How to Erase a Language Without Banning It !

When it comes to north India, everyone categorises it majorly as a single Hindi speaking part, from Gujarat to North east, from Kashmir to Madhya Pradesh,

and even though Gujarati, Kashmiri, Assamese, Bodo, Meitei etc have got their required recognition, there are multiple languages which despite having crores and crores of population struggle to stay alive and sometimes even find it hard to exist on the internet, which is open ground for all.

When we talk of Hindi in contrast with Awadhi, the former is a new doctored language and the latter was rather a prestige tongue for approx a millenia. The language Hindi is not a result of some organic evolution of some language, rather it came from the need to unify the whole region, looking at the need for a unified, well understood language that can be understood by the common masses in the region for better functioning of bureaucracy. It was the British government which introduced a unified "Hindustani" language, which was basically "High Hindi" based majorly on "Khari Boli" and a Persian mix of the same. In other words, this standard Hindi is rather a recent creation.

This process of lumping many regional languages like Braj Bhasha, Bundeli, Marwari, Awadhi, Kannauji, Pahari etc under a single umbrella of Hindi, and diluting the sovereignty of those languages, was caused by some of the following catalysts.

1. Historical paradoxes and catalyst

Modern Hindi is, by the clock, one of the youngest modern literary languages in not just India but the whole world with such a wide acceptance and usage , it was in fact engineered in its current form roughly 220 years ago, versus Awadhi, which started cooking somewhere around 1000 years past from Prakrit Apabhramsha.

	Approx. origin	Age today (2026)
Standardised Hindi (Khari Boli prose register)	c. 1800–1804, Fort William College	~222 years
Awadhi literary tradition	c. 1000–1100 CE, out of Śaurasenī/Prakrit Apabhraṃśa	~900–1000 years
Awadhi's landmark text, Rāmcharitmānas	1574 CE (Tulsidas)	~452 years

Here are a few catalysts which caused the creation of Hindi:

1.1 The administrative catalyst

Fort William College was established in Calcutta, 1800, to train English officers in Indian languages and tongues. Scottish surgeon-linguist John Borthwick Gilchrist, being its Hindustani department head, commanded a Sanskrit-Bengali scholar Lallu Lal to produce a prose (gadya) literature in a de-Persianised register of Khari Boli in Devanagari script , as a result, Prem Sagar (1804) was written, making it the first prose work of Hindi literature. At the same time, Gilchrist worked in parallel on creating a Persianised register based on the same Khari Boli base, with heavy Perso-Arabic vocabulary, which later became Rekhta and then formally called Urdu. So both were just college-room doctrination of the same language base with different influences, none were based on any organic development, or even the languages of the adjacent regions.

1.2 The religious/socio-political catalyst

By mid 19th century, Khari Boli became a means of revivalist movement communication and reform protest for Hindu parts, while the Persian based language and Nastaliq stayed the court language of the North West Provinces and Oudh province (Muslim rulers). By 1867 a Hindu-led agitation (associated with Babu Shiva Prasad of Benaras) demanded that Devanagari should be given equal or replacing status, leading to the Hindi-Urdu controversy and hence actively replacing Persian origin words with Sanskrit origin words. As a result, Lieutenant-Governor Sir Antony MacDonnell's April 1900 resolution permitted use of Devanagari alongside Persian script.

The major reform and purification effort of the Hindi language was initiated by Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi's editorship of the journal Saraswati, which imposed grammatical and orthographic standardization on Khari Boli prose. Poetry followed in the 1920s–30s with the Chhayavad movement (Jaishankar Prasad, Suryakant Tripathi "Nirala," Mahadevi Varma, Sumitranandan Pant) , meaning literary Khari Boli Hindi's major poetic corpus is barely a century old.

The Nagari Pracharini Sabha (founded Benares, 1893) was the organisational vehicle behind the Devanagari agitation that produced MacDonnell's 1900 resolution. The Saraswati journal that Dwivedi edited from 1903 is generally credited by literary historians as the single most important instrument of Khari Boli prose standardisation , reinforcing the article's point that Hindi's grammatical norms are a 20th-century, editorially engineered product rather than an organic outcome.

