The paper focuses on the communicative approach in plurilingual settings and analyzes data from Indian English in the light of the speaker/listener, the task, the context, and other negotiating factors which regulate speech in everyday life. In the post-colonial period there has been a noticeable growth in the use of grassroots English among those who spontaneously acquire certain rudimentary characteristics of the language in an urban plurilingual milieu. By and large, such use of language is not formally learnt by education. This situation reveals the processes of adaptation to the context-and-task-specific reality. Instead of deliberating over the normative characteristics of Indian English on the global pluricentric cline of native and non-native Englishes, this study concerns itself with identifying the complementarity of grassroots English with other Indian languages, and its emergence as one of the vital contact languages in plural India.