Hindi
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What would Braj Pradesh look like?
In 1961 ten mother tongues were grouped under Hindi. In 1971 the grouping widened to forty-eight, and Hindi’s share of India rose from 30 to 37 per cent in a…
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The “Prakrisation” of Hindi
Reposting a commenter’s theory unedited, the authors present FlyeDie’s argument that Hindi is the Prakrit of the modern age, caught between English and the regional vernaculars, and may be displaced…
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Should Babri Masjid have been moved to Pakistan?
In a deliberately provocative piece, X.T.M proposes a rules-based doctrine for sacred-site disputes (excavation, relocation, compensation) given unequal sacred weight, and argues that standardising Hindi on Khari Boli rather than…
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“I Will Never Speak Kannada”
Responding to a viral video of a bank manager refusing to speak Kannada, the post argues that the row exposes a wider tension over who accommodates whom in a multilingual…
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Pew Survey on India (religion, etc.)
The author lists impressions of the Pew survey on religion in India: Hindi’s dominance in the Gangetic plain, doubts over reported mass conversion in the South, strong opposition to inter-caste…
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A Dalit writes on Oppresive Hindi
An extract from an essay on Hindi, quoting historian Sumit Sarkar that literary Hindi was bound up with Hindu-revivalist movements, and arguing that it carried Brahminical and communal impulses from…
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BP Episode 50: South Asian Subnationalism with Prof. Majeed
A BrownCast episode with Professor Majeed on linguistic sub-nationalism and Grierson’s Linguistic Survey, covering how regional language identity grew alongside communalism before independence, why India’s languages stay healthy, and how…
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Are all Arabs “honorary” Muslims?
Starting from whether Pakistanis treat all Arabs as honorary Muslims, the author argues that South Asian identities split along a Hindi-Urdu civilisational fault line, citing the choices made by Bengalis…
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BP Podcast episode 49: Hindi as the lingua franca
A BrownCast episode in which Shoaib, Abhisek and the host discuss the recent Tamil-Hindi controversy, limited to North India as the South Indian guest could not join, with a note…
