Shuddh, saaf, and the nation as forgetting

The origins of the schism in Hindustani

The Indian past has never been more political. The Parallel Campaign is a fortnightly newsletter that questions the traditional (male, Hindu, upper-caste, ‘secular’) orthodoxies presented in Indian schools’ history curricula. We investigate historical narratives by consulting sources and perspectives outside established media, and we review some of the most interesting academic books and articles currently languishing behind university paywalls.

There are no definitive answers here because we want to invite as many people as possible to an alternative conversation—on what it means ‘to do history’. If nothing else, we hope to convey that history matters, and to spark our readers’ interest in undertaking historical enquiries of their own.

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“The history of Kakania had been replaced by that of the nation; the authors were at work on it even now, formulating it in that European taste that finds historical novels and costume dramas edifying. This resulted in a situation not yet perhaps sufficiently appreciated, which was that persons who had to deal with some commonplace problem such as building a school or appointing a stationmaster found themselves discussing this in connection with the year 1600 or 400...injecting into all this talk the notions of high-mindedness and rascality, homeland, truth, and manliness.” 

The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil 

Happy Sunday, friends!

There are few problems more commonplace than those that deal with railway station signboards—or so you would think. Yet, a few months ago we found ourselves pretty much where our main man Musil found Austria-Hungary in 1913: in the middle of a controversy about an apparent decision to replace Urdu with Sanskrit on station signboards in Uttarakhand that immediately became entangled in questions of homeland, truth, nation, and history. 

The Indian Railway Works Manual says that names of the stations should be written in Hindi, English, and the second language of the state (which, in Uttarakhand, is Sanskrit). But the proposed move was criticised—why would adding Sanskrit require removing Urdu, given that as per the 2011 Census only 386 people in all of Uttarakhand speak Sanskrit, while 425,752 speak Urdu? Most of you understood immediately as you were reading this that any such decision would be political, because you knew intuitively that the subtext for ‘Urdu’ was ‘Muslim’. 

Whatever the outcome of this particular controversy, it’s clear that such decisions are not merely administrative—they are charged with symbolism. Language has always been central to the idea of India and, more importantly, who gets to call themselves an Indian. 

Our last issue was about how early discourses of language and culture in India were heavily couched in terms of gender and female sexuality. Elite social analysts, emphasising narratives of ‘chastity’ and ‘respectability’, characterised Urdu—heavily influenced as it was by begamati zubaan—as ‘degenerate’. 

But—moving from gender to religion—why did a language that is still spoken with relative ease by a majority of this country become so closely identified with a religious minority? At what point did something that was referred to in both Persian and Sanskrit tradition as a singular bhasha—the local, common tongue—become partitioned along communal lines into Urdu and Hindi? 

Of course, Urdu was intended to be replaced on the signboards by Sanskrit. We have a lot to say (when do we not?) on what this has to do with language politics post-Independence—but that’s for another time. For now, and in anticipation of Hindi diwas tomorrow, here’s the story of nation, language, and Who Decides: Hindi dub. 

Mind your language

Some version of ‘Hindustani’, by which we mean the lingua franca of northern Indian and Pakistan, is spoken by approximately 588 million people today. Though we often speak of a ‘Hindi’ belt in India, it contains important regional differences, counting Avadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj Bhasha, Khari Boli, Maithili, and Magahi amongst its dialects. Though the Devanagari script is now predominant across the region, the Kaithi script was also widely used well into the 19th century. 

A Kaithi manuscript from Delhi’s National Museum. Source: Twitter

Each dialect has a rich literary and/or folk tradition of its own, and each can be traced back to an early medieval linguistic complex known as Apabhramsha (a term coined by Sanskrit grammarians, meaning ‘corrupt, non-grammatical language’). In this everyday, vernacular sense, Hindustani is hundreds of years old, and has undergone a slow and more or less organic evolution into what it is today.

Last week we discussed the origins of Urdu—specifically Shamsur Rahman Fahruqi’s thesis that ‘Urdu’ referred simply to the language spoken locally in Delhi, which used to be known as Hindavi or Dihlavi, and developed into what we would now call the Khari Boli dialect. There is little meaningful difference between Khari Boli and Urdu — they’re effectively the same dialect — except that the latter is written in the Persian script. Urdu happened to be elevated above other Hindustani dialects because it was spoken in the capital, because its script linked it to Persian, the language of administration in much of North India until the 1830s, and because of its formal literary output (think of how standard Italian is based on Dante’s extremely poetic Florentine dialect, for instance).