1.3 The constitutional catalyst

Once independent, India needed a national language, a language that can work as a lingua franca for the whole nation. After around three years of debate and discussion, a compromise was struck on 14 September 1949, the Munshi–Ayyangar formula, after committee members K.M. Munshi and N. Gopalaswami Ayyangar , which became Articles 343–351 of the Constitution (effective 26 January 1950). Hindi in Devanagari script was named the official language of the Union (not the "national" language , that status was deliberately not created), with English continuing for 15 years (later extended indefinitely by the Official Languages Act). Article 351 additionally charged the Union with a duty to "promote the spread of the Hindi language" and to "develop it… by drawing, wherever necessary or desirable, for its vocabulary, primarily on Sanskrit."

Date	Event
14 Sep 1949	Munshi–Ayyangar formula adopted by the Constituent Assembly
26 Jan 1950	Articles 343–351 come into effect; Hindi in Devanagari named official language of the Union
1963 / 1967	Official Languages Act passed, then amended, extending English's co-official use indefinitely alongside Hindi

14 September is now observed annually in India as Hindi Diwas, commemorating this exact resolution.

Now languages like Awadhi, Braj Bhasha etc were not some blank vernaculars waiting for standard languages to arrive , in fact they were the most prestigious literary vehicles of North India, with an unbroken prose and pad writing tradition preceding Khari Boli by at least 5 centuries.

Works like Chandayan by Mulla Daud, Padmavat by Jayasi, and then Ramcharitmanas by Goswami Tulsidas in Awadhi, Sur Sagar by Surdas, Prem Vatika by Raskhan, Shiva Bavani of Kavi Bhushan of Braj Bhasha, are some of the most evident pieces of the same. Additionally Rajasthani (Dingal/Pingal traditions) produced the Prithviraj Raso, Bhojpuri and Maithili carried their own independent traditions, Maithili's Vidyapati (14th century) is regarded as a formative influence on the entire eastern devotional-poetic tradition, including Bengali Vaishnava lyric.

Work	Author	Language	Approx. date
Chandayan	Mulla Daud	Awadhi	1379 CE
Padmavat	Malik Muhammad Jayasi	Awadhi	1540 CE
Ramcharitmanas	Tulsidas	Awadhi	1574 CE
Sur Sagar	Surdas	Braj Bhasha	16th c.
Prithviraj Raso	Chand Bardai (attrib.)	Rajasthani (Dingal)	12th–16th c. (composite)
Padāvalī (Vidyapati)	Vidyapati	Maithili	14th c.

Every one of these predates the standardisation of Khari Boli Hindi prose (1804) by 230–620+ years.

2. The Evidentiary Record: Grierson's Survey and Its Aftermath

George Abraham Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India. Proposed in 1886, sanctioned in 1891, conducted from 1894, and published in 11 volumes (20 parts) between 1903 and 1928, it described 364 languages and so-called dialects across British India. Grierson organized Indo-Aryan languages into three sub-branches , "Inner," "Outer," and "Mediate" , and gave Awadhi (with Bagheli and Chhattisgarhi) its own dedicated Volume VI: "Indo-Aryan Family, Mediate Group. Specimens of the Eastern Hindī Language," distinct from Volume IX, Part 1: "Indo-Aryan Family, Central Group. Specimens of Western Hindī and Pañjābī" (which covered Khari Boli, Braj, Bundeli, Kanauji, and Haryanvi) and from Volume IX, Part 2 (Rajasthani and Gujarati). Bhojpuri, Maithili, and Magahi were treated separately again, as the "Bihari" languages, under the Eastern Group.

Volume	Official title	Covers
VI	Indo-Aryan Family, Mediate Group — Specimens of the Eastern Hindī Language	Awadhi, Bagheli, Chhattisgarhi
IX, Pt. 1	Indo-Aryan Family, Central Group — Western Hindī and Pañjābī	Khari Boli, Braj, Bundeli, Kanauji, Haryanvi
IX, Pt. 2	Indo-Aryan Family, Central Group — Rājasthānī and Gujarātī	Marwari, Mewari, Malvi, Gujarati
V	Indo-Aryan Family, Eastern Group — Bihari and Oriya languages	Bhojpuri, Maithili, Magahi, Odia

Confirmed against the Digital South Asia Library's LSI volume index and archive.org scans of Vol. VI. Grierson's biography (1898–1928 survey, 179 languages by his own mutual-intelligibility test, 544 dialects) checks out against Encyclopaedia Britannica's entry.

2.1 The "Umbrella" Classification Policy

The single most important fact found during research for this article is that the list of 'mother tongues' counted under the single census head 'Hindi' was not stable — being small in 1951–61, and widely and deliberately expanded in 1971.

