Number of words: 632

Outside of the particularities and rituals of the two faiths, what also separated them was the medium of education, the language used and the curriculum adopted; they were entirely different and separate. Schools of teaching tended to be attached (mostly) to temples, mosques and such other congregational centres. The medium of instruction here was different: Sanskrit, Hindi or the regional language for Hindu schools just as Persian, Arabic or Urdu were standard for the Muslim. Though Hindu students could, and were, admitted to Muslim schools, Muslims were hard to come by at Hindu establishments. Also, while Hindus severally took to learning Urdu or Persian, it was seldom that a Muslim was fluent in Sanskrit, though Hindi was even then, as now, a commonly-used medium.

The situation in Bengal was entirely different, as indeed it was, for example in South India. However, we examine only Bengal where Muslims were educationally backward. This was for a variety of reasons, amongst which, prominently was the ‘Wahabi influence’. While North India had a Sir Sayyid as an ardent reformer, Bengal, where the need was perhaps greater, had no such benefactor. Syed Ameer Ali, Nawab Abdul Lateef and such other Muslim leaders of Bengal did emphasise that Urdu ought to be for the Muslims what Bengali was to the Hindus of Bengal; yet, it never did acquire the same status. A fact never left unstressed being that there was too much of a Hindu influence in an ordinary Bengali school.

In the 1870s, there arose a conflict between the protagonists of Hindi and Urdu.

Though the Hindus never did really abandon Urdu, the superiority of this camp language, its usability and other attractions provoked Hindi protagonists to protest in Bihar, then a part of Bengal. In consequence, the government of Bengal issued orders for the use of Hindi in the court offices of Bihar whereafter Devnagari was made the exclusive script of use in Bihar for official documents. The doggedness with which this order was followed antagonised Muslims and the controversy travelled then to provinces like NWFP. Here the reverse manifestation occurred: a failure to introduce Devnagari in the provinces, like in Punjab or NWFP became a cause for grievance amongst the Hindus.

For both communities, the question of language and script had more than any ordinary significance. For Hindus, Hindi as a language was purged of Arabic and Persian influence, and for the Muslims, Urdu came to signify power and influence; the Arabic script, in consequence, acquired a completely unwarranted religious significance. This was by the second half of the nineteenth century by when Urdu had indeed replaced Persian as a language of the government. In the literary circles of the north and western province, much of the drive against Persian and Urdu came from people like Pundit Pratap Narain Mishra and Bhartendu Harishchandra, famous names who switched loyalty, also their medium of expression, from Urdu to Hindi. Wishing to break the patronage in government jobs for the Urdu-speaking elite, Bhartendu Harishchandra’s pro-Hindi paper Kavi Vachan Sudha, frequently gave expression to the attitude of such civil service hopefuls: ‘The Muslims, it is true, might suffer by the change from Persian to Nagri script but they are only a small portion of the community and the interests of the few must always yield to the many’. It was Benares from where emerged the main inspiration for the pro-Hindi agitation. Here Raja Shiv Prasad from the 1870s, mainly through the efforts of Bhartendu Harishchandra, helped Hindi acquire a body of literature, also its form as a language. Much of this activity involved Hindi translation of Bengali works. The Arya Samajists also found that they could use Hindi and the Devnagari script for facilitating contact with the masses.

Excerpted from Page 40-43 of ‘Jinnah: India-Partition Independence’ by Jaswant Singh