Did Hindutva Kill Urdu? A Fact‑Check of Scroll’s Claim

[00:00:00]The deepest fracture in the social fabric of India is the Hindu-Muslim fault line and few are the manifestations of this divide are as stark as the Hindi-Urdu rivalry.

[00:00:12]The left-leaning digital outlet Scroll published an excerpt from Javed Gaya's book Heartland Rising, The Making [music] of Majoritarian India. True to the Scroll's ideological slant, the excerpt alleged that Urdu had been systematically pushed out by majoritarian Hindutva politics and replaced by Sanskritized Hindi.

[00:00:34]Gaya frames the whole issue in a very specific way. The Scroll claim is that Urdu, once ubiquitous in courts, signage, [music] and popular culture, has been systematically erased from public discourse in the Hindi heartland.

[00:00:48]He casts Hindutva as the aggressor and equates the decline of Urdu with the alleged decline of pluralism and tolerance. You almost feel sad >> [music] >> until you notice that the author quietly invites the reader to mourn the decline of a language as though it was synonymous with the erasure of a community.

[00:01:08]In this video, we challenge the claim that Urdu is a victim while unpacking the historical, political, and cultural forces that ultimately shaped its rise and decline.

[00:01:20]Advent of Islam.

[00:01:22]Let us start from the beginning.

[00:01:25]Before the advent of Islamic rule, Sanskrit held the highest cultural prestige as the language of the elite enjoying widespread royal patronage.

[00:01:34]From the Delhi Sultanate onward, however, this position was supplanted by Persian as the language of the court, administration, and justice.

[00:01:43]The everyday speech of the majority comprising of dialects like Khariboli, Awadhi, and Braj Bhasha was the language of homes, markets, [music] and villages, not of official decrees or revenue records. These dialects [music] are the direct ancestors of modern standard Hindi. The Muslim rulers deemed them rustic and unrefined, fit for domestic life, [music] folk songs, and local trade, but unfit for administration, high literature, or serious intellectual work.

[00:02:14]Urdu in the elegant Nastaliq script gradually emerged as a courtly [music] and literary language, blending Persian vocabulary with local grammatical structures. In the eyes of the Muslim elite, Persian and Urdu carried prestige, cosmopolitanism, and access to power.

[00:02:32]Hindi was provincial because it was native.

[00:02:35]This is the background which 19th century Indians faced when trying to lift the native speech into the realms of power. Colonial chaos.

[00:02:46]With the arrival of the British, another language was thrown into the mix, English. And after the 1857 revolt, the British increasingly shifted from Persian to vernaculars in lower administration and education. A key fault line emerged, Urdu in Nastaliq versus Hindi in Devanagari. Competing petitions, agitations, and debates followed over which language should be used in courts >> [music] >> and which script in schools and official documents. Figures like Bharatendu Harishchandra, often called the father of modern Hindi literature and theater, pushed for Hindi in education, courts, and literature, crafting a modern prose style rooted in local dialects enriched by Sanskrit and distinct from Persianized Urdu.

[00:03:31]For them, this was a decolonizing project, breaking the monopoly of Persian, Urdu, English elites. It was also a democratizing project, making the language of the masses the language of power.

[00:03:46]It was Hindi finally demanding a fair share after centuries of exclusion.

[00:03:52]But beyond the decolonizing agenda, for many Hindi advocates, it was just about access to jobs and status for non-Urdu literate populations, and about recognizing the linguistic reality of the Hindi-speaking majority. This is where the erasure narrative starts to fray. What books like Javed Gaya's project as Urdu's decline from above was actually Hindi's ascent from below.

[00:04:16]Partition of India. The demand for partition was advanced by the All India Muslim League through the two-nation theory, and its leadership portrayed Pakistan as a new Medina, a homeland from which a renewed Islamic polity would emerge to capture the world. In 1947, India was divided along religious lines, giving birth to Pakistan.

[00:04:40]Urdu was elevated [music] as Pakistan's sole national language, despite being the mother tongue of only a small minority. This policy marginalized indigenous [music] languages such as Sindhi, Pashto, Balochi, Saraiki, Brahui, and others.

[00:04:57]This raises an uncomfortable question.

[00:05:00]If Urdu advocates insist on coding Urdu as a marker of Muslim identity, [music] and Pakistan adopted as a national language, then a Hindu-majority Indian state prioritizing Hindi is not a random erasure, but a predictable national consolidation.

[00:05:17]It is an expected outcome of administrative standardization and nation-building, [music] because languages don't just rise and fall on their own. They're pushed, pulled, and chosen. [music] Against this backdrop, the rise of Hindi is less a conspiracy against Urdu than a response to the realities of building a new inclusive nation.

[00:05:38]The aim was to establish the official language rooted in India's own linguistic and cultural traditions, while accommodating the multilingual [music] character.

[00:05:47]as for Urdu, it sits comfortably as Pakistan's state [music] language. In other words, Urdu never actually disappeared from public discourse. It migrated. Having said that, caring for a language that is dear to religious minorities still a legitimate demand in a democracy. [music] And it is here that a line must be drawn between advocating for Urdu and weaponizing it in the service of identity politics.

[00:06:15]If as Gaya claims, Urdu had truly been erased, it wouldn't still be everywhere.

[00:06:21]Just look at Bollywood. Much of Hindi cinema still relies heavily on Urdu words in its songs, dialogues, and poetry. The same is true for television, advertising, news media, and even social media where Urdu vocabulary is often used to make content sound more emotional, elegant, or impactful. Many of the biggest lyricists, poets, script writers, and TV anchors still speak in a style that is very close to Urdu. So, the idea that the language has disappeared simply doesn't match what we see around us. [music] The Hindi-Urdu rivalry has long run parallel to the story of Hindu-Muslim relation in a secular Hindu-majority India. Because in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, that question does not even arise.

[00:07:11]If ever there was a case for erasure, it is not one but two erasures. First, centuries where the majority's language was kept out of power. Then, a new narrative where Hindi's rise is treated as a moral crime, and any retreat of Urdu from central spaces is painted as a tragedy with only one villain, the idol-worshipping Hindu.