RETHINKING RELIGION AND LANGUAGE IN NORTH INDIA:

THE HINDI-URDU DISPUTE AND THE RISE

OF RIGHT-WING POPULISM

William Gould
University of Leeds

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 rela-
tion 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.
Keywords: Communalism, Hindi, Language policies, Urdu.

Resumen

Durante las décadas de 1930 y 1940 en Uttar Pradesh los debates sobre la primacía del hindi
o el urdu como la lengua oficial, ‘nacional’ se solapaban en gran parte con el enfrentamiento

29
entre hindúes y musulmanes. Atendiendo a la postura que adoptó la ‘izquierda’ del Partido
del Congreso, vemos que la relación entre lengua e identidad religiosa es bastante compleja

REVISTA CANARIA DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES, 76; 2018, PP. 29-44

y en ocasiones paradójica. En este artículo exploramos cómo las características de sendos
idiomas se asociaban a determinado comportamiento social y político y cómo de esa co-
rrelación de fuerzas surgió la hegemonía del hindi.
Palabras clave: Hindi, Política lingüística, Sectarismo religioso, Urdu.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.25145/j.recaesin.2018.76.03
Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 76; April 2018, pp. 29-44; ISSN: e-2530-8335
 On 6 January 1936, in reaction to Gandhi’s attempts to promote Hindustani
in both scripts —Persian and Devanagri— within the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan
(hereafter HSS),1 the newspaper Sudha described the Mahatma as a ‘blind devotee
of Muslims’. Because of Gandhi’s pious wishes it reported, poor Hindi would have
to put on an awkward half-rustic, half Muslim costume and would be ‘cremated’.
Hindi, it claimed, was ‘sansrkit’s daughter and the language of cow protecting,
non-violent image worshipers who considered India their only land.’ How could it
come to terms, Sudha argued, with the communalist language of cow-eating image
destroyers, who considered Arabia and Iran their motherland, and whose foreign
culture was violent, brutal and harking back to the days of Muslim empires?2
The image-laden reaction of Sudha provides a snapshot into one of the
most important political divisions of late colonial India —a debate that had
clearly emerged in the north of the country’s mainstream media by the mid
1930s, around the issue of script and language. What we might describe as the
‘Hindi world’ —the sphere of politics and culture that sought to promote the
idea of a single national vernacular— was split into two camps. On the one side a
‘Hindustani’ group, promoting a language which recognized the mixed scriptural
and vocabulary bases of Hindi and Urdu as conjoined languages. This included
the likes of Rajendra Prasad, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vinoba Bhave, Kaka Kalelkar,
Rajagopalachariah, and Jamnalal Bajaj. On the other side, promoting Hindi in the
Devanagri script, as a language effectively in competition with Urdu in Nastaliq
script, was, for example, P.D. Tandon, Babu Sampurnand, V.N. Tiwari, and
Balkrishna Sharma. The debate, which reached its peak and raged through the
HSS sessions of 1938-41 at Simla, Banaras, and Abohar, was conducted in and
through the Hindi press itself, which tended to take the side of Hindi rather than
30

Hindustani. Throughout, as is also evident in the writings of the likes of Tandon

and Sampurnand (explored below), the Hindustani side was largely associated
REVISTA CANARIA DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES, 76; 2018, PP. 29-44

with a politics of religious community accommodation, a proto-secularism that

embraced the essentially composite nature of India’s political and social histories.
The other side was more clearly aligned with a Hindu revivalist trend that worked
both within and alongside mainstream political institutions such as the Indian
National Congress.
This divide has been the subject of extensive academic commentary. And
arguably, the division between Hindi and Urdu has, itself, been reinforced by sub-
sequent literature exploring it.3 This article will not revisit this well-trodden terrain
in terms of the languages themselves, but presents a survey of how the supposed
Hindi-Urdu divide became an increasingly ‘communal’ issue, despite late colonial
common knowledge about the largely non-religious/non-communal associations

1
The ‘Hindi Literature Convention’ —the principal organization promoting Hindi as a
national language in India.
2
Sudha 6 January 1936.
3
The literature on the Hindi-Urdu debate is extensive but can be explored in depth. See
for example, Rai 1984; King 1994; Rahman 1999; Faruqi 2001
with each language. It will not look in detail at the means by which we arrive at a
language that has distinctive overlapping provenance with a range of dialects and
then to a bifurcated language based on script, but it will explore the politics that
accompanied this division. In the first part of the article we will explore the ways
in which Hindi and Urdu were mapped onto particular readings of India’s political
history, which became more closely related to religious community in the late colonial
period. The second part of the article will examine the agencies and individuals who
made this possible, exploring in particular the work and writings of Sampurnand
and P.D. Tandon in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The article will
argue that particular forms of political change in the late colonial period shaped the
polarization of Hindi and Urdu in debates about language. Specifically, the forms
of anti-colonial and populist protest brought a new urgency to the promotion of
a common vernacular at the right moment. Secondly, the forms of anti-colonial
protest that dominated parts of northern India —the politically most significant
regions of India— also generated forms of cultural nationalism that shaped Hindi
promotion as a ‘Hindu’ project.