Sources: Outlook India, "How Grouping Of Languages Inflated Number Of Hindi Speakers" (2024); Shuddhashar, "'Languages' to 'dialects of Hindi'" (2022); The India Forum, "India's Linguistic Diversity" (2021).

As evident from the table above, the number of languages under Hindi stayed at 10, and major other groups were separate, with this structure:

and 1971 onwards, after major aggregation, the figure became like this:

Maithili was carved back out of the "Hindi" umbrella in 2003, when it was added to the Eighth Schedule as its own recognised language , so post-2003 census tables no longer count it under Hindi. Nepali left the umbrella earlier still, in 1992. Both moves are the only two successful exits from this grouping to date; Bhojpuri, Rajasthani, Chhattisgarhi, Bundeli, Awadhi and the rest remain inside it as of the 2011 count.

2.2 Decline of Regional Languages

With no state support and an induced inferiority complex in the speakers of these languages, languages that are now called dialects of Hindi have lost ground in education, media, literature, for instance, in the core Awadhi speaking region, government schools use Hindi, English, Sanskrit for educational purposes, and a person speaking Awadhi is looked down upon.

Myself being from a rural Awadhi speaking region, I have experienced how a person using Hindi is considered cool, and someone even if educated using Awadhi is considered 'gawar'. This is a mindset induced by depromotion of the local regional language and unavailability of opportunities in the same.

Quantifying the decline: no recent census breaks Awadhi out as an independent language, where the number of speakers would be roughly around 4–5 crore at least, same is the case with Braj Bhasha, Bundeli etc.

Contextual indicator: India's own Scheme for Protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages (SPPEL) has identified 117 critically endangered tongues, and UNESCO has declared 2022–2032 the Decade of Indigenous Languages.

Sources: Sindh Courier / research on SPPEL (2022); The India Forum, "India's Linguistic Diversity" (2021).

3. Monolithic Perception of "Hindi" & The Bhojpuri Exception

Across much of the states of India, especially the southern parts, people lump north India's diversity under a single Hindi label, considering that the entire north India is a linguistically homogenous bloc. The Census itself reports "Hindi" as a single 528-million-strong category, and when the Eighth Schedule (the list a layperson would consult to check "what languages does India recognize") shows only one entry for the entire Gangetic belt from Rajasthan to Jharkhand, external observers reasonably infer administrative reality reflects linguistic reality.

Uttar Pradesh's Linguistic Diversity Index is critically low at 0.11, but recalculating it based on independent research more than triples it to 0.34 , a purely artifactual difference created by categorization choices, not by any change in the underlying population.

Source: The India Forum, "India's Linguistic Diversity: How the Census Obscures It" (2021).

Note: this perception issue is harder to quantify directly since it's an issue of attitude rather than a census figure, but it is well attested in Indian political discourse, most visibly in the long-running anti-"Hindi imposition" politics of Tamil Nadu and other southern states, where "Hindi" is treated in public debate as a single monolithic entity to be resisted or accommodated, with little public discussion of the fact that a large share of its official speaker count consists of Bhojpuri, Rajasthani, Chhattisgarhi, and Awadhi speakers who might, given the choice, identify their own mother tongue differently.

3.1 The Bhojpuri Exception

Among all these, Bhojpuri is a partial exception because of its:

• Bhojpuri cinema (Bhojiwood) producing 186 theatrically released feature films in 2022 alone

• Diaspora visibility: Bhojpuri travelled with 19th-century indentured labor migration to multiple countries like Mauritius and Fiji

• The contested reputation: This same visibility is widely characterized , by critics, by academic media studies, and even by Bhojpuri cinema's own star-turned-politician Ravi Kishan, who has formally petitioned Union and state governments to legislate against "vulgar content" in Bhojpuri films and song

4. The Imperative for Digital Linguistic Preservation

Multiple independent bodies of evidence converge on the same conclusion, though from different angles:

• The scale of loss is already documented at the national level. Ganesh Devy's People's Linguistic Survey of India identified 780 living languages in India, against the government's officially recognized figure of 122 (2001 Census, languages with 10,000+ speakers). Roughly 250 languages disappeared in the fifty years between 1961 and 2011 — and he projected, if the trend continues, that as many as 400 more could vanish within three to four decades.

• Research on endangered languages emphasizes creating a "central hub" digital repository housing diverse linguistic materials: audio, text and video.

Sources: Wikipedia, "People's Linguistic Survey of India"; Atlas Obscura, "Mapping the Languages of India with Ganesh Devy"; Careerindia PLSI profile.