Whatever Happened to Hindustani?
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WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HINDUSTANI? LANGUAGE POLITICS IN LATE COLONIAL INDIA A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN HISTORY DECEMBER 2012 By Richard Forster Thesis Committee: Ned Bertz, Chairperson Peter H. Hoffenberg Miriam Sharma ii Acknowledgements In the course of completing this thesis and other requirements for the MA degree I have become indebted to numerous individuals as well as several institutions for various forms of encouragement and support. Firstly and above all I want to thank Lorinda and Lichen for putting up with me and my often irascible temperament, almost always without complaint, and for supporting me so selflessly that I have been largely free to pursue my studies over the last several years. Without your hard work and many sacrifices it would surely have been impossible for me to spend so much time trying to learn something more about South Asian history and culture, and I am more grateful to both of you than you can know. Similarly, our extended family in both Australia and the USA have been consistently generous, offering both material and moral support without which this study would have so much more challenging. This thesis concerns aspects of the history of certain South Asian languages, in particular Hindi and Urdu, (or Hindustani), but in a way, Sanskrit and Persian as well. Now that I take stock of my attempts to learn each of these languages I realize that I have been assisted in no small way by a rather large cohort of language teachers, for each of whom I hold enormous fonts of respect, affection and gratitude. Most recently, Azadeh and Marty Nikou have given me an absolutely delightful introduction to the Persian language and Persian culture. I am grateful to them for this, and for tolerating my as yet persistent mispronunciation of their language, informed as it is by a combination of accents from Australian and American English as well as from Hindi and Urdu. More than any of my language instructors, Sai Bhatawadekar, merī adhyāpikā, has had to put up with the worst excesses of my bevakūfī for the longest time, and for her patience and tolerance as well as her creativity and enthusiasm, I can only say, bahot bahot śukriyā. With Sai, Azeema Faizunnissa first taught me how to read and write the Urdu script and over the last several years has given exceedingly generously of her time in helping me to read and understand various Urdu texts, including several letters referred to in what follows. Wafadar Hussein, in eight intensive weeks at Madison filled my head with what felt like about two years of Urdu instruction and somehow it is still his voice I hear in my head when I try to read certain Urdu phrases. In a similar way, though much earlier, two years of Sanskrit with Professor Rama Nath Sharma (Sharma-ji) opened up vistas on worlds I hadn’t really known existed, and in many more ways than are evident in the present work spurred much of my curiosity about the relationship between language and culture. His off-the-cuff remark one day that “Delhi is a linguistic zoo” has stayed with me and perhaps even planted a seed that eventually grew into this thesis. Even before I had the pleasure to learn the little Sanskrit I know from Sharma-ji, it was another Sharma - Professor Jagdish Sharma - who assisted me in my earliest efforts to comprehend the genius of the Devanagari script. I miss him so much! It would have been so wonderful to have had him there in front of the Manoa Marketplace of an afternoon and perhaps even to have been able to discuss this project with him over the last couple of years. Fortunately for me, his good friend Amarjit Singh has been here for me, at least during iii the Spring semesters! If there is anything of value in this thesis at all, I owe a great deal of the credit to Amarjit for his willingness to spend hours and hours helping me to decipher the Devanagari handwriting of Rajendra Prasad, Kaka Kalelkar, and P. D. Tandon among others. Visiting Professors Ishita Bannerjee and Saurabh Dube also gave generously of their time at the outset of this project and suggested several of the initial readings that got me going on this topic. Professor Asha Sarangi was similarly good enough to meet with me while I was in Delhi and was very kind and encouraging, assisting me in understanding several aspects of my topic with greater clarity. Also in Delhi, Seraj Ahsan’s warmth and hospitality made my visits to J.N.U. and the N.M.M.L. particularly memorable. I also very much appreciated the camaraderie of fellow researchers at the N.A.I., including that of Catherine Warner and Peter Samuels, but then also that of a more unexpectedly boisterous variety from the likes of Dinyar Patel, Nathalie Gunasekara, Mircea Raianu, Diwas Kc and Manu Goswami in the Private Papers section of the archives. On more than one joyous occasion our informal seminars at the table in the Private Papers reading room resembled a case of the proverbial animals taking over the zoo, or the inmates running the asylum, or, as someone put it, ironically, I’m sure, it was as though we had all “gone native.” During that summer of 2011, I spent so much time in the Private Papers section of the archive (actually mostly entirely alone but for the staff and piles and piles of index books and file folders) that when it was finally time leave I almost felt I had become one of the family, or at least an item of furniture. I am grateful to all of the staff of the Private Papers, but especially to Anu, for making me feel so welcome and doing so much to assist me in my often beleaguered efforts. Also, thanks to Mukesh for always smiling so often, and to Kishan for smiling so rarely but so avidly when he did. Although I can’t remember his name, the young man with the languor (whose role is to chase away the wild monkeys who come to eat the flowers in the gardens surrounding the N.A.I.), was especially good about humoring me in my efforts to converse with him in Hindi, as were various security officers and members of the canteen staff. Back in Manoa, the staff and faculty at Hamilton Library never failed to come through for me. I am especially grateful to Monica Ghosh, Barbara Trecker, the staff of the Interlibrary Loans section, and most of all to Linda Laurence whose kind and prompt service was simply outstanding and went far above and beyond expected professional standards! I am profoundly grateful to the East-West Center for its generous financial support in the form of a Graduate Degree Fellowship and also for offering a quiet place in Burns Hall in which to keep my books and some of my sanity. I was also greatly honored to be one of the inaugural recipients of the Jagdish P. Sharma Memorial Scholarship, the financial component of which was hugely significant in underwriting this research, as also were smaller yet no less appreciated grants from the East-West Center Alumni Association and the Daniel W. Y. Kwok Fund. iv Sue Carlson, graduate secretary in the Department of History has been a rock, always calmly and patiently answering my frantic questions about forms and deadlines and looking out for my best interests whenever she was able. Of course, I extend many thanks to my committee members Professor Hoffenberg and Professor Sharma for their generous readings of this thesis and their many helpful comments and suggestions. Professor Sharma graciously agreed to participate at almost the eleventh hour despite an already very full roster of commitments. Most of all, I am indebted to Professor Bertz, who across(ed?) the span of numerous lecture courses and seminars and now two theses has been as critical, incisive and insightful a reader of my work as any I have had in my academic career thus far. While I am sure I would fail miserably should I attempt to emulate his example, as a scholar who is clearly as committed to cultivating the greatest potential in his students as he is to pursuing his own interests, and to realizing the potential of scholarship to effect greater degrees of social justice in the wider world, I could certainly do worse than to try. I am most fortunate to have had him as a teacher and mentor and, despite all the weirdness of the hierarchical nature of academic relations, I hope also as a friend. Finally, I dedicate this thesis to Dr. Jerry H. Bentley, whose contributions to the way we think about the world and its history of cultural interactions are too well known to warrant exposition here. I was thrilled when Dr. Bentley agreed to serve on the committee for this thesis and looked forward to hearing his thoughts about my research, so I was also devastated by his sudden death. There were of course numerous other students in our department who found themselves in a similar predicament of having to search for an alternate committee member, or even worse, a new advisor. Almost everyone wanted to have Bentley on their committee, after all. It is some comfort to reflect that although he is gone, leaving a huge hole in our department and the field of world history, he has also left his mark not only on the legions of graduate students whose theses and dissertations he trained throughout his career, but on so many more undergraduate students for whom his textbooks, with their inherently hopeful and humanistic view of world history as the shared heritage of all peoples and cultures, have been and will no doubt continue to be required reading.