Post-Diaspora Borders and their Effect on Hindi-Urdu Differentiation in London

by Siddharth Ravuri

Siddharth Ravuri is an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign majoring in Political Science and Linguistics. Siddharth’s future plans including traveling, practicing international law, and using multiple languages. He wrote this blog post for 418 “Language and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023.

In the fall of 2022, a series of violent incidents between Muslims and Hindus in Leicester, England took place, to the shock of much of the global community who believed these differences to be conflicts of another continent entirely. Investigations of the incidents found that they had been caused by misinformation campaigns ran out of India in order to incite violence in Leicester (Chandra 2022). Why is the UK a battleground for the Hindu-Muslim conflict?

The 1947 Partition of the British Raj caused the largest mass migration in human history, cleaving the Indian Subcontinent by religious divisions imposed by old colonial authorities. The two new major powers of the region were the Indian and Pakistani states, defined by territorial delineations of Hindu and Muslim majorities respectively. runs deep now, and still flares up geopolitical concerns with two nuclear-powered neighbors holding such animosity.

A particular focus of much postcolonial study is the distinction of Hindu and Urdu. European philologists entering the Indian Subcontinent in previous centuries saw the languages as part of the same Hindustani oral continuum. A Hindi speaker can converse with an Urdu speaker on a variety of topics, but mutual intelligibility is not extended to everything. The differences between the two languages stem from a similar historical clash. Hindi today is written in the Devanagari script as descended from Sanskrit, whereas Urdu is written in a Persian-derived script which itself is ultimately Arabic-derived. The parts of Urdu vocabulary unknown to the Hindi speaker are likely those derived from Islam and the Persian language, whereas those likewise unknown to the Urdu speaker are likely those derived from Hinduism and the Sanskrit language. As a result of national conflict, “each faction wanted to ‘purify’ its language from the influence of the other (121 Belmekki 2010), and so the two languages have consciously diverged further since the mid-century.

Following the Partition, newly nationalized Indians and Pakistanis began to migrate to the rest of the world, with a significant population taking up residence in the United Kingdom and London in particular. This should not be a surprise, as a similar process occurred in many other postcolonial relationships with the old colonizer. The capital links are not only economic but linguistic, and South Asians have a much deeper history with the British than any others in Europe, be it for better or worse.

The question which immediately arises is whether these new immigrants in London, and over the following decades, if being speakers of Hindi and Urdu, might have come into some form of linguistic conflict. Languages are frequently a point of national pride, and conflicts frequently erupt over the use of language. With the added influence of language regimes, as the British policies on foreign languages would undoubtedly play a role, Hindi and Urdu present a unique case study for how national tensions could erupt in diaspora through language conflict. It is clear that Hindu-Muslim violence is nothing new to South Asia, and that in today’s world it spills over into the diaspora communities of the United Kingdom. What linguistic conflict has arisen as a result?

Interestingly, conflicts and differences between Indian Hindi speakers and Pakistani Urdu speakers have arisen primarily through the language regime of the UK rather than direct confrontations between communities. The impact of Indian and Pakistani national identities are conflated by the natives of the United Kingdom with Hindu-Muslim and Hindi-Urdu identities respectively.

“A facet of the economic and social marginalisation of British South Asian Muslims is their continued educational underachievement (269 Abbas, Jacobsen 2018)”

As this quote from a study on this discrepancy succinctly states, the economic underachievement of Pakistani and Bangladeshi students in London has long been compared to their Indian counterparts. Institutional racism is viewed as a predominant factor in why this occurs, as teachers are known to comment things along the lines of:

“Language is the biggest issue, there is no doubt about that.
- Male Senior Teacher, White-British, 38” (282 Abbas, Jacobsen 2018)

But this is shown to be more closely caused by the teachers’ views on Islam rather than the Urdu language, a trend which reoccurs frequently in exogenous views on Urdu. Just as when the subcontinent was initially partitioned, people think of Urdu and Pakistan and Islam as the same thing, just as they think of Hindi and India and Hinduism as the same thing. The capital flow of the United Kingdom has a predisposition towards disliking Islam, just as in much of the rest of the West. This predisposition seems to tend towards an economic disadvantage for British South Asian Muslims, now Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, providing for some of the differences between their experiences and their Indian counterparts.

What all of this seems to point towards is a lack of conflict where we might expect it. Language is frequently tied with nationality and its Geist. When national conflict arises, so too does linguistic conflict typically. So then when examining the British case of South Asian diaspora, where there is clearly much national conflict between Hindus and Muslims or Indians and Pakistanis, why is there not a similar conflict between Hindi and Urdu?

I hypothesize that the factor causing this effect is a legacy of the caste system. The caste system has long been recognized as a societal form for coagulating the different ethnic groups of South Asia into a hierarchical system, as genotypic differences and ethnic variations are found between caste descendants. Some researchers have gone so far as to report “a trend toward upper castes being more similar to Europeans, whereas lower castes are more similar to Asians” (1 Bamshad 2001). For quite some time, the caste system has had a legacy of preventing ethnic intermixing which might have otherwise occurred in South Asia.

Judith Brown says in Global South Asians that “there persist[s] throughout the diaspora broad understandings of ritual and social status, even among Sikhs and Muslims, and particularly strong is the wish to construct marriage alliances for one’s family within one’s caste or at least within one of similar status (83 Brown 2006)”, denying the traditional idea that caste is solely a Hindu idea. The caste system and its legacy are not limited to modern Indian borders.

Among “normal” diaspora conditions, or at least in the absence of caste’s legacy, South Asian populations speaking the Hindustani oral register would need no pidgin to communicate, and thus might merge in some form to create a true South Asian diaspora identity. However, I believe that with the effects of caste, South Asian groups have remained rather cliquey even in the diaspora, leading to communities which do not interact frequently enough for conflict and clash. These age-old ethnic and caste distinctions would hold apart South Asians even without their modern national identities of Pakistani, Indian, or Bangladeshi.

Works Cited

Bamshad, M. “Genetic Evidence on the Origins of Indian Caste Populations.” Genome Research, vol. 11, no. 6, 8 May 2001, pp. 994–1004, https://doi.org/10.1101/gr.gr-1733rr.

Belkacem Belmekki. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Muslim Cause in British India. Berlin, Klaus Schwarz, 2010.

Brown, Judith M. Global South Asians. Cambridge University Press, 31 Aug. 2006.

Chandran, Rina. “How Tweets, Lies from India Fuelled Hindu-Muslim Unrest in UK.” Reuters, 4 Oct. 2022, www.reuters.com/article/britain-tech-religion/how-tweets-lies-from-india-fuelled-hindu-muslim-unrest-in-uk-idUKL8N30R28Z. Accessed 9 Apr. 2023.

“Prevailing Religions of the British Indian Empire, 1909,” Wikimedia Commons, 1909, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brit_IndianEmpireReligions3.jpg.

Jacobsen, Knut A, and Pratap Kumar. South Asians in the Diaspora. BRILL, 14 Aug. 2018.

ShonEjai. “Hindi,” Pixabay, pixabay.com/photos/background-texture-abstract-grunge-1853251/.

Posted in: Conflict,Hindi,Post-Diaspora,Siddharth Ravuri,Urdu