wl-4269-Hindi Diwas and Relocating the Hindi–Urdu Debate

In a certain sense, every time world Hindi Diwas is celebrated not only does it evoke the idea of the monolingual identity of the Indian nation, but it also invents certain linguistic claims and imaginaries about Hindi- Hindu past. One dominant way, in which such linguistic assumptions around Hindi are imagined and practiced is by insisting on a binary choice between Hindi-Hindu and Urdu-Muslims. This social binary of two languages exists despite their fluid meanings in medieval India. The historical enquiry into pre-colonial India shows how the colonial-orientalist assumptions and the nationalist discourse reformulated the linguistic and social meanings of Hindi and Urdu each being the “other” of the “other”. The article argues that while Hindi and Urdu are assigned distinctive historical genealogies what is often missed is the context of fluidities of medieval India where such vocabularies of linguistic and social binaries hardly existed.