I. DEFINING HINDI AND URDU ORIGINS

Much of the debate around language, and specifically Hindi and Urdu,
made references to deeper historical contexts. In many cases, this was a deliberate
‘invention of tradition’, which served the aesthetic purposes of literature; and as
we will see below, key political publicists in the Hindi belt tied their nationalist
mobilisation to historical developments of a pure dialect. As with most examples

31
of nationalist hagiography, these histories obscured a far more complex reality, but
themselves drew on certain myths of linguistic origin. Most linguistic scholars relate

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the variable roots of modern Hindi and Urdu to 12th and 13th Century Prakrits and
dialects, which eventually developed to Khari Boli —a language spoken around
Delhi in that period (Orsini 2009). The literary languages of those centuries,
further east, were Awadhi and Brajbhasha. These variable dialects from that time,
also related to their use in a range of contexts. What eventually became Urdu then
(what language scholars describe as ‘Hindvi’), had certain origins in the courts of
Delhi and the regional courts to the East of that city (Awadhi and Brajbhasha).
From these languages, a range of temporally shifting forms developed —Hindvi,
Rekhta, Dakhani, which flourished in different areas at different times— in the
Deccan in the 17th Century and then in Delhi by the 18th.
The word ‘Urdu’, which first appeared in the late 18th Century in the writings
of the court of Shah Alam ii of Delhi, was derived from the Turkish word ‘camp’.
But was a misleading term, in the sense that it was spoken beyond the permanent
or shifting courts of regional rulers. As I will argue more below, the lack of accuracy
here was, at least from the late 19th Century a deliberate nationalist construction, in
promoting the idea that Urdu was somehow ‘new’ and ‘foreign’ —a language brought
to India by the Mughals. At the same time, Urdu did develop its own historical
mythologies and literary associations. It became a recognized language of poetry
 in the 18th Century, which was thought to have a specific relationship to ‘Persian’,
although in many respects this was an invented or ‘pseudo’ ancestor.
In the 18th Century, Urdu emerged as a highly developed language of poetry,
especially in the cities of Delhi and Lucknow, although it had flourished earlier in
the Deccan. In some ways, this was a period of the rennaisance of the arts, including
poetry. But these social and literary associations reinforced the idea that Urdu was
somehow largely a language of governance and a tongue that had been ‘changed’
via association with the languages of invaders such as Arabic, Persian and Turkish.
This is a distortion. 95% of Urdu verbs have their roots in Sanskrit/Prakrit, which
assimilated other languages into its dialects. The assumption of Mir Amman in
‘Bagh-o-Bahar’ (1802), later taken by up by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and initially G
A Grierson, that Urdu was largely a ‘camp’ language, was a popular misconception
based in misreadings India’s Muslim histories (Parekj 2011).
Far from being ‘foreign’ then, Urdu was an example of a local language,
which was enriched with Persian literary currents, in fact displacing, gradually
Persian itself as the language of elites. This issue of the extent to which language
changed in relation to government is crucial —in the 19th Century, the British
dispensed with Persian as the language of governance and replaced it with English
at the highest levels and the vernaculars at provincial and more local levels. For
north India, from Bihar across to Punjab, this became Urdu for educated elites. It
became much more of a prose language, used in journalism and the novel, which
affected the significance of the language overall (Metcalf 29-37). Importantly, even
organizations associated with the Hindu revival, such as the Arya Samaj generally
used Urdu in the late 19th Century. (Jones 1976).
Urdu in the Persian script was, then, doubtless the most important language
32

of governance as the British began to establish their dominion over north India.
But as colonial power became increasingly complex and formal from the
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1880s onwards, debates and decisions took place around ‘vernacular’ languages
in the project of governance. The crucial phase in these language debates
therefore corresponded to the critical transformations in colonial power and its
administration on the ground around the turn of the Century. From this stage
then, the association of language with its formal and informal ‘use’ in a multi-
lingual setting, became a common point of reference in all discussions of political
reform or constitutional advance. And it was from this position, that the politics of
religious community came to be grafted too, on the question of language. We can
see this most directly in the decisions of the Lt Governor of the NWP (later United
Provinces), Anthony Macdonnell at the turn of the century. In 1900, Macdonnell
took the decision to recognize the growing movement among publicists writing in
the devanagri script, to establish the principle of an equality of Hindi and Urdu
(Robinson 1974).
It was through the late 19th Century, and into the early 20th Century, that
Urdu came to be more clearly associated with an older ‘decadent’ Nawabi culture
(Metcalf 31), as the colonial state formalized rules of administration, attempted to
root out local fiefdoms in some cases, and sought to rationalize the bases of its district
administration. What David Lelyveld describes as ‘language repertoires’ —the use
of Hindi or Urdu, or another dialect in different places or for different functions,
became hardened in this phase of high imperialism (Lelyveld 107-117). The state,
not being an autonomous entity as far as social change was concerned, was also
responding to changes in communication technologies: Increases in the outputs
and subjects of publishing and journalism not only created the physical medium
for language propagation, but also became the vehicle for its discussion. Alongside
new reading publics, were new forms of educational institution —school and uni-
versity movements, epitomized by Syed Ahmed Khan’s Aligarh movement, but also
a range of revivalist institutions, such as the Gurukuls. These promoted new forms
of cultural communication, which cut across and included writing, literature and
music (Bhakle 2005). They also accompanied a growth in colonial anticipation of
administrative Indianisation, as it attempted to rationalize its power, and the need
to consider languages of administration and the courts.
Debates about which languages should be used in any particular region
or across India, for education, commerce, the courts or administration, became
particularly intense then just as the projects of regional and national publishing
and journalism developed on a large scale. The journal, newspaper and tract made
new forms of literature, or debates about language possible. And those with the
skills and finance to publicise literary pursuits, were able to open up such debates
about language. Print culture was therefore at the centre of these endeavours, and
moreover, the issue of promoting vernaculars took place against the ever present
power of English as a language of rule. Colonial hierarchies were developed through
the ‘high’ literacy associated with English, and it was in reaction to this that literati
across India promoted the vernaculars (Naregal 4-5). A central figure here was Syed
Ahmed Khan in the debates around and promotion of Urdu. Attempts to define a

