The cacophony of outrage over Kamal Haasan’s remark that Kannada was “born out of Tamil” has reached an unseemly but not unexpected crescendo — it follows a pattern seen whenever the politics of language and the language of hurt sentiments are invoked. It has gone all the way to the Karnataka High Court, which advised Haasan to apologise and questioned his credentials to make such a statement, asking, “Are you a historian, linguist?” But there are other pertinent questions, which the Court didn’t ask: Is such escalation over a misinformed comment proportionate or justified? Does one need to be an expert, or even correct, to exercise the right to free speech? Is this an appropriate use of the state’s time and........

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