Looking into the 'diseased' heart of the Hindi belt

Ghazala Wahab's new book captures the past and present realities of the region with nuance and attention to detail

- Aditya Mani Jha

What is wrong with the "Hindi heartland"? Like a lot of Bihari professionals living in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, I have often been asked variants of this question. A colleague once used the term "bimaru" ("diseased" in Hindi; BIMARU is the derogatory acronym used to describe Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) while asking me why Biharis always voted along caste lines.

The episode reminded me, once again, of the extent to which my home state has been caricatured in popular imagination, a fate that it shares with Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, sometimes referred to as "the Hindi belt" for clarity. I would recommend Ghazala Wahab's new nonfiction book, The Hindi Heartland, to such people.

Across 500-odd well-researched, copiously reported pages, she has captured the past and present realities of these regions with the kind of nuance and attention to detail that serious readers deserve.

The book is divided into five sections, moving chronologically from the medieval past towards the contemporary moment. The first two sections are unfussy demonstrations of Wahab's methodology. Each begins with a condensed history involving the specific context being discussed (the first section is divided into chapters like "Society", "Economy", "Culture", and so on).

More often than not, Wahab is on point with her choice of history books. While discussing the Harappan period, she refers extensively to Tony Joseph's Early Indians. In a segment on the influence of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), we get A.G. Noorani (The Muslims of India) and Christophe Jaffrelot on the page. G.N. Devy is cited when we are being introduced to the linguistic diversity of the region, and Nandini Sundar when we're talking about the influence of the Naxalite movement in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. Urvashi Butalia is interviewed about her book