Hindi–Urdu controversy

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

Hindi and Urdu are mutually intelligible standard registers of the Hindustani language (also known as Hindi–Urdu). The respective writing systems used to write the language, however, are different: Hindi is written in the Devanagari variant of the Brahmic scripts whereas Urdu is written using a modified Nastaliq variant of the Arabic script, each of which is completely unintelligible to readers literate only in the other. Both Modern Standard Hindi and Urdu are literary forms of the Dehlavi dialect of Hindustani. A Persianised variant of Hindustani began to take shape during the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526) and Mughal Empire (1526–1858) in South Asia. Known as Deccani in South India, and by names such as Hindi, Hindavi, and Hindustani in North India and elsewhere, it emerged as a lingua franca across much of Northern India and was written in several scripts including Devanagari, Perso-Arabic, Kaithi, and Gurmukhi.

Hindustani in its Perso-Arabic script form underwent a standardisation process and further Persianisation during the late Mughal period in the 18th century, and came to be known as Urdu, a name derived from the Turkic word ordu or orda ('army') and is said to have arisen as the "language of the camp" (Zaban-i-Ordu), or in the local Lashkari Zaban. 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. Hindi as a standardised 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.

In the middle of the 18th century, a movement among Urdu poets advocating the further Persianisation of Hindustani occurred, in which certain native Sanskritic words were supplanted with Persian loanwords. On the other hand, organizations such as the Nagari Prachar Sabha (1893) and Hindi Sahitya Sammeland (1910) "advocated a style that incorporated Sanskrit vocabulary while consciously removing Persian and Arabic words." The last few decades of the 19th century witnessed the eruption of this 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. In 1900, the government issued a decree granting symbolic equal status to both Hindi and Urdu. Deploring the Hindu-Muslim divide, Gandhi proposed re-merging the standards, using either Devanagari or Urdu script, under the traditional generic term Hindustani. Describing the state of Hindi-Urdu under British rule in colonial India, Professor Sekhar Bandyopadhyay stated that "Truly speaking, Hindi and Urdu, spoken by a great majority of people in north India, were the same language written in two scripts; Hindi was written in Devanagari script and therefore had a greater sprinkling of Sanskrit words, while Urdu was written in Persian script and thus had more Persian and Arabic words in it. At the more colloquial level, however, the two languages were mutually intelligible." Bolstered by the support of the Indian National Congress and various leaders involved in the Indian Independence Movement, Hindi, along with English, replaced Urdu as one of the official languages of India during the institution of the Indian constitution in 1950.