Hindi, Urdu or Hindustani? Revisiting ‘National Language’ Debates through Radio Broadcasting in Late Colonial India

Abstract

Asking how the nationalist intelligentsia and Hindi literati sought to interact with and shape the new medium of radio in a period of time that witnessed the establishment of All India Radio’s Lucknow station in 1938, this article embeds colonial discussions of radio broadcasting into the cultural, literary and linguistic debates over Hindi, Urdu and Hindustani. The vibrant debate on the standardisation of Hindi, set against the background of All India Radio policies, is discussed from the perspective of those literary actors and institutions that envisioned diverse oral forms of Hindi and Hindustani for the rural and urban population residing in the Hindi belt and the rest of India. In addition, the article compares the radio broadcasting language to other contributions published in Hindi to show how languages operated not only in parallel but also in intersecting literary spheres. The article shows that language debates over radio broadcasting functioned as a site to probe the flexibility of what was to be officially projected as the language of the nation-to-be.