REDISCOVERING HINDUSTANI
It is ironic that about the only place where one can engage with the shared linguistic legacy of Hindustan is in foreign South Asia departments, in London and Chicago. In nominally post-colonial India, we take the colonial legacy of Partition very seriously—and the linguistic “partition” practised by our Hindi and Urdu departments would be farcical, if it weren’t so sad. Hindi departments are anxious to free their language and its literary legacy from “ contamination; Urdu departments are in a perpetual fret about how to handle the Hindi and
