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17 The Progress of Hindi, Part 2 Hindi and the Nation Harish Trivedi The current preeminence of Hindi among the modern Indian languages is a phenomenon of surprisingly recent growth and represents a dramatic change in its fortunes. Until about a hundred years ago, Hindi was commonly perceived to be an underdeveloped and underprivileged language, fragmented into several competing dialects, backward and dusty by association with its largely rural constituency, and medievally devout and conventionbound in its literary orientation. Beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, Hindi began to refashion itself comprehensively and to assert vigorously its new identity, especially in relation to its sister language , Urdu, which inhabited the same vast and populous expanse of northern India. Through repeated and sustained struggle, it was able to enlarge its public cultural space to such an extent that it was adopted by Gandhi and Congress as the ra3trabha3a, the national language. Hindi became not only the medium but also one of the major planks of anticolonial nationalism, which led to its installation after Independence as the rajabha3a, the official language of the nation-state. Indeed, so sudden and spectacular was the rise of Hindi that most of the 958 As it happened, I alone of the contributors to this volume did not have the benefit of sustained mutual criticism and collaboration, a deprivation that Sheldon Pollock has graciously made up for through his patient support and insightful editorial suggestions. Vinay Dharwadker offered an attractive alternative frame for organizing some of my materials, which however I could not use. All unreferenced translations in this essay are mine. In view of convenience and the convention in English citations in these matters, some longer compound names such as “Ayodhyaprasad ” are often (but not consistently) cited with a word break, as “Ayodhya Prasad.” At one or two places in the essay I have pulled together the main strands of some of my work previously published in India, reinforcing it here with additional archival materials and contextual reformulation. other Indian languages, some of which had modernized and reinvigorated themselves in response to the colonial stimulus some decades before, now opposed the spread and “imposition” of Hindi and its encroachment, in terms of both official diktat and popular culture, upon their traditional territories . It is an ironically apt measure of the rise and rise of Hindi during the twentieth century that whereas in the colonial period it was seen as a spearhead of resistance against British imperialism, in the postcolonial period it has had to face charges of “Hindi imperialism,” of exercising its own brand of linguistic dominance and expansionism, which have in turn been resisted by the other Indian languages.1 The nationalist evolution of Hindi in the twentieth century thus describes a full circle. Such resurgence and refashioning of Hindi was effected through a series of related and mutually reinforcing measures. The movement, which began in 1867 but assumed a sustained charge through the 1880s and the 1890s, was initially a modest demand that Devanagari, the script in which Hindi is written, be permitted as an alternative script, alongside the modified Persian script in which Urdu is written, for the purposes of administrative and judicial business at the lower levels in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (subsequently called the United Provinces and, after independence, Uttar Pradesh, both abbreviated to U.P.). This public demand made on the British government was accompanied by an internal literary development: the search for a form of Hindi suitable for the writing of prose, which until then had hardly existed but for which a growing need was now acutely felt. The form of Hindi selected, Khari Boli (a dialect or regional form spoken in the areas of Western U.P., Delhi, and Haryana) was a new literary medium, and the choice was perhaps reinforced by the fact that virtually all the poetry in Hindi so far had been written in other regional forms, mainly Brajbhasha and Avadhi. The new prose in Hindi was thus to be uncontaminated by any preceding poetry. In fact, when the early Hindi essays and novels, which were the most popular new forms of prose in the language, used poetic quotations and allusions, as they did quite frequently, they illustrated a conjunction of two different kinds of Hindi hardly ever seen before. Soon enough, however, a new and perhaps natural demand arose: the language of prose and the language of poetry should be the same in Hindi, as...

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