33
clearer and dominant language in Nagri, were led by figures such as Harischandra
Bharatendu in his promotion of a nationwide standardised Hindi through pub-

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lishing and educational endeavours. For the Banaras based journalist, language,
literature, religion and territory were all important in defining Hindu identity and
he linked Sanskritised Hindi unambiguously to the Hindu community, and high
caste Vaishnavite belief (Dalmia 432-434).
For most of the period up to the 1910s, the promotion of vernacular litera-
tures, although it began to map, for example, Hindi onto the ‘Hindu’ community
and Urdu to Muslims, did not generate lasting antagonism or controversy. It was not
until the 1920s that, for example, movements for the promotion of Hindi began to
be represented in earnest as communally competitive. The question as to how this
came about and why such controversies appeared at all is extremely important and
warrants careful consideration. How they were sustained will form the key theme
of the arguments that follow. Certainly, the idea that the Hindu community might
be connected to the promotion of Hindi was certainly something on the horizon
of some of the key political publicists and leaders of the 1900s and 1910s. And in
the 1888 session of the Indian National Congress, local issues such as the preven-
tion of cow slaughter, as they applied to cities such as Allahabad, could still create
the suggestion of a potential Hindu-Muslim divide (McLane 1997). Nevertheless,
none of these developments created a uniform or broad sense that the interests of
 populations might be defined by ideas of religious difference; or that such differences
existed uniformly across the entire subcontinent.
However, over the period up the 1910s, the issue of language increasingly en-
tered into broader political discussions about the nation. For example, Hindi and the
Devanagri script were at the centre of the project of late nineteenth-century Hindu
revival. Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj, shared with Keshub
Chandra Sen and a range of other Bengali leaders the desire to promote Hindi as a
national language (Jones ch. 2-3). Moreover, the particular form of Hindi chosen by
these intellectuals was important, and defined later language debates of the interwar
period. Dayanand and figures like him, chose to concentrate on the promotion of
a highly sanskritised Hindi, as part of the project for the rejuvenation of the ‘true’
or ‘original’ language of Hindus. This was despite the fact that most speakers in
what came to be known as the Hindi belt would have spoken neither a standardised
Hindi, nor one that was entirely devoid of Persian influences (Orsini Intr.)
A key element of Hindi promotion in the late nineteenth century revolved
around script, particularly the use of Devanagri, and it was around the issue of script
that some of the most important controversies of the period raged. An important
institution, linked to the Arya Samaj in this project, was the Nagri Pracharini Sabha
based in Banaras, whose first secretary, Shyam Sundar Das, claimed that the idea
for the Sabha had come out of a meeting of the Samaj (Kumar 4-26). The Nagri
Pracharini Sabha was a crucial institution at the end of the century in promoting
Hindi as a language of the law courts in Uttar Pradesh. The Arya Samaj educational
institutions, such as the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic Colleges were also instrumental
in pushing the cause of Hindi. However, it was through Hindi journalism and
literature that perhaps some of the most important progress in publicising Hindi
34

in Devanagri was made. As well as Harischandra, the journals Brahman, Ksatriya-

patrika, Hindi Pratap (edited by Balkrishna Bhatt), and Anandkadambini (edited
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by Babu Radhakrishnadas) were important in forwarding the cause of Hindi as

