Lingual Battlefield

Writing as a disappointed enthusiast, Rai provides an intelligent guide to the bitter and successful fight against a "feudal-foreign" Urdu led by the savarna east UP elite on behalf of a linguistically-wronged Hindi/Hindu India. The success of the '20s Hindi elite was at the cost of making this language unrepresentative of popular speech. The status gained by official 'Hindi' in independent India was scarred by the play of power politics. If Urdu from the days of the language controversy came to stand for the Gangetic Mussalman, the historical power of "Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan" lay not only in its brevity. Concurrent with the census that for the first time enumerated a Hindu majority and a Muslim minority, it marked the immaculate conception of linguistic majoritarianism. The pre-December 6 nation-state has been as complicit as today's double-speak rulers in portraying the triumph of high 'Hindi' as God's own handiwork.