Modern Standard Hindi, however—the language designated as the official language of the Indian Union (the Constituent Assembly debates on this were truly, truly nuts but this is for another time)—is a fairly new, consciously-crafted creature.

When we say ‘Hindi’ in this issue, this is what we’re referring to. It comes largely from Khari Boli and is written in the Devanagari script, but also strove actively to distinguish itself from ‘degenerate’ spoken Urdu by taking heavily from Sanskrit (‘Sanskrit’ literally means ‘adorned, purified’). 

Modern Hindi can trace its origins to voluntary literary and educational societies formed by the North Indian upper-middle classes (such as the Nagari Pracharini Sabha, founded 1893, and the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, founded 1910). These societies fed into a sweeping political movement that took hold primarily in the United Provinces (modern Uttar Pradesh) in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, inspired in part by the literary innovations of the Hindu revivalist writer Bharatendu Harishchandra (1850-1885). Largely due to the standardisation and popularisation efforts of such societies, Hindi had replaced Braj as the primary written form of literary Hindustani by the 1920s. In the 1930s, it superseded Urdu in volume of output as well.

This movement summarised its own philosophy only too neatly: Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan. 

(We wish there was some significant nuance to add here. There isn’t.)

The nation as forgetting 

Ernest Renan once remarked: “forgetting—I would even say historical error—is essential to the creation of a nation, which is why the advance of historical study often poses a threat to nationality.” The past is full of caveats that are best passed over by any political community hoping to imagine itself as a unity. To translate into full snark, à la political theorist Karl Deutsch: a nation is a bunch of people who all hold the same misconception about the past and all hate the same rival bunch of people. 

Benedict Anderson was deeply influenced by Renan and Deutsch. He hypothesised that the nation is an imagined political community that is produced from the manipulation of social characteristics, such as the construction of a common past and the formulation of a shared language. 

Paul Brass offers what seems to us a logical continuation of these ideas in the specific context of North India. He argued that features like language (or religion) are not givens when it comes to imagining communities: they can be—and are—altered, reformed, redefined. 

Which characteristics get chosen and who makes that choice? Who decides what gets forgotten for the sake of a ‘national identity’?

Brass argues that, when it comes to the final call about which shared traits are significant to national identity, it is political elites who choose one symbol as primary and then strive to bring other symbols into line. 

In North India, in Brass’ telling, this ‘multi-symbol congruence’ happened around religion. Once majoritarian shapers of culture (whom Charu Gupta refers to as ‘Hindu publicists’) began to emphasise Hindu and Muslim as the primary binary into which everyone was divided, all the other features of social reality, including language, were gradually organised around this binary. 

Even though today it seems like the natural prerogative of any north-centric telling of our national past to simply draw a straight and easy line from Sanskrit to Sanskritised Hindi, it was actually very difficult for these political elites to claim ancient antecedents for Modern Hindi (it’s literally in the name). It took work, the work of history, to turn the Sanskrit → Hindi proposition from an outlandish into a ‘common-sense’ one. And it was very hard work, indeed. 

The bee and the lotus 

Rewind a millennium. Take one of the riddles attributed to Amir Khusro, written in the 13th century in a language—then called Hindavi by the Central Asians and Persians newly resident in the subcontinent—that is just about recognizable to modern speakers of Hindi: 

He visits my town once a year.
He fills my mouth with kisses and nectar.
I spend all my money on him.
Who, girl, your man?
No, a mango.

In the Bazaar of Love: Selected Poetry, Amir Khusro

Source: ew

This is just one in a series of (excellent) jokes with an infinitely repeating punchline—a woman playing ‘I Spy’ with a narrator who keeps trying to steer the conversation in the more lascivious direction of her sex life. Not exactly a hallowed foundation of noble words and patriotic speech. Even less so a valuable reserve of the vocabulary and conceptual architecture required for a Hindu publicist to aspirationally outfit his language for modern state administration (though perhaps ample inspiration for our oversexed ad agencies).

