Urdu/Hindi: An Artificial Divide

Urdu/Hindi: An Artificial Divide PDF

Author: Abdul Jamil Khan

Publisher: Algora Publishing

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 0875864376

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The lingua franca of the Indo-Pakistani people is one language, claims Khan, called Hindi when written in Nagari and Urdu when written in Arabic. He says it is not descended from Sanskrit, as conventionally believed, but is 10-12,000 years old and was influenced early by the Austric-Munda and Dravidian language families. Leaving aside any religious

Tracing the Boundaries Between Hindi and Urdu

Tracing the Boundaries Between Hindi and Urdu PDF

Author: Christine Everaert

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 9004177310

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This book sheds light on the complex relationship between Hindi and Urdu. Through a detailed reading of a representative set of 20th century short stories in both languages, the author leads the reader towards a clear definition of the differences between Hindi and Urdu. The full translations of the stories have been extensively annotated to point out the details in which the Hindi and Urdu versions differ. An overview of early and contemporary Hindi/Urdu and Hindustani grammars and language teaching textbooks demonstrates the problems of correctly naming and identifying the two languages. This book now offers a detailed and systematic database of syntactic, morphological and semantic differences between the selected Hindi and Urdu stories. A useful tool for all scholars of modern Hindi/Urdu fiction, (socio-)linguistics, history or social sciences.

Negotiating Languages

Negotiating Languages PDF

Author: Walter N. Hakala

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2016-08-30

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0231542127

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Prior to the nineteenth century, South Asian dictionaries, glossaries, and vocabularies reflected a hierarchical vision of nature and human society. By the turn of the twentieth century, the modern dictionary had democratized and politicized language. Compiled "scientifically" through "historical principles," the modern dictionary became a concrete symbol of a nation's arrival on the world stage. Following this phenomenon from the late seventeenth century to the present, Negotiating Languages casts lexicographers as key figures in the political realignment of South Asia under British rule and in the years after independence. Their dictionaries document how a single, mutually intelligible language evolved into two competing registers—Urdu and Hindi—and became associated with contrasting religious and nationalist goals. Each chapter in this volume focuses on a key lexicographical work and its fateful political consequences. Recovering texts by overlooked and even denigrated authors, Negotiating Languages provides insight into the forces that turned intimate speech into a potent nationalist politics, intensifying the passions that partitioned the Indian subcontinent.

Hindi Christian Literature in Contemporary India

Hindi Christian Literature in Contemporary India PDF

Author: Rakesh Peter-Dass

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-09-12

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1000702243

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This is the first academic study of Christian literature in Hindi and its role in the politics of language and religion in contemporary India. In public portrayals, Hindi has been the language of Hindus and Urdu the language of Muslims, but Christians have been usually been associated with the English of the foreign ‘West’. However, this book shows how Christian writers in India have adopted Hindi in order to promote a form of Christianity that can be seen as Indian, desī, and rooted in the religio-linguistic world of the Hindi belt. Using three case studies, the book demonstrates how Hindi Christian writing strategically presents Christianity as linguistically Hindi, culturally Indian, and theologically informed by other faiths. These works are written to sway public perceptions by promoting particular forms of citizenship in the context of fostering the use of Hindi. Examining the content and context of Christian attention to Hindi, it is shown to have been deployed as a political and cultural tool by Christians in India. This book gives an important insight into the link between language and religion in India. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of Religion in India, World Christianity, Religion and Politics and Interreligious Dialogue, as well as Religious Studies and South Asian Studies.

English Heart, Hindi Heartland

English Heart, Hindi Heartland PDF

Author: Rashmi Sadana

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2012-02-02

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0520269578

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English Heart, Hindi Heartland examines Delhi’s postcolonial literary world—its institutions, prizes, publishers, writers, and translators, and the cultural geographies of key neighborhoods—in light of colonial histories and the globalization of English. Rashmi Sadana places internationally recognized authors such as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, and Aravind Adiga in the context of debates within India about the politics of language and alongside other writers, including K. Satchidanandan, Shashi Deshpande, and Geetanjali Shree. Sadana undertakes an ethnographic study of literary culture that probes the connections between place, language, and text in order to show what language comes to stand for in people’s lives. In so doing, she unmasks a social discourse rife with questions of authenticity and cultural politics of inclusion and exclusion. English Heart, Hindi Heartland illustrates how the notion of what is considered to be culturally and linguistically authentic not only obscures larger questions relating to caste, religious, and gender identities, but that the authenticity discourse itself is continually in flux. In order to mediate and extract cultural capital from India’s complex linguistic hierarchies, literary practitioners strategically deploy a fluid set of cultural and political distinctions that Sadana calls “literary nationality.” Sadana argues that English, and the way it is positioned among the other Indian languages, does not represent a fixed pole, but rather serves to change political and literary alliances among classes and castes, often in surprising ways.

The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940

The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940 PDF

Author: Francesca Orsini

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-04-29

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 0199088802

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This book analyses how a language became the instrument with which the contours of a new nation were traced. Mapping the success of formalized Hindi in creating a regional public sphere in north India in the early twentieth century, the book explores the way many educated Indians, influenced by the British ideas and institutions, expressed interest in new concepts such as progress, unity, and a common cultural heritage. From the development of new codes and institutions to a language that helped to create space for argument and debate, the book gives an overview of the Hindi public sphere. Furthermore, it throws light on the work of Vasudha Dalmia about the nascent Hindi public sphere and brings to light how early-twentieth-century discourses on language, literature, gender, history, and politics form the core of the Hindi culture that exists today.

The Indo-Aryan Languages

The Indo-Aryan Languages PDF

Author: Danesh Jain

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-07-26

Total Pages: 1086

ISBN-13: 1135797110

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The Indo-Aryan languages are spoken by at least 700 million people throughout India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldive Islands. They have a claim to great antiquity, with the earliest Vedic Sanskrit texts dating to the end of the second millennium B.C. With texts in Old Indo-Aryan, Middle Indo-Aryan and Modern Indo-Aryan, this language family supplies a historical documentation of language change over a longer period than any other subgroup of Indo-European. This volume is divided into two main sections dealing with general matters and individual languages. Each chapter on the individual language covers the phonology and grammar (morphology and syntax) of the language and its writing system, and gives the historical background and information concerning the geography of the language and the number of its speakers.

Remembering May Fourth

Remembering May Fourth PDF

Author: Carlos Yu-Kai Lin

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-02

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 9004424881

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Remembering May Fourth: The Movement and its Centennial Legacy discusses a wide range of issues concerning the relations between politics and memory, writing and ritualizing, fiction and reality, and theory and practice within the context of the May Fourth movement.