6 min readApr 22, 2025 11:11 AM IST
First published on: Apr 22, 2025 at 07:00 AM IST
“Language is not religion. Language does not even represent religion. Language belongs to a community,” ruled Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia in a recent landmark Supreme Court judgment. It went on to call Urdu “the finest specimen of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, or the Hindustani tehzeeb”. One must thank the apex court for reminding us that India has always been a deeply multilingual nation. Each region had a language, each language had its own tradition of oral literature and dialects that fed into the pool. Until the 18th century, Urdu and Hindi were among the various names used for a common spoken tongue in the northern plains, from the borders of Punjab to the principality of Awadh.
The name Urdu means an army camp in Turkic. The language initially grew among the residents of an area where Persian-speaking army personnel were stationed as far back as the 14th century. It was created as they interacted with local citizens speaking a mix of north Indian dialects, which Amir Khusro also termed Hindavi. He used it copiously in many of his poems and songs, mixing various dialects spoken in Braj, Awadh, and also the Khadi Boli of what is now western UP.
Urdu mutated as it moved from Delhi to Awadh. Among the Urdu cognoscenti, it was a subject of debate whether the standardised form of Urdu was the one spoken in the camp area in Delhi or the Awadh durbar. It was assumed that Hindavi was a common base for both Hindi and Urdu. Controversy first began to crystallise around the script. The four clerics or bhakha munshis appointed by the British were ordered to carve out two languages from spoken Hindustani: Hindi written in the Devanagari (or Nagari for short) script borrowed from Sanskrit and Urdu written in a slightly indigenised version of the Persian script.
Interestingly, with literacy levels low in the Hindi belt and more Persian script writers being available courtesy of the Mughal court, by the 1820s, Calcutta, and not Delhi or Awadh, rose to be a major centre for publishing books in both Urdu and Hindi. Two popular newspapers came up under the ownership of not Muslims but Bengali Hindus: Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s Persian weekly Mirat-ul-Akhbar, and Harihar Dutta’s (originally a publisher of Bengali books) Urdu newspaper, Jam-i-Jahan-Numa. Once cost-effective and portable litho publishing reached Bihar, Agra and Awadh, Urdu publishing began to flourish there as well.
Demand for school texts for Anglo-vernacular government schools created a big market for Hindi and Urdu text books by the early 20th century. Hindus being numerically larger and Hindi script being marked out as “nagari” by the government, the market for Hindi books began to overtake that for Urdu. In 1868, Raja Sivaprasad, a member of the British-fostered educational elite and an inspector of government run Anglo-vernacular schools, was tasked with writing textbooks in Hindi. He earned handsome royalties as also the coveted title of Sitara-e-Hind (The Star of India). With that, a typically Indian politicisation of Hindi-Urdu was spurred.
Soon, Sivaprasad attacked Urdu as a “foreign” language foisted on India and, following him, the Allahabad Institute also made a declaration in favour of Hindi. The battlelines were thus drawn. As the commerce in printing popular tracts on religion, medicine and fiction grew, alongside the demand for school texts, literary patrons, educators, industrialists and Indian publishers all began to take sides. Detractors of Urdu alleged it was throttling the indigenous language or bhakha. This charge is baffling. Bhasha or bhakha has actually been the term for an inclusive melange of dialects spoken in the northern plains, including in Braj, Awadh, Mithila and Bhojpur, in both Hindi and Urdu. This was the common language of the Hindi belt trickling down since the 16th century through bands of pilgrims, fakirs and sadhus reciting orally the exquisite poetry of Tulsidas, Kabir and many others.
Like Elizabethan English, this Hindi-Urdu mix has always been more of a liquid bubbling with a certain fury against the system. To call it alien and unworthy of sharing space on government signboards of a municipal council building, like the Akola councillor who filed the petition in the Supreme Court did, defies not only the law of the land but also historical facts about the birth and growth of our very own bhakha Urdu.
Make no mistake, the Hindi that the government today wishes to crown as the national language is a vastly associational Sanskrit with many of its caste and gender biases intact. Also, while daggers are out on both sides over the language issue, the young in the Hindi belt are willingly abandoning Hindi en masse for English. Their parents, including the most vociferous supporters of the BJP leadership, and of Hindi, will root for an English-medium education in (relatively expensive) private schools when it comes to their own children. Parents and children are in agreement that superior job opportunities and upward social mobility are accessible only if they master English first.
Various filmmakers and musicians from Bollywood are disturbed by the shrinking popularity of their films colonised by English-speaking actors and pop singers of no great talent. If there is any hope for popular Hindi films to regain their lost glory, writers, musicians and film/TV makers and mediapeople must master their Hindi-Urdu once again and translate more and more. As for literary historians, they have remained trapped into writing angry competing historical narratives of Hindi and Urdu for too long. What we now need is a calm, composite, comprehensive history of Indian literature that spans both Hindi and Urdu as people’s languages, differing little but in scripts.
The writer is former chairperson, Prasar Bharati
The name Urdu means an army camp in Turkic. The language initially grew among the residents of an area where Persian-speaking army personnel were stationed as far back as the 14th century. 
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