Then there’s an additional discomfort: the author of this verse is a Qara-Khitai Turk whose paternal family was from Samarkand, a city in Uzbekistan. Again and again, literary reformers throughout the 19th century came up against the fact that many of the best-documented examples of written poetry in Hindustani dialects (like Avadhi or Braj Bhasha) survived to be recovered because they were produced in the courts of the Sultanates, the Mughals, or their vassals.

As Aditya Behl, a scholar of Sufi romances, has put it: “If Hindi and Urdu were historically linked with the formation of separate “Hindu” and “Muslim” literary and social identities, how does one begin to understand a major body of premodern literature that is both ‘Muslim’ and in [Hindavi]?”

A leaf of a surviving Khusro manuscript. Source: Wikimedia

To us, this excerpt from the Mughal Emperor Jahangir’s memoir encapsulates the role of Hindavi vernaculars in elite social life pretty well: 

“The lotus flower often closes up, and traps the bhaunra (bee) inside for the whole night...Because the black bee is a constant visitor to these flowers, the [Hindavi] poets consider it to be like the nightingale in love with the rose, and they produce marvellous poetic conceits based on it. One such poet was Tan Sen Kalawant, a musician [one of the ‘nine gems’], who was in my father’s [Akbar’s] service and without equal in his own time—or any other, for that matter.” 

Jahangirnama (trans. William Thackston)

Elites from the Persianate world would have been well aware of the metaphorical power of the love between the nightingale and the rose—but the concept did not translate at all to the hot, humid plains of North India. Persian was important, but it was inadequate. Every language of power needs a language of belonging, an indigenous idiom. 

As rulers like the Delhi Sultans and the Mughals conquered territory, their courts also set about becoming desi, going local, immersing themselves in the landscape. Hindavi was considered much more suitable for certain types of aesthetic experience, and for expressing and cultivating more feminine, passionate, sentimental kinds of emotional sensibility. As Behl puts it: “That culture regarded the works of Persian poets as delicate...but lacking the graphic allure and frank eroticism of the desī Hindavī.” 

The patronage of Hindustani dialects offered courts a valuable link to local forms of culture, and this court patronage shaped the local languages every bit as deeply and thoroughly as a landscape full of lotuses. These languages themselves shaped court culture in return. Crossover genres such as the Sufi romances distanced themselves from both Sanskrit and Persian, rejecting classical literary traditions for the pleasures of a local tongue. 

This process certainly wasn’t a stroll in a garden. Bees sting. Rather than the easy, simplistic narratives of overdrawn crusades of conquest and resistance on the one hand, and the stereotypes of harmonious coexistence on the other, this shared culture was a result of collisions, encounters, convergences, interchanges, and lots and lots of competition.

Some Braj poets, for instance, served only Rajputs, merchants, or bhakti and Vaishnava communities. They rejected the perks and prestige offered by association with Indo-Muslim courts. 

“Pay heed, wise emperor, to what Pravin Rai has to say. Only low caste people, crows, and dogs eat off the plates used by others.” 

Pravin Rai, Braj Bhasha poetess and courtesan of the Hindu court of Orchha, in response to Akbar’s invitation to attend his court (which, in case you missed the insult here, she declined).
(Sudhakar Pandey, Hindi Kavyaganga, Nagari Pracharini Sabha, 1990)

This apparent resistance, recorded in oral (rather than written) popular traditions, only makes an antagonistic history of Hindi vs Urdu harder to substantiate. As Allison Busch notes, histories written in Persian would often omit any mention of Hindavi literary activity. Where such mentions did occur, the only contextual historical knowledge that could be recovered from the poetry would be from the prashasti, or panegyric, verses dedicated to the poet’s patron—a patron who was frequently an Indo-Muslim ruler or a noble in his court. By the time modern Hindi was making its bid for power, no one wanted to see Hindavi poets like Gang, Birbal, and Tansen effusively praising the generosity of their Muslim admirers.

Muazzam Shah Alam, a Mughal prince, visiting the Braj poet Tulsidas. Source: Smithsonian Museum, Freer Gallery of Art

Hindi Sahitya ka Itihas

To sum up an inconvenient truth: in Busch’s words, “Record-keeping was not the [Hindavi] literary tradition’s strong suit.” This, of course, opened the door to a great deal of reductionist speculation in the modern social sciences. 

