Rethinking religion and language in north India: the Hindi-Urdu dispute and the rise of right-wing populism

Abstract

In 1930s and 1940s Uttar Pradesh, the question of the relationship between Hindi and Urdu in debates about a possible ‘national’ language has been widely assumed to interface with a politics of communal antagonism between Hindus and Muslims. However, the politics of figures on the ‘left’ of the Congress in this period suggest that the role of language in relation to religious antagonism was complex and sometimes paradoxical. We will explore the ways in which characteristics of the two languages were associated with particular forms of social and political behaviour, and how these associations between language and behaviour came to characterise the rise of Hindi.