Eight-year-old Sundar Baghel stands against the blue wall of his house, clutching at his soiled school shirt. The boy is a Class III student at the local government school. Three years of being taught Hindi, you would think, has made him conversant enough to respond to basic queries in the language and pushed him closer to being ‘integrated’ with the rest of India. But it’s impossible to get him and other Dhurwa children in Nagalsar, a village deep in the Jagdalpur block of Bastar district, to speak Hindi. For every line you throw at him, Sundar just throws the same addled look back at you.