19th century British colonial linguists like John Gilchrist and George Grierson posited a single, originary ‘Hindavi’ that was eventually peppered with and contaminated by Persian loanwords, at which point the language was bifurcated along a racial-religious divide. (Incidentally, Grierson rediscovered premakhyans, or Sufi romances, like the Padmavat—waaay before Sanjay Leela Bhansali re-rediscovered it and the Karni Sena discovered Deepika Padukone’s nose.)

These scholars also assumed, wrongly, that Hindavi was a ‘pure’, folksy, uncontaminated vernacular unassociated with elite and court culture. They attempted to fit every text they found into this straight, linear thesis of language development from an ‘originary’ source. 

This model of literary classification was adopted wholesale by early 20th-century Hindi critics looking to ‘revive’ an indigenous ‘national’ language. For them, the propagation of modern standard Hindi was an enterprise that involved equipping Hindi with a canon of masterpieces. Nationalist critics such as Ramchandra Shukla (who wrote the landmark Hindī Sāhitya kā Itihās in 1929), drew on colonial models of literary history to classify the Hindi canon, placing Hindavi romances like the Padmavat, the Madhumalati, and the Mirigavati within a teleological scheme of the evolution of modern standard Hindi. 

Behl narrates: “Shukla subsumed the five major literary languages of premodern Hindi poetry into a new nationalist construction of the canon, and he collected and edited texts that would fit within this canon. These nationalist critics invented modern standard Hindi on the model of the European nation-states with their own national languages and literary canons, classifying earlier literary and linguistic forms in conformity with primordialist notions of national identity.” 

Such views of Hindi’s cultural past have become deeply entrenched. In A House Divided, the most frequently cited book on this topic, Amrit Rai, Premchand’s son, argues that there existed a pure, idiomatic Hindi, unmixed with loan-words, written in the Devanagari script before the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate.

In his telling, Urdu emerged when Muslims decided to deliberately remove Sanskrit words and adopted a heavy, Persianised style of language that became a distinguishing characteristic of Muslims in India. This reform was harmful and divisive, and Rai blames it for the Partition of the subcontinent. 

In the tradition of Shukla, Rai takes a literary rather than linguistic approach, and his textual analysis is far from unimpeachable—see Rahman, Kachru, and Snell on this. Christopher King thinks Rai’s linguistic evidence is actually relatively convincing, but argues that it focuses mainly on pre-British India, and his analysis is therefore incomplete in many important respects from that point on.

In our view, simplistic theses like Rai’s are simply not borne out by the sources. It is only when groups of people share the same cultural landscape that we have mixed or boundary-crossing literary and devotional traditions of poetry. Equally, it makes sense, on such a cultural scene, to have a wide range of competitive attitudes toward conquest, religion, and the politics of cultural change.

Divide and rule (yes, this again)

So we find ourselves in the mid-19th century, where there was no modern standard Hindi as we know it today and Urdu/Khari Boli was used by both Hindus and Muslims. 

The Urdu script’s association with Persian did link it with a political past of Indo-Islamic administration. But it was not identified with Muslims alone; many upper-caste Hindus who had traditionally been attached to literary occupations and government service (such as Kayasths, Kashmiri Brahmins, and Khatris) actually had particularly strong ties to both Urdu and Persian. Equally, Khari Boli was not simply associated with Hindus. Through its Hindavi lineage, it had shaped and been shaped by patronage in courts that governed in Persian. 

It’s clear that the influence of political elites on the symbolism of a language and literary culture is hardly just a thing of modernity. So what about the 19th century in particular led political elites of that time to make the choices they did about language and religion?  The answer lies in a complex interaction of economic motivations, government policies, and cultural and emotional attitudes.

Christopher King argues that, for a start, British government policy—particularly in UP—showed contradictions and inconsistencies that often encouraged the differentiation between Hindi and Urdu, and Hindu and Muslim. For much of the 19th century (before the decision to educate their subjects in English), the state promoted study in vernacular languages through a system whose main purpose lay in qualifying thousands of students for government service, but which created a script-based bifurcation in Hindustani education. 

