Two centuries of discourse around language and identity in India have culminated in Hindi emerging as a nationalist symbol – as the language of the Hindu nation. Nearly 150 years ago, the essayist Pratapnarayan Mishra coined the slogan “Hind, Hindu, Hindi”, an early articulation of the majoritarian refrain “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan”. It is, therefore, unsurprising that such a language would encounter regional resistance.
The languages that Hindi now seeks to dominate in its role as the Hindu language exceed it in literary maturity and historical depth. The history of Hindi extends back no more than two centuries. This is why, particularly in the context of South India, Hindi often appears as a language of imposition and cultural zealotry.
Consequently, every Hindi speaker who steps beyond their regional or linguistic comfort zone is viewed with suspicion. In academic settings, this suspicion intensifies – at times, being manifested as outright rejection or resistance towards Hindi speakers.
However, this ignores a deeper truth: students and scholars who enter higher education through Hindi do not do so from positions of privilege. More often than not, they are women, Dalits, the rural poor, or working-class families from small towns for whom the only real choice was between under-resourced Hindi-medium schools and no schooling at all.
The region commonly called the “Hindi belt” is inhabited by communities who rarely use Hindi in their domestic lives. In this context, Hindi functions primarily as a language of work – an acquired language rather than a mother tongue. Their native languages have distinct linguistic traditions such as Bhojpuri, Maithili, Braj, and Awadhi. For them, Hindi has never been a symbol of dominance but a domain of exclusion. First, because of their mother tongues and now, ironically, because of Hindi.
Contemporary discussions often attempt to explain this history of Hindi’s rise to dominance through the lens of the Hindi-Urdu divide. This important frame becomes limiting when the split is seen merely as an administrative accident. In an article in The Indian Express, linguist Peggy Mohan suggests that the division between Hindi and Urdu was primarily the result of a government classification of scripts issued in 1900.
However, this interpretation flattens the longer, more complex history of linguistic struggle in North India.The ideological separation of Hindi and Urdu began much earlier, with the establishment of Fort William College in Calcutta in 1800. Under the direction of John Gilchrist and other British orientalists, the spoken khari boli of North India was divided into two standardised forms: one, written in the Nagari script, became Hindi; the other, composed in the Arabic-Persian script, was accepted as Urdu.
This linguistic division certainly hardened when the colonial state passed the 1900 order granting official recognition to Nagari Hindi alongside Urdu. However, to locate the roots of this conflict solely in colonial administration is to fall into an overly simplified reading of history. Poetic compositions in bhākhā – a premodern register of Hindi used in devotional and poetic traditions – had existed alongside the world of Urdu poetry well before the interventions of Gilchrist and Fort William College, and they confirm the long-standing practice of writing Hindi in two distinct stylistic traditions.
What did shift, however, was that in the aftermath of the script conflict in the United Provinces, the cultural claim over language became so deeply internalised that Hindi began to see itself as the language of all Hindus in Hindustan.
Hindi first claimed authority over its neighbouring languages, whose ancient literary traditions were appropriated through a nationalist ideology. In doing so, Hindi activists carried out two simultaneous moves. First, by presenting Bhojpuri’s Kabir, Braj’s Surdas, Awadhi’s Tulsidas, and Apabhramsha’s Chand Bardai as part of an ancient literary reservoir, they strengthened Hindi’s historical legitimacy vis-à-vis Urdu.
At the same time, by invoking these figures from other regional languages, they positioned Hindi as the people’s language – the authentic vernacular of India – while casting Urdu as the language of foreign Muslims. All of this occurred around 1880, well before the aforementioned government order.
This history makes it strikingly clear that the category of “Hindi speakers” is itself a fiction. What census reports and public discourse describes as “Hindi” is, in fact, a collection of highly diverse languages – Bhojpuri, Maithili, Braj, Magahi, Awadhi, Chhattisgarhi, Bajjika, among others – each of which is linguistically distinct and has a long literary and oral tradition.
