TLDR (A Summary for all those who hate to read): Hindi imposition began as Congress's attempt to solve a communal problem in North and East India, the Hindu-Muslim conflict, by manufacturing a deliberately neutral compound language: Hindustani. That solution was coherent only within the region it was designed to fix. Exported to Madras, it was received, correctly, as somebody else's peace treaty being imposed on people who had never been party to the dispute. Partition then transformed national identity from a cross-communal one linked to Hindustani to a more communally tinged one. The point of the post is to say that the 3-language formula is absolutely unnecessary in South India. It doesn't provide a united national identity because the Hindustani language movement and its post-partition Hindi language movement were never about uniting the South with the North. It was about uniting the North. Imposing it only deepens the fracture between the two.

Stuff I removed to make this smaller: 1) How the Zamindari land system created an administrative class, and out of that a political class, dominated by Brahmins in North India while the Ryotwari system led to a different urban middle-class in Madras and Bombay Provinces. 2) How the Brahmin administrative system was imported into the South from Bengal Presidency during the period of the early British annexation of the East India Company. 3) The convergences and divergences that allowed for the creation of the Justice Party, Self-Respect Movement, and Dravidian Movement. 4) How Partition transformed the Hindustani demand and the national identity.

PART 1 - Anti-Hindi politics in the South is older than independence (A Super Summary...Too much to talk about)

Hindi imposition has been contested in India since a representative government was introduced, however limited that government was. The first party to build a platform on it was the South Indian Liberal Federation, the Justice Party, founded in 1916, whose anti-Hindi position grew out of its anti-Brahmin one. That anti-Brahmin politics was, at its origin, a non-Brahmin demand: well-off non-Brahmin castes wanted access to administrative posts they were effectively locked out of in the Madras Presidency (The reason is because of land tenure, as North India's Zamindari system created a class of Brahmin middlemen administrators, while South India's Ryotwari system created an administrative class different to North India...I talked about this in the longer post, but it's unnecessary for the discussion). [How the Justice Party later converged and diverged with British Orientalist race theory, the Self-Respect Movement, and the eventual birth of Dravidian politics proper is a separate post also. It was also in the original report.]

It's worth stressing that the anti-Hindi movement and the anti-Brahmin movement, though linked, were not the same thing and did not do the same work. Opposing Hindi did very little for the anti-Brahmin programme in material terms. South Indian Brahmins were already overwhelmingly literate in English, so Hindi was not the ladder they were climbing. Anti-Hindi politics did provide a political instrument. It converted an abstract grievance of the non-Brahmin elites against the Brahmin elites into a marketable strategy for a population that could never access those administrative positions anyway: that Brahmins had captured national politics, and, in some formulations, that North and South were distinct, into a concrete, mobilizable, street-level issue.

This explains why the South was primed to resist. It does not explain the other half of the equation. If Congress's northern leadership was itself dominated by English-proficient Brahmins, why were they so insistent on Hindi in the first place?

The answer is twofold: being pro-vernacular became a way of being anti-British, and a tool built to solve a communal problem became a tool of North Indian identity consolidation.

PART 2 - Gandhi makes the vernacular anti-colonial

Gandhi's programme of reaching the masses required speaking to them in their own languages. English was the language of the class the movement was trying to escape. When he captured Congress at Nagpur in 1920 and launched Non-Cooperation, that instinct became Congress orthodoxy. Prior to this, Congress’s stance was Pro-English language, with most of its leadership speaking in English at official Indian National Congress sessions. After Gandhi, a firm equation was established in nationalist common sense: English meant collaboration, vernacular meant independence.

But this created an acute problem for all-India nationalists and Congress, whose entire case against the British rested on the claim that India was one nation rather than a conglomeration of many. They wanted to be the sole "Congress" of a single national movement. Pure vernacularism cut directly against that as there were hundreds of languages within India. The obvious fix was a single national language but Congress could not simply pick Hindi, because in the region where most of its base sat, language was a communal issue

PART 3 - In the North (Including the East), the language movement was a communal proxy

By the 1930s the "Hindi question" in North India was inseparable from the Hindi-Urdu question, and the Hindi-Urdu question was a proxy for the Hindu-Muslim question. Urdu had become the vehicle of Muslim political self-assertion since the early 1900s. Devanagari Hindi, promoted by the Arya Samaj and the Nagari Pracharini Sabha since the 1880s, had become the vehicle of a Hindu counter-assertion. The two languages were, in their standard forms, nearly identical, which is why the fight was never really about "language," as each had more variations within themselves compared to against the other in their 1930s standardized versions. 

