ABSTRACT
Literary production in South Asia is typified by widespread translingualism. After a discussion of the official status of Hindi and Urdu in post-independence India and Pakistan, this chapter charts the emergence of Hindi and Urdu literary production in the early modern period and the persistence of multilingualism across the region after Independence. It provides an overview of the shifting denotations of the terms hindi/hindavi and urdu and the eventual emergence of these as two separate literary registers sharing a common grammar. It demonstrates how the modern term Hindi can refer to a range of languages spoken across northern India whose morphosyntactic forms differ so substantially that they are often mutually unintelligible. It concludes with several case studies of translingual authors writing in India and Pakistan.
