India after Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

It is necessary, at this point, to introduce a distinction between ‘Hindustani’ and ‘Hindi’. Hindi, written in the Devanagari script, drew heavily on Sanskrit. Urdu, written in a modified Arabic script, drew on Persian and Arabic. Hindustani, the lingua franca of much of northern India, was a unique amalgam of the two. From the nineteenth century, as Hindu–Muslim tension grew in northern India, the two languages began to move further and further apart. On the one side there arose a movement to root Hindi more firmly in Sanskrit; on the other, to root Urdu more firmly in the classical languages from which it drew. Especially in the literary world, a purified Hindi and a purified Urdu began to circulate.