This chapter addresses the question of language, citizenship, and notions of biocultural belonging in India. It explores how the idea of the ‘mother tongue’ has acquired heightened significance in the context of the decisive shift to the idea of India as a bio-cultural unity, which is underpinned by upper-caste genetic nationalism, and how the liberalisation of the Indian economy has added another dimension to the dynamics of multilingualism in India. However, it argues that the neoliberal conceptualisation of language as an economic asset has reinforced the role of the idea of the mother tongue in bio-cultural belonging in India. The chapter concludes with a sketch of alternative forms of linguistic pluralism to hierarchical national multilingualism in the subcontinent. It considers how we might de-reify the ‘national’ and the ‘multilingual’ to open paths of linguistic belonging which are not tied to dominant forms of bio-culturalism, and how we might deploy the term ‘India’ as a linguistic region at odds with post-partition competing nation-states.