Opinion: Hindi’s strength lies in embracing its diverse roots
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A PhD scholar at the University of Delhi argues that modern Hindi’s strength comes from its history of absorbing influences, not from linguistic purity.
Before British colonial rule, people in northern India used multiple languages depending on the situation, and literary texts appeared in several scripts including Devanagari, Kaithi, Gurmukhi, and Perso-Arabic. The East India Company’s attempts to classify languages in the 1830s created competition between Hindi and Urdu, and later policies solidified these as separate communal markers.
The Piggott Commission in 1912 to 13 led to standardised versions of Hindi and Urdu, diminishing the importance of other languages like Bhojpuri, Awadhi, and Braj Bhasha. Nationalist organisations then promoted a Sanskrit-based version of Khari Boli as the only “pure” Hindi, with journals like Saraswati actively removing Arabic and Persian words and replacing them with Sanskrit equivalents, for example, changing safed (white) to shvet.
This process involved claiming a broad history for “Hindi” while simultaneously limiting its modern form to a single register. The author contends that true decolonisation of Hindi requires acknowledging and embracing its diverse linguistic heritage, including Persian, Urdu, Braj, and Awadhi, to achieve a unified but not uniform India.
