This chapter demonstrates how the competing pressures of monolingualism and multilingualism that were built into the Indian nation form produced a unique sensibility of linguistic alienation in the postcolonial period. This alienation was rooted in the contradictory requirement for Indians to monolingually orient themselves toward their regional mother tongues and, at the same time, multilingually embrace the pan-Indian languages, Hindi and English. Using the case of Tamil New Poetry, I suggest that linguistic alienation was a condition with which many Indian writers, irrespective of language, grappled in the postcolonial period. Simultaneously, it compels us to account for the regionally specific singularities that shaped linguistic difference in the various Indian literary spheres. Tamil New Poetry writers navigated linguistic alienation by developing translation as a metonymical relation. In doing so, they configured Indian languages as contiguous to one another rather than bounded, equivalent, and thus identical in translation. Translation allowed New Poetry writers to aestheticise linguistic alienation instead of minimising it, and to revel in its experience and possibilities for transforming the burden of the monolingualism-multilingualism tension into a shared and productive postcolonial condition.