Whose Language is Urdu?

Abstract

One important aspect of the socio-political location of Urdu is the culturally accepted relationship of its "sisterhood" with Hindi. Independent India has, however, seen this sisterhood re-interpreted as a conflation of religious and linguistic identity, by which Urdu in particular has come to be represented as the language of Muslims. In this paper, we present the findings of a field survey in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Mysore, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh, which show that speakers of Urdu resist this identfication, and explicitly characterise both the language as well as their linguistic practices in terms of the shared and syncretic culture of India.