Hindi–Urdu controversy

The Hindi–Urdu controversy arose in 19th century colonial India out of the debate over whether Modern Standard Hindi or Standard Urdu should be chosen as a national language.

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Hindi and Urdu are mutually intelligible as spoken languages, to the extent that they are sometimes considered to be dialects or registers of a single spoken language together referred to as Hindi–Urdu, or the Hindustani language. The respective writing systems used to write the language, however, are different: Hindi is written using Devanagari, whereas Urdu is written using a modified version of the Arabic script, each of which is completely unintelligible to readers literate only in the other.^[1] Both Modern Standard Hindi and Urdu are literary forms of the Dehlavi dialect of Hindustani.^[2] A Persianized variant of Hindustani began to take shape during the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526 AD) and Mughal Empire (1526–1858 AD) in South Asia.^[2] Known as Deccani in southern India, and by names such as Hindi, Hindavi, and Hindustani in northern India and elsewhere, it emerged as a lingua franca across much of India and was written in several scripts including Perso-Arabic, Devanagari, Kaithi, and Gurmukhi.^[3]

The Perso-Arabic script form of this language underwent a standardization process and further Persianization in the late Mughal period (18th century) and came to be known as Urdu, a name derived from the Turkic word ordu (army) or orda and is said to have arisen as the "language of the camp", or "Zaban-i-Ordu", or in the local "Lashkari Zaban".^[4] As a literary language, Urdu took shape in courtly, elite settings. Along with English, it became the official language of northern parts of British India in 1837.^[5][6][7] Hindi as a standardized literary register of the Delhi dialect arose in the 19th century; the Braj dialect was the dominant literary language in the Devanagari script up until and through the nineteenth century. Efforts by Hindi movements to promote a Devanagari version of the Delhi dialect under the name of Hindi gained pace around 1880 as an effort to displace Urdu's official position.^[8]

The last few decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the eruption of the Hindi–Urdu controversy in the United Provinces (present-day Uttar Pradesh, then known as "the North-Western Provinces and Oudh"). The controversy comprised "Hindi" and "Urdu" proponents each advocating the official use of Hindustani with the Devanagari script or with the Nastaʿlīq script, respectively. Hindi movements advocating the growth of and official status for Devanagari were established in Northern India. Babu Shiva Prasad and Madan Mohan Malaviya were notable early proponents of this movement. This, consequently, led to the development of Urdu movements defending Urdu's official status; Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was one of its noted advocates.^{[citation needed]} In 1900, the government issued a decree granting symbolic equal status to both Hindi and Urdu. Hindi and Urdu started to diverge linguistically, with Hindi drawing on Sanskrit as the primary source for formal and academic vocabulary, often with a conscious attempt to purge the language of Persian-derived equivalents. Deploring this Hindu-Muslim divide, Gandhi proposed re-merging the standards, using either Devanagari or Urdu script, under the traditional generic term Hindustani. Bolstered by the support of the Indian National Congress and various leaders involved in the Indian Independence Movement, Hindi, in the Devanagari script, along with English, replaced Urdu as one of the official languages of India during the institution of the Indian constitution in 1950.