the language of Hindus and as a national language (Dalmia 141-142). The cause of
Hindi literati was also furthered by the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) project,
driven by Madan Mohan Malaviya. In a manner similar to the Aligarh University,
BHU started off in 1905 as a project that had a wider significance than just the
establishment of a University. The finance for the University was the result of fund
raising among India’s Hindu landed interests across the Hindi belt, through north
and central India. Like Aligarh, it was designed to impart a particular kind of
cultural and ‘national’ education that brought with it qualities not to be found in
other institutions. This related to the symbolic and religious significance of Banaras
itself, a town considered as the heart of Hindu culture. BHU slowly developed too
into the centre for the development of a standardised Hindi syllabi for teaching in
other colleges around the country.
The promotion of Hindi and its relationship to Urdu was always executed in
tension with the politics of region over nation. In other words, its proponents’ claim
that it constituted a ‘national’ language was always limited by Hindi’s demographic
and spatial reach. In exploring the largely ‘invented’ religious community associa-
tions between Hindi and Urdu therefore, we might also consider its relationship
to, and similarities with parallel language movements in other parts of India. In
western India for example, from the late 1870, Marathi was acquiring a dominant
place in high literary pursuits in Bombay presidency, led by Chitpavan Brahman
intellectuals. Over the same period that Hindi was being promoted, Marathi litera-
ture and the politics of bilingualism were furthered by voluntary associations, such
as the Bombay Education Society, and the earlier Students’ Literary and Scientific
Society. These organisations acted as intermediaries between the local intelligentsia
of urban centres and colonial officialdom, in producing a corpus of printed litera-
ture both in English and the vernaculars (Naregal 2001: 232-235). But in Pune,
the high caste intelligentsia’s intermediary position in the literary and educational
sphere was challenged by the low —caste Satyashodak Samaj, led by Jotirao Phule,
which used non literary public performances such as the tamasha, to contest high
caste dominance of the municipalities (Naregal 268-270).
In India in the late colonial period, the politics of the journal was never far
away from the politics of the streets and the assemblies. As anti-colonial national-
ism extended and expanded beyond the initial petitioning movement of the Indian
National Congress, the question of language also became more intensely political. In
1920, M.K. Gandhi rewrote the constitution of the Congress, lowering its member-
ship fees to open the doors to wealthy peasants and workers. The language of that
movement had been dominated by the cosmopolitan English-speaking elites of the
Presidency cities. From 1920, if not much earlier, it was forced to keep pace with
peasant and worker organisations that it had increasingly co-opted or swallowed as
a means of building electoral strength and anti-state leverage (Pandey 1978). The
languages of these communities were the vernaculars. Simultaneously, a new genera-
tion of publicists working in Hindi or Urdu took the place of provincial political

35
mobilisations, as the 1920s-30s system of dyarchy pushed the foci of power more
into the provinces and districts. These leaders had cut their political teeth in the

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city and district organisations, or had been educated through vernacular medium
schools. Most importantly, they were representatives not of the large urban interests of
previous years, but increasingly of agrarian communities, small traders, blue —collar
workers and to some extent, the landless poor (Gooptu 2001; Gould 2004: Intr).
This was important context then, for the development of political controversy
around language, not least because the medium of political rhetoric itself drew in the
question of vernaculars. On the one hand the question of Hindi’s place, for example,
in the new political structures and societies of north India, created new debates about
‘national’ language and how the promotion of particular vernaculars encouraged
forms of cultural autonomy. On the other hand, the use of vernaculars assisted in
the development of political rhetoric that more clearly drew on community themes,
religious questions, and issues of ethnic difference. This is not to argue that Hindi
or Urdu were inherently vehicles for communal expression. Rather, the development
of mass politicization in a context of language hierarchies, in which English was
placed at the centre of urban cosmopolitanism, endowed vernaculars with the power
of cultural difference. Such a politics easily wedded the issue of language to notions
of anti-western mobilization, a critique of the presupposed structures of modernity,
and the use of tradition to defend ‘national’ culture.
 The debate around Hindi was also related to its inherent limitations, in
the sense that there were many arguments against it ever fulfilling a role as a truly
national language. It had to fill the extended ‘national’ space that the larger British
presence had helped to establish, but it was by no means the lingua franca in all of
those regions. The ‘Hindi belt’ itself was actually not uniformly Hindi speaking:
it is still made up of related dialects such as Bhojpuri. Hindi then was a language
that had enough mass and speakers at the commercial epicentre, to morph into a
‘language’ and was a very large regional language therefore, but not easily a ‘national’
one. The idea of it being based in ‘Sanskrit’ was also, in some respects, a fiction. The
idea of ‘sanskritized’ Hindi was actually something quite modern, and a response to
the idea of Hindi being sidelined by English —speaking elites in India. This led to
deliberate abstruseness, which was used to change, and artificially bolster a natural
language. This also involved an ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Urdu from the language, and
a like for like unnatural translation of English terms into Sanskrit.

