Rethinking Language Education in NEP-2020 Era: Exploring the Convergence of Language, Knowledge and Culture in Harmony

Partha Biswas; Saroj Kumar

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i03.81919

Rethinking Language Education in NEP-2020 Era: Exploring the Convergence of Language, Knowledge and Culture in Harmony

Author(s)	Mr. Partha Biswas, Dr. Saroj Kumar
Country	India
Abstract	Education in India faces several historical and contemporary challenges despite being one of the world’s richest intellectual and cultural traditions. The National Education Policy (NEP-2020) strives to address the challenges by advocating a transformative educational framework that is rooted in Indian knowledge systems, promoting multilingual, experiential and holistic education integrating the local content in curriculum and pedagogy. The paper highlights both the curricular and pedagogical shifts in language education revolving around Indian Knowledge System. The paper critically reviews the role of mother tongue, multilingual education and how NEP-2020 provides platform to connect the ancient wisdom with modern educational models by promoting multilingual education, teacher training for holistic, experiential learning. This paper further contends the scopes of innovative pedagogical practices such as oral traditions, storytelling, debate, discussion, dialogues in language learning reminding the Guru-Shishya Parampara of Gurukul system, the cultural scaffolding, community-based pedagogy. The study is basically a qualitative review study that focuses on the educational policy, alignments of Indian Knowledge System (IKS) with Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP), Three-Language Formula (TLF) in language education. The paper concludes that meaningful incorporation of IKS in language education can nurture cultural rootedness, contextual learning, value education, ecological consciousness and inclusive learning to realize the goals of NEP20, suitable for the needs of new millennium learners. As a larger part of decolonization, the multilingual approach with the involvement of teacher’s cultural scaffolding and translanguaging, as a tool in language curriculum and classroom interaction, broadens the scopes of Indian epistemology. As a policy review, the study concludes that successful orientation of the pre-service and in-service teacher with the IKS-integrated curriculum, can develop grounded, holistic and culturally relevant teaching learning experience.
Keywords	NEP2020, Indian Knowledge System, Decolonization, Multilingualism, Three-Language Formula, Culturally Responsive Pedagogy
Field	Sociology > Linguistic / Literature
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 3, May-June 2026
Published On	2026-06-21
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i03.81919

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Rethinking Language Education in NEP-2020 Era: Exploring the Convergence of Language, Knowledge and Culture in Harmony

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