The secret history of the Hindi language

Tyler W. Williams reveals how political, cultural and economic forces shaped Hindi publishing in the subcontinent

- Aditya Mani Jha

At the Arya Samaj school in Ranchi where I studied, one of the fixtures was a havan (Hindu fire ritual) held on Saturdays, our Sanskrit teacher leading the chanting of the mantras.

One sneaky morning, I rifled through the book in question and discovered that it contained the weekly havan mantras copied out in longhand, alongside colloquial Hindi instructions for vocal emphasis, tone and tenor, like stage directions.

For my teacher, the medium was the message. The words written in his little book were inextricable from the circumstances that led to their inscription. The physical form in which books are produced, as well as the material and social circumstances of production, play a crucial role in our understanding of the history of the Hindi language.

As a historical framework this is especially relevant for Hindi since Hindi publishing as an organised industry is no more than 100-odd years old, when the demand for a common tongue for India’s freedom movement resulted in the standardisation of the language. These factors also ended up shaping how Hindi was established as a versatile language of the masses in the subcontinent—a medium for poetry, politics, devotion and even revolution.

These two interrelated arguments form the core of Tyler W. William's excellent book, If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi. As he explains in the introduction, each chapter “reconstructs a ‘scene’ of vernacular writing in early modern north India, explaining how ideologies of writing, textual genres, practices of inscription and performance, and material text artefacts worked together to form an organic whole.”