II. HINDI, HINDUISM AND CULTURAL EXCLUSIVISM

In writing about the development of language politics in late nineteenth and

early twentieth century India, historians and literary scholars have frequently made
use of the idea of the ‘public sphere’ (Orsini 2009; Naregal 2001). This framework
presents the idea of a hegemonic middle —class public, who developed voluntary
institutions and publishing enterprises which defined the idea of public space in new
ways in India. However, most scholars have also sought to complicate the traditional
model of the public sphere presented by Jurgen Habermas in looking at European
36

society in the modern period. Francesca Orsini, for example, has argued with refer-
ence to the Hindi literary sphere, that instead of a twofold division of ‘public’ and
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‘private’, we might consider Indian society in terms of three layers —public, private
and ‘customary’. For Orsini, this ‘customary’ sphere related to cultural practices and
beliefs that unevenly overlapped between both private and public matters (Orsini
Intr.) Certainly, the development of literary spheres in India was very different to
the experience of most European states, not least because of the complication of
bilingualism among the social and literary elites.
The symbolic power of the English language, and its association with
governance in India, also recreated forms of colonial hierarchy in cultural affairs,
and in popular media. Perhaps most significantly, the sphere of vernacular literary
pursuits was more commonly associated by the politically powerful in India with
the politics of the disadvantaged.4 And just as appeals to the grassroots were often

4
This was a constant refrain of M.K. Gandhi in the 1910s and 1920s, who associated
the gulf between India’s urban educated and rural peasant communities in terms of knowledge of
vernaculars, and in particular, Hindi. See ‘Gandhi’s Speech on Non-Cooperation in Calcutta’, 13
December 1920, in Gandhi 1972: vol. 22/25, pp. 84-89.
made via a religious idiom, so too, did the use of Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Bengali,
or other regional languages, presuppose a different level of political mobilisation,
which was often deliberately divorced from western notions of secular mobilisation.
Finally, the promotion of particular vernaculars involved projects of standardisation
and definition, which reinforced institution and organisation building as a means
of asserting particular kinds of collective identities. Insofar as language movements
were concerned with the future shape of state power, as well as literature, the arts
and ‘culture’, such institutions were tied to the whole process too, of how different
communities shaped their approach to an imagined free Indian state.
There was also a sense in which the promotion of Hindi was about the
development of a popular vernacular —an idiom used outside the formal constitu-
tional structures of politics. In this sense, as Orsini and A. Rajagopal also argue, the
politics of Hindi runs alongside this dualistic English/vernacular divide in India.
For Orsini, this was also about opening out forms of peasant mobilisation, via the
politics of figures such as Sahajanand Saraswati and the Kisan Sabha movement in
Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar (Orsini ch 3; Rajagopal 1999). Equally, we can
talk about an urban popular idiom of politics in this region, via the work of Nandini
Gooptu and the mobilisation of lower castes in the towns and cities (Gooptu 2001).
However it is via the political idiom of Hindi too, that we see a specific form of
cultural exclusivism emerging from the 1930s, just as the idea of non-constitutional
mobilisation was widening out. This final part of the paper will look at that via
religious symbolism and the press and via the political writings and thinking of two
leaders in particular —P.D. Tandon, and Babu Sampurnanand,
In the early stages of journalism in the Indian vernaculars from the early
to mid 19th century, language use in the media clearly reflected the role of each

37
language in governance. In 1870 for example, there were 15 Urdu papers with a
circulation of 2050, and 8 Hindi ones with a circulation of 384. From the 1910s

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onwards however, the Hindi weeklies and dailies started to expand —in this sense
catching up with the growing political importance of the Hindi belt as a region
and the language itself, but in important ways, defining the conflict between the
two branches of the language.
Some key new publications were started from the early part of the 20th cen-
tury into the 1920s, for example, Abhyuday (Malaviya) in 1907; Ganesh Vidyarthi’s
Pratap, (1913 weekly, and daily from 1920), V.N. Tivari’s Bharat, Prabha, Vartman,
and Adhars all founded around 1920, and K.D. Paliwal’s Sainik (1925 weekly, 1935
daily) from Agra. Banaras, the home of the Nagri Pracharini Sabha was a key city
for Hindi papers, and it was from here that Aaj (1920) Jagaran, (1929), and Hams
(1930) were published. In Lucknow, after the 1924 riot we have Arti and Anand,
which started as a result of the riot there and which displaced Hamdam somewhat
(which was Urdu).
These newspapers were promoted and supported then, by a specific kind of
journalist/publicist, often with a political career, and in some cases with leanings
towards forms of cultural nationalism that derived from Hindi’s popularization. This
included leaders and publicists like K.D. Paliwal, M.M. Malaviya, P.D. Tandon,
and V.N. Tivari. These editors and political publicists often promoted forms of
 cultural nationalism which tied festivals and local events to national movements,
as a form of popular mobilization. For example, Paliwal’s Sainik published in Agra,
ran a series of articles at the beginning of Holi in which the imagery of religious
symbolism was given a kind of political edge —Gandhi would dye the bureaucracy
with splashes of his blood. Both this paper and the Abhudhaya which was published
in Allahabad, talked about Holi in terms of the demon that still existed in India
today, Hiranyakashyup (Gould ch 2). In other respects, these newspapers used the
occasion of local events to tie support for anti-colonial protest to activities such as
cloth boycotts, especially during the early 1930s.

