Colonial Standardisation Shaped Modern Hindi's Identity and Boundaries

The linguistic landscape of pre-colonial northern India was remarkably fluid. People moved between multiple registers depending on context: Persian in courts and administration, Sanskrit in temples and scholarship, and a range of vernaculars, Braj Bhasha, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, and others, in everyday life and literary expression. Scripts too were plural: Devanagari, Kaithi, Gurmukhi, and Perso-Arabic all carried literary and administrative texts. No single register was treated as the exclusive 'mother tongue' of a community.

Colonial rule disrupted this fluidity. The East India Company's decision in the 1830s to replace Persian with vernacular languages in lower courts forced an administrative choice between what had been sister registers: Hindi and Urdu. The 1900 court resolution in the United Provinces, which permitted Devanagari alongside the Persian script, turned a practical administrative question into a politically charged communal one. Languages that had coexisted and borrowed from each other were now cast as markers of separate religious identities. The Piggott Commission of 1912–13 accelerated this process: when the policy of maintaining a common language collapsed, the colonial government prescribed separate standardised readers for Hindi and Urdu in 1916, effectively delegitimising the rich oral traditions of Bhojpuri, Awadhi, and Braj Bhasha.

Nationalist organisations did not reverse this colonial narrowing. The Nagari Pracharini Sabha and the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan promoted a heavily Sanskritised, Devanagari-based form of Khari Boli as the only 'pure' national language. The journal Saraswati, under its influential editorship, became an instrument of language standardisation, purging Arabic and Persian loanwords and replacing common Hindustani words with Sanskrit-derived equivalents. By the 1930s, the Congress had accepted Hindustani, a more inclusive blend of Hindi and Urdu, as the preferred national language, reflecting the view that a language common people could actually speak should serve as the national medium. This tension between the Sanskritised, standardised register and the more plural Hindustani tradition was never fully resolved before independence, and it shaped the language debates in the Constituent Assembly that followed. The nationalist movement drew strength from many voices, regional poets, folk traditions, oral ballads, even as institutional language politics worked to silence some of those same voices.