Though the Devanagari script is now predominant across the region, the Kaithi script was also widely used well into the 19th century.Ī Kaithi manuscript from Delhi’s National Museum. 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. Some version of ‘Hindustani’, by which we mean the lingua franca of northern Indian and Pakistan, is spoken by approximately 588 million people today. For now, and in anticipation of Hindi diwastomorrow, here’s the story of nation, language, and Who Decides: Hindi dub. 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. Of course, Urdu was intended to be replaced on the signboards by Sanskrit. Elite social analysts, emphasising narratives of ‘chastity’ and ‘respectability’, characterised Urdu-heavily influenced as it was by begamati zubaan-as ‘degenerate’.īut-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? Our last issue was about how early discourses of language and culture in India were heavily couched in terms of gender and female sexuality. Language has always been central to the idea of India and, more importantly, who gets to call themselves an Indian.
Whatever the outcome of this particular controversy, it’s clear that such decisions are not merely administrative-they are charged with symbolism. 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’.
#Forgetting urdu poem manual
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). 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. There are few problems more commonplace than those that deal with railway station signboards-or so you would think. 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 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.
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