III. SAMPURNANAND AND TANDON

We might more effectively look at these processes in the dual promotion

of Hindi with forms of anti-colonial mobilization/political ideology, by exploring
specific leaders in the period, and particularly from the regions where the Hindi
debate was most prominent —The United Provinces or Uttar Pradesh. The final part
of the paper will explore this in relation to two prominent figures in Uttar Pradesh
—P.D. Tandon and Sampurnanand. Both leaders applied certain assumptions about
Indian society, which presupposed the efficacy of vernacular forms of mobilization.
The common man could be reached via vernaculars through folk forms or a religious
idiom. This, interestingly, took on a peculiarly colonial idea about the organisation
of Indian society overall, in which the politics of the poor was associated with pre-
modernity and religious community. Through the use of the vernacular, language
itself became a means of expressing certain kinds of boundaries, rights and forms of
38

political behaviour. In the case of Sampurnanad, as we will see, this was that the use
of Hindi allowed for the promotion of a Hindu organacist view of the nation. In the
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case of Tandon, this was about the ways in which a particular form of standardised
Hindi should be seen as a framework for full citizenship rights. In both cases, it
involved the representation of Urdu in terms of decadence and decline.
Babu Sampurnanand was from a kayastha family and would have been Urdu
speaking but his father insisted on teaching him Hindi. He was drawn to yoga and
toyed with the idea of joining the Radhaswami sect and in his early career worked
as a teacher and university lecturer. In April 1930, he was appointed ‘dictator’ of
the Banaras Congress, and in 1938 was appointed education minister in the United
Provinces Ministry. Sampurnanand was known in the early to mid 1930s as a Con-
gress socialist, although it was an interpretation of that philosophy that had distinct
north Indian characteristics (Gould ch 2). The implications of his socialism, was
that notions of social equality and cohesion were rooted, specifically, in Vedantic
Hindu religious traditions, and the notion of an oversoul of the universe (Virat
Purusha). This informed his writing on a range of larger political issues, including
the role of democracy in India. It also generated an important take on ‘secularism’,
as a phenomenon, Sampurnanand believed, known by ancient India long before
western Europe. Added to this were his organicist ideas about the nation in rela-
tion to Hindu culture and society: Indian society, he argued, had historically been
at its weakest when influenced by semitic religions like Islam and Christianity. He
suggested that Hindu culture was more ‘confident’ when not influenced by these
groups (Sampurnanand 1939).
The wider implications of Sampurnanand’s politics was seen when he was
in office as Education Minister in the UP, and he decided to implement the Wardha
scheme across the province. The scheme tended to present, according to Muslim
organisations, a one-sided view of history and focused very much on the promotion
of Hindi as a medium of education. This was reflected in Sampurnanand’s own views
about Urdu, which he found to be ‘unacceptable... and not suitable to be adopted
as a national language’ (Sampurnanand 1962: 88-92). At the end of August 1938
at the Kashi Nagri Pracharini Sabha, Sampurnand talked too about the qualitative
differences between Hindi and Urdu, and made the point that there should be a
retention of Sanskrit in the language, for the sake of speakers from other regions
like Maharashtra, Gujarat and Bengal.5
The policies of Sampurnanand towards Urdu led to a reaction among Mus-
lim organisations —some picking up, specifically on the Wardha scheme and the
promotion of Sanskrit, and others, such as the Jamiat-ul-Ulema— more generally
about the attitude of the Education Minister to Urdu. This formed the backdrop
to a more direct and focused Hindi campaign for Sampurnanand after Independ-
ence. As Chief Minister of UP between 1954 and 1960, he helped to implement
a range of state —level policies that cemented a Hindi— only policy, over-riding
instructions from the Central government to allow for the promotion of Urdu as a
minority language of instruction in educational institutions (Jaffrelot 161).
Sampurnanand’s promotion of a mono-linguistic culture in north India
was, in the main, focused on education and culture. But for another key Congress

39
leader and contemporary, Purushottam Das Tandon it entailed the rejection of
Indo-Persian cultural influences on the idea of the citizen. P.D. Tandon was best

REVISTA CANARIA DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES, 76; 2018, PP. 29-44

known for his successful challenge to Jawaharlal Nehru as President of the Congress
in 1950, with the backing of Vallabhai Patel, but his political career spanned back
to the 1900s. He first represented the city of Allahabad at the All India Congress
Committee in 1906, and was involved in the main Gandhian protests of the 1920s
and 1930s. Throughout the 1940s, although seen as a radical in the Congress in these
earlier years, he came to be associated with spin-off Hindu organisations. Tandon
also maintained a keen interest in the promotion of Hindi as a national language,
but as we will see below, combined it with a form of majoritarian politics, which
was often channeled through the HSS.6
Tandon’s espousal of ‘Hindu’ unity linked into a range of other cultural
activities for him, and it is here that the significance of this politics for the idea of

