Linguistic Diversity within Uttar Pradesh

Uttar Pradesh is called Hindi heartland, but in fact, it is a land of language diversity.  Uttar Pradesh is at the cross roads of several Indo-Aryan dialect zones - Western Hindi, Eastern Hindi, Central Hindi and Bihari.  Rather than a single homogeneous Hindi, U P hosts a continuum of dialects, many of which are mutually intelligible, but distinct in vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar.  

In western U.P. (Delhi, Meerut, Saharanpur, and Agra) Khariboli, Braj and Haryanvi were prominent. Khariboli has a rich poetic tradition. 

In Central UP ( Kanpur, Jhansi, Etawah, Fatehpur, and Hamirpur) Kannauj and Bundeli dialects were used in folk songs and communication. 

Eastern UP (Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Allahabad, Mirzapur and Ballia) Awadhi and Bagheli, language of Ramacharitmanas was the dialect.

North Central UP (Bareilly, Rampur, and Shajahanpur ) witnesses Rohilkhandi, a form of Western Hindi with Urdu influence from Rohilla and Mughal presence.  The term Rohilla originated from Pashto word for mountaineer. So it is a mix of Urdu and Pashto. Pashto is an Indo Iranian language of Indo-European family. Urdu is  an Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-European language group. At a spoken level Hindi and Urdu are mutually intelligible and are considered to be two formal registers of the same language, Hindustani. It is written from right to left using the Nastaliq script, a modified form of Perso-Arabic script.

It originated in the 12th century in around Delhi, as a pidgin from the interaction of speakers of Khariboli and Persian speaking Turks and Iranians, who arrived in Delhi in the 12th century. It was a common language or lingua franca for trade and military purposes. The language found its first literary patronage in the Deccan in South India. 

In Southern UP ( Lalitpur, Jalaun, and Chitrakoot ) we see Bundeli which overlaps into Madhya Pradesh.  It is Central Hindi, which is closer to Chattisgarhi and Bagheli often considered a separate regional speech.

Finally we have eastern boarder region adjoining Bihar (Ballia, Deoria, and Kushinagar) where we have Bhojpuri, which is closer to Magahi and Maithili.

Among these diverse dialects, Khariboli became the basis of standard Hindi and Urdu because of its proximity to Delhi and the British administrative centres.

Standard Hindi as we know it today did not evolve naturally.  It was largely shaped and standardized through print culture. News papers, magazines, and later school text books and administrative documents. 

This process more or less happened  everywhere and stiffled the growth of dialects and in some cases it even led to the extinction of some dialects.  Let us examine how 19th century printing boom helped to rise standard Hindi.

With the rise of printing presses in cities like Calculata, Banares and later Allahabad publishers promoted a form of Hindi that could be widely understood across dialects such as Awadhi, Braj and Khariboli. As school text books promoted standardized Hindi it spread among new literates.

Periodicals like Udant Martand, Kavi Vachan Sudha, and later Hindustan, Aaj and others promoted Khariboli Hindi in Devnagari script.  These publications consciously moved away from Persianised Urdu to Sanskritised Hindi.

The colonial government's decision to promote Hindi in the northwestern provinces, from the 1860s onwards further solidified print based form of Hindi.

Thus standardized Hindi was a literary and bureaucratic construct, and not the mother tongue of any particular group, and was a product of News paper and publishing industry, moulded by editors, grammarians, and educators.

Let us look at print culture and the rise of Hindi nationalism.

By the late 19th century Hindi Newspapers and journals had already formed a literary public sphere. Editors like Bharatendu Harishchandra, Pratap Narain Mishra, and later Madan Mohan Malaviya used Hindi publications to promote reform, education, and a sense of cultural revival.

Through these efforts standard Hindi began to represent modernity, progress and Hindu identity in contrast to Urdu, which was portrayed as Mughal and Muslim elite culture.  These efforts had the backing of Nagari Pracharini Sabha and Hindi Sahitya sammelan. Both these institutions actively promoted Hindi as the National language.  They standardized spelling, vocabulary, and grammar and produced text books for schools.  These institutions together with publishing industry turned standard Hindi a pan-North Indian medium of modern education and national discourse.

Language & Nationalism 

During the freedom movement Hindi news papers became instruments of nationalist mobilization.  They spread nationalist idea to the masses.  Indian National Congress and its leaders supported this.  They saw it a symbol of unity and resistance against colonial rule.  Hindi was increasingly Sanskritised and presented as a natural language of India, marginalizing regional languages.

By 1920s to 1940s, the period that Francesca Orsini calls the Hindi Public Sphere, Standard Hindi was not just a medium of communication, but a marker of cultural nationalism - the idea of Hindi-Hindu- Hindustan.  A vision of unified nation under one language. But this treatment of Hindi is a matter of discord between Hindi speaking states and non-Hindi speaking states.

All the talk of National language is based on two wrong premises. One that a national language can help integration of the states.  Second, that English is a foreign language. The first premse was built on Soviet example.

After Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the Soviet Union undertook massive linguistic and cultural reforms to unify a vast multi ethnic empire.  Indian national leaders did look towards Soviet Union as an example 

in matters, of language, planning, education and nation building.  Soviet Union promoted Russian as the language of administration and modernity. But it is no more valid after the disintegration of Soviet Union.

Attributing English a foreign tag is not natural. Foreign language and national language are not natural facts. They are political and historical construct.  Language does not carry flag, but people do.

National language: A nineteenth century idea.  The notion of national language grew with European nationalism.  It gained currency after French revolution: One language, one people, one nation.  This worked relatively in homogeneous societies like France or Germany, but not in multilingual civilization like India.

When Indian leaders adopted this concept they were following a European model, trying to build unity through one language. But India had a mosaic of languages, each with its own literature and emotional depth.  So, the validity of national language in India is limited.  It is a borrowed European idea forced onto a multi lingual reality.

Every language is a system of human communication.  The label foreign and national arise when political boundaries and collective identities are drawn.  English was foreign under colonial rule but became an Indian language after independence, once it entered parliament, bureaucracy, judiciary, universities and daily speech.  Hindi, though spoken natively in a limited region, in Uttar Pradesh,  Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, became a national language candidate through political promotion. 

Persian was once a language of power and culture in India for 600 years.  Was it foreign then?

Sanskrit, though native is foreign to Indian public.  English, though foreign in origin is native to millions of Indians, who think and write it.

The notion of National language grew with European Nationalism.  The foreignness in language is a matter of perception and politics.

A language becomes "ours" once it is rooted in our institutions and imagination.

A language cannot hold a multi ethnic multilingual nation.  The disintegration of Soviet Union is before us.