And as somebody married to someone from India, I doubt a lack of English proficiency is the reason.

you don't have to doubt :) , English proficiency is the norm in professional jobs in India. Not to native levels but certainly more than sufficient for jobs like a pilot.

Indian Alien here. I'd suggest more sleep. I would bet a fair amount of $ that average scores of Indian kids who take GRE / SAT would be higher than citizens born in, ahem, God's Own Country. Admittedly, those would be kids from the middle / upper middle class. To afford pilot school you'd need to be from those sections anyway, or from the air force. So I'd not consider language to be a factor here. Although as the top comment says, wait a week or two. Or maybe more.

Off topic, as someone who travels to India 1-2X per year .. it's more common to see women Indian pilots. I'm only mentioning this unusual stat as your comment shows a kind of regional bias.

Isn't English quite prevalent in India?

Hindi and English are considered the two main languages in India. (Officially, it's a lot more complicated than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_with_official_recogn...). So yeah, this comment is misinformed.

Indeed. For those of a social class to become pilots, it's probably their native language.

Lots of good counterarguments here but I was speaking in more general terms. Whoops. Glad to learn that it was likely not a factor in this case due to English prevalence.