Far before the Language debate, Nathaniel Halhed's 18th-century views shaped the Hindi-Urdu divide

Indian Express

3 days ago

During the colonial past, much had been written about the Hindi-Urdu divide and its cultural fissures. Most accounts trace the origins of this linguistic-political rupture to the mid-19th century, when debates over script, vocabulary, and education began to mirror the sharpening communal distinctions between Hindus and Muslims. Colonial administrators such as John Gilchrist and missionaries like Samuel H Kellogg are often seen as pivotal in solidifying these divisions. However, few recall that the conceptual groundwork for this divide was laid earlier by a British Orientalist scholar, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed.
Though better known for his pioneering work on Bengali grammar and his role in translating Hindu legal codes, Halhed's lesser-known remarks on Hindustani, found in his Grammar of the Bengali Language (1778), strikingly reveal early insights that cast language in communal terms. He was perhaps the first colonial figure to construct a narrative in which script, vocabulary, and linguistic purity became closely aligned with religious identity. Long before intensive language politics emerged in North India, Halhed had already begun imagining a Hindu-Muslim linguistic binary, which later generations of colonial and indigenous thinkers would inherit, refine, and politicise.
Halhed claimed that, prior to the Muslim conquests, there existed a vernacular he called 'Hindostanic,' which had evolved from Sanskrit and was written in the Nagari script. This language, he believed, had been spoken widely across 'proper Hindostan' and served as the everyday speech of the Hindu population. Drawing on European parallels, he likened Hindostanic's relationship to Sanskrit to that between modern French or Italian and classical Latin, suggesting that although it was a vernacular form, it retained the core grammatical structure of its ancient source.
According to Halhed, this linguistic equilibrium was disrupted by the arrival of Muslim rulers, who introduced Persian and Arabic words into the local dialect. These rulers, he argued, needed a practical means of communicating with their Hindu subjects but found Sanskritic terminology too complex and unfamiliar. As a result, they substituted indigenous words with foreign ones, and over time, this gave rise to a hybrid language that Halhed referred to as the 'Moorish,' a vernacular written in the Persian script and spoken primarily by Muslims and Hindus associated with Muslim courts.
What made Halhed's interpretation so significant was not just his attention to language change, but the value judgments he attached to these changes. He cast the Persianised vernacular as an adulterated offshoot of a once-pure linguistic tradition, and he portrayed those who adopted this hybrid idiom as having compromised their cultural integrity. In contrast, Brahmins and 'well-educated Gentoos,' who continued to speak what he viewed as the original form of 'Hindostanic', were presented as guardians of linguistic and moral authenticity.
Halhed's narrative effectively produced a cultural hierarchy: On the one side, a pure, Sanskrit-derived language used by conservative Hindus; on the other, a hybrid vernacular shaped by foreign elements and aligned with Muslim rule. Though articulated within a philological context, his analysis represented the colonial tendency to essentialise and categorise Indian society along rigid religious and cultural lines. What appears at first as a minor aside in a grammar book was, in fact, a subtle but potent ideological intervention.
Halhed's account also reveals something crucial about the intellectual foundations of colonial knowledge. He was writing at a time when there was no organised Hindi movement, no formal advocacy for Urdu, and no government policy privileging one script over another. Yet his description of linguistic contamination and preservation foreshadowed the very arguments that would later animate Hindi and Urdu partisans. He was writing in an intellectual climate shaped by the Orientalist project of recovering and codifying India's ancient heritage.
Halhed's immediate influence on colonial language policy was limited, especially compared to the institutional legacy of figures like John Gilchrist. Yet his way of thinking about language endured. In 1868, the Banaras-based advocate of Hindi, Shiv Prasad, also known as 'Sitar-e-Hind', submitted a memorandum to the colonial government arguing that Hindi, written in the Nagari script and rooted in Sanskrit, was the authentic language of the Hindu people. Like Halhed, he suggested that Urdu was a product of foreign rule and therefore lacked historical legitimacy for Hindus. This notion would gain further traction in the late 19th century, as Hindi became a central symbol for Hindu reformers and nationalists in the United Provinces.
To recover Halhed's role is not just to adjust the timeline of language history. It invites us to rethink the genealogy of linguistic communalism in India. Far too often, the Hindi-Urdu divide is portrayed as a mid-19th century phenomenon, emerging from immediate political and administrative concerns. But Halhed reminds us that the impulse to read language through the lens of religion and cultural hierarchy began much earlier. His writing also exposes the deeper logic of colonial knowledge production.
Grammar books, dictionaries, and linguistic surveys may appear to be technical or apolitical, but they are often steeped in implicit assumptions about culture, identity, and legitimacy. Halhed's treatment of 'Hindostanic' and the 'Moors' dialect' reveals how linguistic description could become a vehicle for ideological encoding.
Long before language became a battleground, Halhed had already drawn the lines.
The writer teaches History at Bharati College, University of Delhi