However, these languages have now come to be absorbed into what is called the history of Hindi. Stripped of their own literary traditions and historical identities, they have been reduced to mere dialects of Hindi. In the regions labelled within English-speaking academia as the Hindi Belt (or the derogatory “Cow Belt”), there are still tens of millions of people who, in their entire lives, have never spoken what is officially called Hindi.
However, for most people counted among these so-called Hindi speakers, language is not a seat of power but a narrow corridor of access – the only path left open when all others are shut. If someone from this background eventually reaches an elite university and enters the academic world, they encounter a second wall of exclusion. The Hindi-medium education that once enabled their survival becomes the very reason they are no longer taken seriously. They are viewed as provincial, lacking in theoretical understanding, and incapable of participating in the real work of critique and research.
In the Hindi literary field, upper-caste men continue to dominate the canon. When women, Dalits, or scholars from other backward classes question canonical texts or challenge prevailing literary values, they are often dismissed as insufficiently refined, lacking in literary sensibility, or lacking theoretical training. At times, they are accused of politicising culture.
In this way, Hindi becomes the means of their academic entry and the reason for their double exclusion. They cannot renounce it because it is their intellectual home. However, English – an elite world to the point of being alienating, even colonising – stands on the other side. Both spaces continually remind them that neither truly belongs to them.
In today’s academic discourse, a strange fantasy circulates – that the answer to Hindi’s nationalist politics is to abandon it, adopt English, stop teaching or writing in Hindi, and embrace “modernisation”. Some critics even argue that because Hindi is marked by Brahminical dominance, it should be entirely boycotted by Dalits.
However, one must ask: how is the Dalit student from a village, especially a girl, meant to access education? Should she boycott education itself in order to boycott Hindi? Moreover, what about the woman writer who learned to intervene through Hindi – should she stop reading and writing altogether for fear of being labelled a supporter of Brahminism?
This elite demand fails to acknowledge that switching linguistic gears is difficult and impractical for those who grew up in Hindi and often had no access to English. It is not a socially just solution. It also erases the decades of struggle through which they made intellectual life possible in Hindi. Language is not just a medium: it is a memory of resistance. To walk away from it is not liberation. It is the erasure of a history of struggle.
The Hindi public sphere has been undergoing a slow but profound transformation over the past two to three decades, especially since the 1990s. Women, members of the Other Backward Classes, Dalit and Muslim writers, critics, artists, and readers are actively reconfiguring what counts as literature and criticism and who has the right to speak in and through Hindi.
These interventions are not merely linguistic or stylistic. They question the norms of Hindi literary tradition, challenge gender roles, confront the silencing of caste, gender and Muslims, and directly face the exclusions that have long been celebrated as part of Hindi’s literary canon.
These voices are not rejecting Hindi. They radically inhabit it – demanding that it make space for questions and perspectives that have long been suppressed or ignored.
At precisely this moment, attempts to purge Arabic-Persian vocabulary, construct a South-North binary and invoke cultural nationalism through the state-sponsored promotion of Hindi risk undermining this emerging democratic space from within.
Across the country, arguments about so-called Hindi hate or Hindi resistance are increasingly used to silence the voices of those already marginalised. In the Hindi literary world, writers, particularly women, Dalits, and those who dissent, are pressured either to assimilate into the existing hierarchical framework or risk erasure altogether.
This forced consolidation threatens to undo decades of grassroots transformation. If we fail to recognise and protect the diversity within Hindi, we may lose the very possibility of a democratic Hindi public sphere.
Hindi today is not a unified tradition but a site of unresolved tensions. Preserving this character of Hindi is essential to preserving democracy in this country. Moreover, this cannot be achieved through elite anger, impulse, or resentment. It can only be accomplished through a nuanced understanding of the present moment and a deep commitment to the diversity within Hindi itself.
Charu Singh teaches Hindi at Ahmedabad University.
