Language and literacy education has long been a site of contestation. Lisa Delpit, an African-American language and literacy educator, shook this contested site in the 1980s and 1990s through her ground-breaking book "Other People's Children: Cultural Conflicts in the Classroom," by centring the voices, discontentment and hopes of African-American communities that were emerging from their everyday lived experiences in classrooms saturated by cultures of power and norms of the privileged. In this essay, I explore why her arguments hold such deep currencies in the world we inhabit, contextualising it within her work contexts. Further on, I explore their significance and applications within the diverse contexts in which we work in India, to revisit, rethink and reimagine critical, decolonial and transformative pedagogies for India's fractured, post-colonial, caste-centred, often patriarchal, culturally, religiously and linguistically diverse but often hegemonic landscapes.