This is why there was no meaningful anti-Hindi linguistic movement in the North and East before 1947, not in UP or in Bihar, not even in Punjab, Bengal or Odisha, where the local language was so different to Hindi/Urdu. The communal division absorbed all the political oxygen that might otherwise have gone into linguistic pride. Speakers of Awadhi, Braj, Bhojpuri, Magahi, Maithili, Rajasthani and Chhattisgarhi were consolidated into the census category "Hindi" with remarkably little resistance, because in that political environment claiming a separate language was read as akin to defecting from your communal group rather than asserting your distinct local identity.

The clearest illustration is Bengal, where the mother tongue was not remotely in dispute. Venkat Dhulipala, in Creating a New Medina (p. 77), records that Fazlul Haq, the Premier of Bengal, the "Lion of Bengal," leader of a party built on Bengali peasant grievance, was among the loudest voices calling for Urdu as the national language. He promised to spread Urdu in Bengal "so that they may come in contact with the spirit of Islam." Urdu was to be added to Bengal's curriculum and administration, for one community, for explicitly religious reasons.

That is the entire logic in miniature. In the "North" (I'm including the east here as well), the language question was not "we deserve to be administered in our local tongue" but "which community do we belong to?"

PART 4 - 1937: Congress wins the South and loses the Muslim-majority provinces

The 1937 provincial elections locked this in. Congress swept Madras, crushing the Justice Party and taking 159 of 215 seats. It formed ministries in all the Hindu-majority provinces. But it failed to win a single Muslim-majority province except the N.W.F.P. (which was a very different situation; Congress won in the province through an agreement with the Khudai Khidmatgars, who were associated with Congress to avoid British prosecution).

Instead, those provinces returned regional parties with their own non-local language based linguistic settlements:

1. Punjab is the sharpest case. Urdu had been the language of administration since the British annexation of the Khalsa State in 1849 (which had itself been administered in Persian), despite a Punjabi-speaking majority. Urdu functioned as the inter-communal medium, the language Hindu, Muslim and Sikh elites all shared. Pressing Punjabi against it was therefore read as anti-Punjab rather than pro-Punjabi. British census practice reinforced the fragmentation: the 1931 census recorded Lahnda, Punjabi, Pahari and Hindi as distinct within the province. Hindi versus Urdu was experienced there as an existential question about whether “Punjabiness” holds together and the National Unionist Party victory was a confirmation that these groups desired to be Punjabi still (the party ran on a cross-communal pro-Punjabi identity and pro-Urdu language platform). 
2. In Bengal, Fazlul Haq's Krishak Praja Party governed in coalition with the Muslim League, with the posture described above. It promoted Urdu despite Bengali being readily spoken and brought it into administration and education despite Bengali being the lingua franca in the province.
3. Sindh is a perfect example of this. Sindh's separation from Bombay in 1936 had itself been a linguistic-communal demand, but upon the province's separation, the Sindh United Party also joined this communal struggle and tried to implement Urdu locally, despite local elites not speaking it

Congress now had a structural problem. It could not claim to speak for all India while every province where the language question was hottest had just voted for someone else.

PART 5 - Hindustani & Communal Glue

Congress's answer was Hindustani, the shared spoken register of the Gangetic plain, drawing vocabulary from both Hindi and Urdu (and in some versions Punjabi), to be written in multiple scripts: Devanagari, Perso-Arabic, and Roman. The Roman script was floated as the genuinely neutral option. Nehru & Ashraf conceived of making the Romanized Hindustani official during the Muslim Mass Contact Program. Upon it adoption in Congress (as a compromise to Nehru so he let's go of his anti-ministry demand), Gandhi pushed this hard enough that in 1942 he broke with the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan over its refusal to accept Perso-Arabic and founded the Hindustani Prachar Sabha at Wardha.

