Hindi–Urdu controversy
[3] Hindustani in its Perso-Arabic script form underwent a standardisation process and further Persianisation during the late Mughal period in the 18th century, and came to be known as Urdu, a name derived from the Turkic word ordu or orda ('army') and is said to have arisen as the "language of the camp" (Zaban-i-Ordu), or in the local Lashkari Zaban.
[8] In the middle of the 18th century, a movement among Urdu poets advocating the further Persianisation of Hindustani occurred, in which certain native Sanskritic words were supplanted with Persian loanwords.
[9] On the other hand, organizations such as the Nagari Prachar Sabha (1893) and Hindi Sahitya Sammeland (1910) "advocated a style that incorporated Sanskrit vocabulary while consciously removing Persian and Arabic words.
Deploring the Hindu-Muslim divide, Gandhi proposed re-merging the standards, using either Devanagari or Urdu script, under the traditional generic term Hindustani.
[17] In cities such as Delhi, the local language Khariboli began to acquire some Persian loanwords, giving rise to Old Hindi, the earliest form of Hindi-Urdu.
[24][26] The conflict over language reflected the larger politicization of culture and religion in 19th-century colonial India, when religious identities were utilized by the British administration in unprecedented ways.
[8] Sumit Sarkar notes that in the 18th and the bulk of the 19th century, "Urdu had been the language of polite culture over a big part of North India, for Hindus quite as much as Muslims".
[8]In 1837, the British East India company replaced Persian with local vernacular in various provinces as the official language of government offices and of the lower courts.
This policy gave rise to conflict between students educated in Hindi or Urdu for the competition of government jobs, which eventually took on a communal form.
[15] In 1867, some Hindus in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh during the British Raj in India began to demand that Hindi be made an official language in place of Urdu.
In 1897, Madan Mohan Malaviya published a collection of documents and statements titled Court character and primary education in North Western Provinces and Oudh, in which he made a compelling case for Hindi.
They also argued that Urdu script made court documents illegible, encouraged forgery and promoted the use of complex Arabic and Persian words.
Speaking to Mr. Shakespeare, the governor of Banaras, after the language controversy heated up, he said "I am now convinced that the Hindus and Muslims could never become one nation as their religion and way of life was quite distinct from one another."
This wide divergence in the 1920s was deplored by Gandhi, who exhorted the re-merging of both Hindi and Urdu, naming it Hindustani, written in both Nagari and Persian scripts.
A poet could draw upon Urdu's lexical richness to create an aura of elegant sophistication, or could use the simple rustic vocabulary of dialect Hindi to evoke the folk life of the village.
[8] Due to linguistic purism and its orientation towards the pre-Islamic past, advocates for pure Hindi have sought to remove many Persian, Arabic, and Turkic loanwords and replaced them with borrowings from Sanskrit.
In April 1900, the colonial Government of the North-Western Provinces issued an order granting equal official status to both Nagari and Perso-Arabic scripts.
Hindi was supported by religious and political leaders, social reformers, writers and intellectuals during independence movement securing that status.
