Tariq Rahman
Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, Pakistan

THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL USES OF PLURICENTRISM: A Case Study of Identity-driven Dominance in Urdu and Hindi

Keywords: Urdu, Hindi, Hindustani, Identity, Pluricentric languages, Dominant language variety, Muslims, Hindus, Pakistan, India.

Hindi-Urdu  or Hindustani is the name given to the  mutually intelligible varieties of a  larger common ancestor, again called Hindi-Urdu or just Hindi.  However, the offspring of this common ancestor, Urdu and Hindi have been standardized as two national languages in Pakistan and India since both became independent countries in 1947.
The argument of this paper is that the concept of dominance is different in this case since it is driven by the imperatives of identity politics in South Asia. In the beginning  of British rule in India Urdu was dominant in the domains of  power i.e education, printing, radio and the courts of law. The institutions for standardizing the two languages  were not grounded in two separate countries but functioned through institutions controlled by Hindus and Muslims i.e the two major religious  identities which were separating into national identities in British India. The very use of the two languages created and supported these two communities.  
Thus, in this case dominance  of any one of these languages was correlated with the political and social power of the community in question. Urdu dominated, despite being a minority language, in the early part of colonial rule but lost its lead to Hindi in the domain of schooling and printing by the end of British rule. Nowadays, both languages have states which serve as centres of language planning and standardization. However, even now the real norm-giving centres are the Muslim and Hindu communities of north India and Pakistan. Thus, even when the Muslims of India take up the Devanagari script to write Urdu, they use certain diacritical marks in order to differentiate their Urdu from the Hindi of the majority in India.
In Pakistan, corpus planning in Urdu makes it more and more Arabized in order to emphasize Muslim identity. In India, increased Sanskritization of official High Hindi serves the corresponding function of emphasizing the Hindu identity. Thus, the uses of the pluricentric language Hindi-Urdu continue to be political and serve to mark identities which remain in conflict and competition in South Asia.