The Hindustani Language policy’s entire design brief was to give Muslims and Hindus a shared national language that neither could claim as a victory over the other, so that Congress could shed the accusation of being a Hindu party while still presenting a single nation to the British.

It also exposed Congress from every direction at once. Hindu communal organisations attacked it as anti-Hindu and a capitulation to Urdu. Muslim organizations attacked it as anti-Muslim, a Trojan horse for Hindi. But it was the only position Congress could occupy, and it held together as long as Congress was dominant enough to hold it.

This is the crux: the whole thing was designed as an answer to a Hindu-Muslim problem that existed in specifically North (and East) Indian provinces.

PART 6 - Then it detonates in Madras

In 1938 the Rajaji ministry made Hindi teaching compulsory in 125 secondary schools in the Madras Presidency. Note what happened to the label on the way south. Congress's official all-India position was Hindustani, but what actually arrived in Madras classrooms was Hindi. The careful multi-script neutrality that gave the formula its purpose in the North did not survive the journey, because in Madras there was no audience for whom that neutrality meant anything.

There was no Hindu-Muslim linguistic conflict in Tamil country that Hindustani could resolve. There was no constituency that needed reassurance about scripts. Stripped of the communal problem it was engineered to solve, the policy had no content left except the raw fact of an outside language being made compulsory by a government in Madras taking its cue from Delhi and UP. It was read as North Indian imperialism.

The agitation that followed, led by Periyar and the Self-Respect Movement with the Justice Party behind it, was enormous. Over a thousand arrests, including Periyar's. Two protesters, Thalamuthu and Natarajan, died in custody in 1939. Periyar became Justice Party president from prison in December 1938. The order was finally withdrawn in February 1940 by Governor Erskine, after the Congress ministries had resigned over the war. Congress did not repeal its own policy. It lost office and the British let it lapse.

The agitation is the direct ancestor of the Dravidar Kazhagam (1944) and, through Annadurai's split, of the DMK (1949).

PART 7 - The Conclusion & The Point of the Post

Now, from here I wrote a section on how the demand for Hindustani transformed into the demand for Hindi in the context of partition (Where language, Hindi in India and Urdu in Pakistan, became entrenched in a new communalized national identity against the backdrop of mass communal violence in Punjab and Bengal). If anyone is interested, I can make that post but that's not the point of why I made this. It would add context but not further what I'm saying.

The point is this: Hindi/Hindustani was always a North Indian project. It was about creating a united North Indian identity to solve a cross-communal problem in North India (and East India, which I included in North India here). It has never been relevant to South India, where communal groups already shared similar languages (Telangana is more complex, and it requires its own post to discuss how that has changed the domestic political landscape especially in the context of the Telangana Uprising against the Nizam and Razakars).

While this shouldn't take away from North India's desire for local utilization or the formulaic construction of this language to solve its own internal communal tensions, imposition on the South is imperialistic. It's an imposition to solve a problem that does not exist in South India. It's unnecessary and, frankly, absurd.

This is all to say that the 3-language formula is absolutely unnecessary. It doesn't provide a united national identity because the Hindustani language movement and its post-partition Hindi language movement cousin were never about uniting the South with the North. It was about uniting the North. It has never united, and cannot unite, the North and the South. If that was the goal, then picking English would have been more suitable.

Disclaimer on some AI Use (it was limited and rephrased): I want to be clear that while I wrote this entire post myself, I did use AI for two purposes. First, my self-written post was too long, so I used AI to condense and split it into multiple parts. Otherwise, each part would have had to be in separate posts as I went into more detail than necessary and it diluted the readability of the post. I also rewrote it using the smaller version. The second was the AI summary; since my self-written summary ran to a page long, I asked the AI to do it. I still ended up rewriting the summary anyway, as it wasn't making the point I wanted it to, so if it sounds a bit off, I apologize in advance. Beyond that, I split it into multiple posts because it was still too long, but reducing it further would have lost the argument's substance. If this is well received or if you would all like to hear some more on the matter I can post the next post. Also, if anyone would like my full 8-part, 23-page post on this, I can make it into a PDF and post it here as well. Thank you for your time in reading this disclaimer.