Yet, the British government also had a strong preference for the continuity that the Urdu script provided with Persian as the language of administration (and a wish not to antagonise Muslims where they had until recently been politically powerful). As a result the administrative system favoured Urdu, denying equal access to the very government service for which thousands of Hindustani-speaking students had gone to school in the first place. 

This competition between educated Hindus and Muslims for government service existed in a context of British insistence on categorizing “Hindoos” and the “Moosalmans” as the fundamental division of Indian society, in spite of the many differences between say, Hindus in Bengal and Gujarat, and the many similarities between Hindus and Muslims in Bihar. 

The spiritual domain 

Of course, it was not just these economic motivations. Certain dominant caste Hindus had a preference for Urdu and Persian, and were not affected by the government’s preference for one script over the other. But the Hindi movement that arose as a reaction to British policy was channelled through existing cultural patterns, through the prism of choices about national symbols that had already been made elsewhere. 

In particular, this divisive British language policy existed alongside a context of cow protection agitation in eastern UP in the 1890s, Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s revival of Hindu festivals in Maharashtra, and the growth of the Arya Samaj in north India — all factors in the creation of a Hindu nationalism. Political elites had already chosen religion as their dominant symbol, and Hindi was co-opted as one of the shared characteristics of that imagined community of Hindus. 

But why religion? Partha Chatterjee makes a very compelling argument that anticolonial nationalism started out by emphasising its sovereignty in the ‘spiritual’ domain rather than in the ‘material’, which dealt with matters of economy or state craft. The material realm was exactly where the “East had succumbed [and] Western superiority had to be acknowledged.” Following that acknowledgement, there arose a corresponding need to “preserve the distinctness of one’s spiritual culture” as a reserve of sovereignty, which leads us back to our old chums, the social analysts, and their reification of Indian culture along religious lines.

Voluntary organisations such as the Nagari Pracharini Sabha and Hindi Sahitya Sammelan represented a tiny fraction of the already small urban elite. Besides those educated Hindus wedded to Urdu, many preferred Braj Bhasha to Khari Boli as the language of poetry, and those in Bihar in particular preferred the Kaithi script. But the members of the new Hindi organisations were vocal and active, and once this process of differentiation along religious (or, if you will, spiritual) lines was set in motion, it became increasingly untenable for other Hindus to deviate from it. 

And so began a process of ‘Sanskritising’ Hindi to remove Persian and Arabic loan words, and to create a schism between even spoken Hindi and Urdu. There were increasing references in printed literature to the need to speak ‘shuddh’ Hindi, using a language of purification that echoed how Hinduism refers to the relative ‘purity’ or ‘impurity’ of certain castes—a reminder that political elites that entered this foray were almost never lower-caste. 

Scholars such as Vasudha Dalmia and Francesca Orsini have documented how the lobbying efforts of these voluntary organisations led to this modern Sanskritized Hindi being declared equal to Urdu in government administration in the UP in 1900. Once this process of distinction was underway, it generated a centrifugal force—a parallel movement arose to root Urdu more firmly in Persian and Arabic, and to make it saaf, clean.

But more than a century later, these efforts to separate Hindi and Urdu have mercifully been rather less successful than hoped.

How many of us would use the Sanskritised agnirathviramsthan for railway station? How many of us say the Sanskritisted dinank instead of the Persian tarikh? Indians—Hindus and Muslims—continue to enjoy ghazals and Hindustani classical music. Think of all the iconic Bollywood dialogues that remain peppered with those Arabic and Persian ‘loan’ words. Imagine having to say ‘Mogambo prasann hua’—that would be a dull, dull world indeed.

Postscript

• Don’t take us at our word, here’s an exhaustive (and paywall-free!) reading list on the history of Hindi-Urdu. We encourage you to read through the sources, and come to your own conclusions. If you disagree with or want to add to what we’ve said, send us a letter!

• The journalist Akshaya Mukul recently wrote an excellent history of the longstanding links between the Sangh Parivar and Hindi-language print capitalism. The origin of Gita Press, still one of the most influential publishers of Hindu religious texts, is deeply entwined with the rise of Hindutva organisations like the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS in the 1920s. 

• Lastly, here’s a scathing demolition of bad history-writing that had us giggling all week—a reminder that fancy degrees, mainstream publicity, and outsize confidence shouldn’t necessarily add up to authority.