Nahda-izing India: The Urdu-Hindi Debate and its Arabic Alternative, c. 1860s–1947

Abstract

In 1869–70, the celebrated South Asian Muslim intellectual Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98) visited Egypt on his way to England. Khan, one of South Asia's most renowned Muslim thinkers, was the founder of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (est. 1875; hereafter MAO College), a higher education institution in the North Indian town of Aligarh modeled after Oxbridge. Responding to intensified efforts by Hindu organizations to elevate the status of Devanagari-script Hindi to that of Urdu in Indian provincial courts, Khan argued throughout his journey that the use of Urdu was even more extensive than that of French in Europe, contrasting it with Hindi, which he “did not find anywhere.” In his view, Urdu was a clear and simple language that facilitated connections between diverse peoples, unlike Hindi.