Hindustani as a Language Category in Colonial and Postcolonial India
Hindi and Urdu became almost totally identified with various religious communities in the backdrop of 19th- and 20th-century nationalist movements, colonial authority, and the rising split between Hindu and Muslim communities in colonial India. As a result, many groups adopted Hindustani as a consensual formulation that could serve as a linguistic and literary common ground. Hindu-Muslim sectarian tensions have erupted into violent conflict on several occasions throughout the subcontinent’s post-colonial history. The continuous divergence of Hindi and Urdu as community languages continues to play a role by signifying and maintaining perceived disparities between these putative groups and traditions. In South Asia, the potency of language as a symbol and carrier of cultural identity, as well as a motivating yet polarizing force in anti-colonial nationalism, had disastrous implications.
Hindustani is a historically contentious name for a south Asian language that, in its most prevalent contemporary usage, refers to a mixing or middle ground between Hindi and Urdu when the latter are thought of as largely distinct languages. While attempting to systematize Hindustani in dictionaries and grammars in the late 18th century, East India Company surgeon John Gilchrist voiced a strong preference for this medium register between Sanskritised Hindi and Persianized/Arabicised Urdu. Hindustani, in his opinion, was a real people’s language that existed before the latter mutually exclusive registers. S. W. Fallon, for example, chastised “book-learned Maulvis and Pandits” for having “banished the people’s home speech” in favor of manufactured, different languages. Officials such as G. A. Grierson, in the late nineteenth century, was disdainful of Hindustani(Lelyveld) culture. For one thing, David Lelyveld is dissatisfied with Rai’s explanation of the reasons of the Hindi-Urdu division, preferring to focus on a later age and the divisive impact of British colonialism in fomenting animosity over linguistic and sectarian affinities. Lelyveld analyzes how British responses to an often startling language diversity had long-term impacts on social interactions in northern India in a series of key publications.
Hindi and Urdu became almost entirely linked with various religious communities in colonial India as a result of 19th- and 20th-century nationalist movements, colonial governance, and the growing separation between Hindu and Muslim communities. Various parties used Hindustani as a compromise formulation that may serve as a linguistic and literary common ground.The Hindustani Academy, founded in 1927 with the goal of fostering such commonality, was perhaps the most prominent but ultimately unsuccessful effort in this regard — its president was the prominent Liberal politician Tej Bahadur Sapru, its general secretary Tara Chand wrote frequently on the issue of Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani, and the most famous modern Hindi and Urdu writer Premchand was a prominent member.Other Academy members, like as Dhirendra Varma, attacked Hindustani as an unsustainable undertaking, claiming that the language was either lacking of literary worth or very broad, making it hard to master, and that the term itself was hopelessly imprecise. Alok Rai has noticed that M. K. has been unable to make a positive official intervention in the matter, just as the Academy has been unable to make a positive formal intervention in the issue. Gandhi’s compromise formulation of “Hindi or Hindustani” as the national language of the then-envisioned independent India was similarly “doomed to failure,” owing in part to its ambiguity and the already entrenched positions of partisans on both sides of the Hindi-Hindu/Urdu-Muslim divide.
The most evident marker of difference was the script — Devanagari for Hindi and PersoArabic (most often Nasta’liq) for Urdu. Although David Lelyveld’s work on All India Radio in the late-colonial period shows that this was not the case, and that distinctions between Hindi and Urdu were instead more institutionalized, audio-visual media may have provided a way through this otherwise intractable difference. Instead, from the early days of sound in film to the present, it has been in so-called “Hindi” cinema that the potential of Hindustani as a vast and inclusive register has been successfully realized, and Hindustani as a largely unmarked form has “crystallized” (Lunn). In current Indian politics, it thus continues to serve as a “utopian symbol, a point of aspiration” (Alok Rai) against divisive communal and nationalist politics, yet debates over Hindi as the national language are as vehement as ever.
By the early twentieth century, Gandhi, in particular, had put the definition of Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani on the nationalist agenda. Language became an issue of national unity and popular will empowerment. The British colonial regime’s bureaucratic, commercial, and military aspects had developed new communication tools and encouraged a repertory of linguistic abilities among a select group of its subjects. The language of public business at the upper levels was English, but the colonial administration made little effort to foster an indigenous Indian language above the provincial level, with the exception of the military. The province stage, on the other hand, covered a large area, and by the end of the nineteenth century, India’s current standard languages, such as Hindi and Urdu, had been institutionalized in schools, courts, and government offices, as well as in books, newspapers, and public assemblies. In the United Provinces, Bihar, the Central Provinces, Punjab, and many princely states, Hindi, Urdu, or both were official languages, encompassing, at least for public purposes, a wide range of languages and linguistic variants. That system was far from complete, because access to the standard was heavily restricted, and champions for several languages, most notably Punjabi, had saved them from oblivion. The standard languages of post-colonial India are established socially delimited by the political boundaries of India’s federal system, with the exception of Urdu. It is not only a nearly universally ident language for a regionally undefined Muslim community, but it is also the non-regional official language of a foreign country, Pak. Moreover, despite the widespread use of standard Hindi as India’ regional language and the continued dominance of English among the wealthy and powerful, the idea of establishing a national language has not progressed significantly since British control.
Work Cited/References
A Grammar of the Hindustani Language. Calcutta, 1796.
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Oct., 1993, Vol. 35, №4 (Oct., 1993), pp. 665–682
Brass, Paul. Language, Religion and Politics in North India. Cambridge, 1974.
Gilchrist, John Borthwick. Hindustani Dictionary. Calcutta, 1787.
Rahman, Tariq. From Hindi to Urdu: A Social and Political History. New Delhi, 2011. Rai, Alok. Hindi Nationalism. New Delhi, 2001.