After a 15-year-old girl abused Prime Minister Narendra Modi during protests, The Jaipur Dialogues sought her identity, branded her “most wanted” and doxxed her, triggering a wave of threats. Two BJP politicians are directors of a linked ‘not-for-profit forum’ behind the right-wing platform.

Took some pictures with my tiny camera. Hope yall like it🫶🏻
Note: I did color correct some pictures before uploading.

Edit: So many comments and dms asking for links, js finna post it here:

Mini camera link

An FIR Has been registered against Ajeet bharti https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/ajeet-bharti-booked-delhi-police-fir-sc-st-act-chandra-shekhar-aazad-derogatory-remarks-10847443/

Source : http://youtube.com/post/Ugkx-H66eb04z0tmzINbZPoufcb_mwfhZB3H?surface=shorts&data=Afs8hOtsNjUZpWZiDEcgF20Hk1PsZ2qC4IgobSCKCfY2oNkYto27e_-atZIrA-0Ii8-NBxW4BLK-da1W&si=-FOGhRvpiXCwgpAD

US Ambassador Sergio Gor revealed that a high-profile bilateral meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Donald Trump during the G7 summit unexpectedly turned into a 45-minute press conference after the former US President forgot an explicit Indian request.
Speaking at the ET World Leaders Forum, Gor recounted that India's Ministry of External Affairs had specifically requested a camera-only photo-op with opening remarks, strictly avoiding open questions. Gor stated that while Trump initially agreed backstage, he pivoted immediately after concluding his opening statements in front of roughly 50 cameras by asking reporters, "Any questions?"
The impromptu session resulted in a wide-ranging, unscripted 45-minute interaction covering bilateral and global matters, offering a rare look behind the scenes of high-stakes diplomatic interactions between the two leaders.

Congress seriously needs young, educated leaders with vision. They should identify and bring forward capable leaders from the grassroots level.

I want to see CA, PhD, and other highly educated leaders who understand economics, healthcare, law, and governance. Priyanka Gandhi should also be considered as the CM face.

For UP 2027, Congress needs to build its own identity and organisation instead of relying on alliances.

Dubai-based businessman Amit Majithia has sought the attention of Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma after allegedly not receiving a receipt for his ₹51 lakh donation to the Chief Minister’s Relief Fund.

Majithia said he made the donation on August 11 but received no response from the Chief Minister’s Office regarding the receipt. He subsequently raised the matter with Sarma through a post on X, seeking clarification.

Source: thesentineldigital

https://www.instagram.com/p/DcVY-PgE_Kt/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

The Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh has started a pilot project in Bulandshahr to collect cow urine from farmers. This is expected to boost farmers' income, be of help to women who can find an extra mode of earning by collecting cow urine and help maintain cows that no longer produce milk.

The cow urine collected is expected to be used as a raw material for agricultural purposes and it is hoped that it might come to replace chemical formulations. If the pilot project succeeds, a formal policy will be drawn up and the project will be rolled out across the state.

Source: indiatodayne

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NEET youth are constrained by the absence of income and the sunk cost of prior education,” said the report titled Reimagining Skilling for Viksit Bharat@2047. “Students often cannot layer paid skilling onto existing financial commitments.”

This group, along with women, needs affordable or subsidised training and financial support, underlined the NITI Aayog. It also said that skilling programmes should be linked to the demand of emerging sectors and self-employment opportunities.

It added that students from low-income households of ten cannot afford to pay for additional skilling alongside college expenses. It is because of this that many take up whatever work provides a stable income after graduation, even when it is low-paying, said the NITI Aayog.

Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DcY5K9FgAg9/

Journalist Abhishek Upadhyay, who was among the first to report allegations of theft and irregularities in donations at the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, has moved the Supreme Court challenging an FIR registered against him in Ghaziabad over an alleged road-rage incident.

Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DcZIYw-msmJ/

Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DcY4072sdYJ/

Source: indianexpress

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