5
Sampurnanand Papers (Varanasi Regional Archives), Sampurnanand to Gandhi, 5 Sep-
tember 1938.
6
‘Appreciation of the Political Situation’ (hereafter APS) 11 May 1945; 25 May 1945.
‘Confidential Report’, Fortnightly Report for the first half of April 1945, 19 April 1945 Frampton
Papers, Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge (hereafter SAS).
 the citizen plays out. The relationship between active opposition to Pakistan and the
promotion of a majoritarian position on Hindi were directly related, and espoused
simultaneously. For example, Tandon’s chairmanship of the 31st HSS between 17
and 19 May 1943, entertained amongst its alumni representatives of the Mahabir
Dal and RSS, and contained speeches criticizing the Muslim League.7 In April
1945, as well as collecting funds for a Hindi Sahitya Sammelan Bhavan in Jaipur,
he supported Sampurnanand’s criticism, via the UP Provincial Sammelan, of the
pro-Urdu policy at All-India Radio.8 In the same month at the Kangri Gurukul in
the western UP district of Saharanpur Tandon was again vocal about his opposition
to Gandhian non-violence.9 The promotion of Hindi then, became a vehicle for the
development of an exclusively defined, majoritarian concept of citizenship in which
linguistic difference potentially positioned the nation’s denizens. At open session of
the HSS held in Bombay in December 1947, attended among others by V.D. Savarkar,
Tandon had suggested that there was still an attempt to satisfy Muslims in relation
to the national language, and that in the past the British had encouraged the idea
that their culture was different. At that same meeting, Seth Govind Das argued
that while Muslims were voicing their loyalty to the Indian Union, they were still
following the same old policy and that if they did not want to show loyalty, they
should go to Pakistan (“Samelan” 1948).
But it was shortly after independence that these totalizing representations
of Indian culture were developed most directly into exclusive and ethnicised ideas
of citizenship. At an open meeting of the HSS in the spring of 1948, Tandon sug-
gested that use of Hindi should be a means of testing Muslim loyalty to India. If
the Socialists supported Urdu-inflected Hindustani,10 Tandon argued, they would
be continuing to support the two-nation theory. The country’s salvation lay instead
40

in everyone having, in Tandon’s words, ‘one culture and civilization’. Muslims,

therefore, had to “own the Indian culture and civilization like they have done in
REVISTA CANARIA DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES, 76; 2018, PP. 29-44

China.” The partition of the country for Tandon was an illustration of the failure
of this monolithic nation, which naturally revolved around Hindu culture. In the
UP Assembly, Tandon argued that partition was due to the past sins of Hindus and
that if they did not open the doors of Hinduism to Muslims, they would experience
worse grief.
Tandon’s correspondence also shows support for organizations that sought
to directly question the citizenship rights of Muslims, including an All-India Refu-

7
APS 12 February; 21 May 1943.
8
APS 11 May 1945; 25 May 1945. ‘Confidential Report’, Fortnightly Report for the first
half of April 1945, 19 April 1945 Frampton Papers, SAS.
9
‘Confidential Report’, Fortnightly Report for the first half of April 1945, 19 April 1945
Frampton Papers, SAS.
10
The promotion of Hindustani related to a section of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan in
the late colonial period, who favoured the idea of a national vernacular which embraced vocabulary
drawn from Urdu. This group opposed those in the Sammelan, such as Tandon and Sampurnanand
who argued for a ‘pure’ and more sanskritized Hindi. See Orsini 2009.
gee Association (AIRA), a Sindhi-dominated organisation headed by Choitram
P Gidwani. The Association had developed out of refugee agitations for property
compensation, and directly lobbied the Prime Minister’s Office. Tandon was seen
as a key supporter, with the Association seeking his help in rent disputes,11 and in
preventing the recovery of income tax demands issued on Sindhi refugees by the
Pakistani authorities.12 Indeed, his stance on refugees and Muslim properties was a
key dynamic of Tandon’s dispute with Nehru himself and the AIRA spared no ire
in denouncing Nehru as a man whose “culture” was Muslim and who showed too
much open “appeasement” of Pakistan.13
The role of these organisations had a material effect on the substantive
citizenship rights of Muslim communities. In 1950, the Sindhi Hindu Refugee
Panchayat, based in Dugapur Camp, Jaipur, wrote to Tandon for help in prevent-
ing Muslims from selling and mortgaging properties in Rajasthan. The Panchayat
provided lists of Muslim government servants who had retained properties but
migrated, or who had “deceived refugees”.14 In 1950, Tandon presided over the All-
India Refugee Conference in Delhi, at which the speech of Choithram P. Gidwani
complained of inadequacy of refugee loans, suggested that the evacuee property
law had failed to prevent a “drain of crores of rupees from India to Pakistan”,
and charged the Jamiat-ul-Ulema with agitation against the ordinance. Gidwani
summed up his list of accusations with the doubt that “elements returning to India
who have breathed the poisonous atmosphere of Pakistan will ever remain loyal to
our country.”15
Tandon helped rich and poor alike manoeuvre the everyday state in this
majoritarian world of citizens’ rights. Other correspondents to Tandon requested help
in acquiring evacuee property, such as one P.R. Kishanchand, also from Sindh, who

41
wanted help acquiring a shop in Kanpur in 1952;16 or the letter of complaint sent by
the District Refugee Corporation, Jhansi about a rationing officer (B.R. Sharma) and

