Taking its title from Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s puzzling claim that the “Genius of India is to divide,” Chapter 6 tracks the career of linguistic difference in the making of modern India. I show how the effacement of adivasi pasts in the imagination of Odisha was mirrored in the way linguistic difference was managed through the language based division of Indian territory. I analyze writings on multilingualism by three influential leaders of the Indian nationalist movement–Mohandas Karamachand Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. Representing three radically different perspectives on the question of language and nation, these writings allow me to track the passions, ideologies, and anxieties inherent in imagining a nation with multiple mother tongues. The chapter ends with a short discussion of the adivasi critique of linguistic provinces through a reading of speeches given by Jaipal Singh, the leader of the movement for the formation of the adivasi majority province of Jharkhand. The effacement of adivasi difference became established in both the imagination of modern Indian citizens and in the physical, territorial divisions of the emerging Indian nation. As vernacular languages became the foundational category for understanding representation and subjectivity in India, the concomitant exclusion of aboriginal peoples and the downplaying of alternative political possibilities were institutionalized into the very definition of the modern Indian community.