In this presentation, I examine how colonial philology continued to determine the post-independence fate of many languages in India, shaping the attributes that a language had to acquire before gaining acceptance and recognition as an official language by the state. What was the fate of languages that could not furnish these criteria? In the case of Konkani, spoken down the southwestern coast of India, and the official language of the state of Goa, it was translation that functioned primarily as a corrective to the language, evacuating it and refashioning it, to produce an object that met the requirements of literary nationalism. Unlike languages that continue to struggle for recognition, in the space of forty years, Konkani moved from being viewed as a dialect that did not need a name, to a symbol of upper caste identity.  The conception of language as a territorially defined, written, autonomous and historical entity is so naturalized, that it is only when we try to account for texts that do not exhibit these criteria, that the weight of this norm becomes visible, and we are compelled to find different kinds of analysis.