The Hindi belt and the evolution of the idea of India

Ghazala Wahab's The Hindi Heartland, which profiles a vast region, builds on the work of historians and political commentators to contextualise recent debates

- Syed Saad Ahmed

In The Hindi Heartland, Ghazala Wahab expounds on an area that comprises various states of north India even as she questions the very idea of it: "[The] diversity of the Hindi heartland militates against the region being clubbed together as a single entity... What holds it together is an artificial political construct driven by opportunism, which has impacted not just our contemporary politics, but our concept of the nation itself.

She adds that Hindi, the language that gives the region its name, is its least-unifying factor. While many states across North India ostensibly speak the language, their mother tongues are diverse and might be incomprehensible to other Hindi speakers. For example, Garhwali would be as barely intelligible to most Mewari speakers as Punjabi would be to Maithili speakers. And yet the former two are regarded as dialects of Hindi, while the latter two are considered separate languages. Given the arbitrariness of these divisions, the Hindi heartland is a rather amorphous idea.

Wahab, for instance, does not consider Haryana and Himachal Pradesh as part of the region, in her account. She adheres to a definition that marks the watershed between the Indus and Ganga rivers as its northwestern frontier. While such conceptions of the Hindi belt might not seem intuitive, given that many north Indian states have a shared history, geography and economic conditions, viewing them collectively can be a useful lens through which to explore their politics, society, and culture.