ABSTRACT
The role of language as a principal site of differential identity formation innorth India and the Punjab has been more readily acknowledged thansatisfactorily delineated. Proponents of Hindi versus Urdu in both regions and advocates of the regional vernacular in the Punjab were hard-pressed to explain what they meant by ‘Hindi’ and where the line with ‘Urdu’ or ‘Punjabi’ could plausibly be drawn.1 Until the 1860s no specific religious community had sole proprietorship over any of these languages. Nor were there any criteria clearly according status to a language superior to the range of dialects with which it was affiliated. Disagreements over the identity of languages nevertheless led to a hardening of religiously informed cultural differences, underlining how existential fluidities were imparting epistemological rigidities
to communitarian narratives in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century colonial India.