REVISTA CANARIA DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES, 76; 2018, PP. 29-44

the inadequacy of his call for tenders for evacuee properties.17 This led to a host of
other smaller colonies of displaced persons seeking Tandon’s support, including the
poorly-provisioned Lajpatnagar Panchayat Settlement near Delhi which requested a

11
Choitram P Gidwani All India Refugee Association to Tandon, 23 July 1952, Tandon
Papers, File 301 National Archives of India (hereafter NIA).
12
Statement of the Displaced Income-tax payers’ association, New Delhi. Draft Resolutions
of the All India refugee Conference, 29-30 July 1950, Tandon Papers, File 301 NAI.
13
All India Refugee Conference, 29-30 July 1950, General comments on the resolutions.
Tandon Papers, File 301 NAI.
14
From representatives of the Sindhi Hindu Refugee Panchayat, Jaipur, Durgapur Camp,
Gopaldas H. Ladhani, Congress Social Worker, to Tandon. 29 January 1950, Tandon Papers, File
301 NAI.
15
Speech of Dr. Choithram P Gidwani, Chairman Reception Committee, All India Refugee
Conference, Delhi, 29-30 July 1950, Tandon Papers, File 134 NAI.
16
P.R. Kishanchand to PDT, 19 December 1952, Tandon Papers, File 128 NAI.
17
District Refugee Cooperative Society to B.R. Sharma, TRO cum R and R Officer, 9
January 1950, Tandon Papers, File 119, NAI.
 training or work centre.18 Supporting Hindu refugee organisations also meant that
Tandon became a forum of partisan complaints about ‘Muslim’ brutality. His papers
are littered with accounts of such alleged excesses.19 In extension of this patronage,
Tandon was targeted by members of the RSS calling to be reinstated in government
service following the ban on the organisation, including one missive from a Sindhi
migrant seeking help for his son who had been jailed as an RSS member.20 Another
letter compared the apparent “tolerance” shown to Pakistani Muslims to the treat-
ment of RSS men.21 Other correspondents to the leader sought support for complaints
against Muslim government servants in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.22 Later, Tandon
was even a sympathetic voice for the likes of Baburao Patel, a columnist who wrote
a strongly anti-Muslim article in Film India in March 1952, against the Pakistani
documentary Josh-e-Jehad (The Passion of Religious Crusade).23

CONCLUSION

It is possible to write a history of Indian politics for the second and third
quarters of the 20th Century as a history of language. The question of which ver-
nacular should be promoted as the principal language of governance, the courts and
administration, and thereby the putative ‘national’ language, connected to a wide
range of other issues surrounding community, political authority, institution building
and state patronage. Most importantly, as the period progressed, new, more popular
forms of vernacular politics mobilized larger and more diverse constituencies, and
the issue of language appeared yet more urgent. The role of the rapidly expanding
press in the interwar years was central to this, both in terms of providing the medium
42

for language propagation, but also in the linguistic forms that the content of new
presses promoted: particular forms of symbolism, and the connection of linguistic
REVISTA CANARIA DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES, 76; 2018, PP. 29-44

forms to social questions imbued Hindi in particular in north India, with a specific
role in creating new spheres of public debate.
There was no necessary reason, given the very complex linguistic roots of
Hindi and Urdu, that this explosion in interest in language should have provoked
religious community —based controversy. Both languages, by their nature, were
described as homogenous or standardized in a way that distorted not only the wide

18
Lajpatnagar Panchayat Statement, nd, Tandon Papers, File 301 NAI.
19
For example, Statement of S S Bhasin, of district Campbellpur, 22 August 1947 (at pres-
ent taking shelter under the roof of Arya Samaj, Old Hospital Road, Jammu), in Tandon Papers, file
29, NAI. This letter described Hindu deaths near Wazirabad.
20
L.H. Ajwani, Prof of English, Sind College, Karachi to PDT, 21 November 1947, Tandon
Papers, file 29, NAI.
21
S. No 734, S.C. Sharma, Tundla, to PDT —24 July 1950, Tandon Papers, file 28, NAI.
22
‘The responsible citizens of Ghaziabad’ to Tandon, 21 September 1947, Tandon Papers,
File 29, NAI.
23
Baburao Patel to M.I. Quadri, 24 March 1952, in Tandon Papers, file 11, NAI.
variations in dialect and form across space, but also through time. Clearly, differ-
ent forms of both languages were used in different modes of social life. But these
differences might not have had an effect on relations between Hindus and Muslims
without the emergence of new forms of Hindi populism, promoted by a range of
figures in the Congress movement itself. The process of linguistic standardization
for Hindi went hand in hand with a quest to find the ‘pure’ elements of Indian
civilization —a set practices and ways of life that distinguished it from foreign rulers
and invaders. In this sense, the Hindi movement came to polarize around a debate
about exclusivism versus inclusivism— the very same parameters of discussion that
shaped ideas about the future Indian citizen.

Reviews sent to author: 17 November 2017

Revised paper accepted for publication: 2 February 2018

43
REVISTA CANARIA DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES, 76; 2018, PP. 29-44
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