On Hindi Diwas, we ask not merely how Hindi became a modern language, but how we came to imagine what "Hindi" is, writes historian Shagun Gupta.
Today, Hindi appears as standardized Khari Boli in Devanagari, associated with Sanskrit-derived vocabulary. The historical world was more fluid. In pre-colonial north India, people operated in plural linguistic repertoires - function and social context decided language, not a single "mother tongue." Literary texts moved across Devanagari, Kaithi, Gurmukhi, Perso-Arabic scripts.
That porosity was altered by the colonial state's obsession to classify, count and govern. The rupture came in the 1830s when East India Company replaced Persian with vernaculars in lower courts, setting up a competition between sisters Hindi and Urdu. The 1900 Nagari resolution, permitting Devanagari alongside Persian script, politicised the issue.
The decisive partition came with the 1912-13 Piggott Commission. To maintain a "common language," the colonial government prescribed separate standardized supplementary readers for Hindi and Urdu in 1916, delegitimising rich oral traditions and languages like Bhojpuri, Awadhi and Braj Bhasha.
Early nationalist institutions completed the purification. Organizations like Nagari Pracharini Sabha and Hindi Sahitya Sammelan aggressively promoted highly Sanskritised Deva-nagari-based Khari Boli as the only "pure" national language. Under Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi's editorship of Saraswati, language policing standardized grammar and purged Arabic and Persian loanwords.
To legitimise this, authors performed a double move of historical appropriation and modern exclusion. They expanded the definition of "Hindi" when looking at the past - claiming medieval poetry from the Prithviraj Raso to Surdas - even as they restricted its present day to one standardized form. The result: internal hierarchies. Braj Bhasha was dismissed as didactic, folk forms like nautanki and oral ballads devalued, Urdu alienated.
True decolonisation, Gupta argues, requires dismantling these structures. The linguistic world of North India was built through encounters, borrowings and adaptations. Hindi's strength has never been purity but absorption. The future of Hindi will not grow through walls. As PM's slogan of Ek Bharat, Shreshtha Bharat shows, unity is not sameness, but the harmonious coexistence of many voices.