The problem of a lingua franca for India is one of fundamental importance for the building up of the Indian nation. Unfortunately, like all other national problems this also has got stuck in the mire of communal politics, and very little advance can really be made towards its solution so long as the communal question remains unsolved. There is no reason, however, why we should not begin to think seriously about its various aspects and come to some understanding about the difficulties which stand in the way, and how they can be overcome.

During recent years the problem has received increasing attention. In 1925 the Indian National Congress at its Karachi session decided that Hindustani should be the lingua franca of India. A few years later, the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan met at Nagpur, and Mahatma Gandhi invited a number of linguists and scholars there to consider the question. The Sammelan unfortunately modified the resolution of the Congress, and suggested that Hindi-Hindustani should be the lingua franca of India. This decision created a great deal of stir, specially among the nationally-minded Muslims, who keenly desired a settlement, but were disappointed by this resolution. At Indore the decision of the Sahitya Sammelan was confirmed, with the result that the communal tangle became much worse.

The establishment of the Hindi Prachar Sabha, and the intensification of attempts to propagate Sanskritized Hindi, led to a reaction; and the Muslim League decided that Urdu should be considered the lingua franca of India. In May 1942, Mahatmaji laid the foundations of a new society called the Hindustani Prachar Sabha, which pledged its support to the decision of the Indian National Congress concerning Hindustani. Thus there are now three claimants to the status—Modern Hindi, Hindustani, and Urdu, and we have to consider which one of them should be made the lingua franca of India.

The problem is important because language is basic to all culture. Outside India, linguistic problems have arisen in other parts of the world. In Ireland there has been a fierce agitation concerning the language of the Irish people; and in spite of the fact that practically every educated Irishman knows English, they have adopted the Irish language as their national language. There has been agitation in Wales for the recognition of Welsh, and no less a person than Mr. Lloyd George has been responsible for giving a strong impetus to the movement. Historians have pointed out that Poland is still alive as a nation, and still aspires to an independent status, because the Polish poets and Polish writers  have kept alive the Polish language and the traditions of Poland enshrined in that language.

The linguistic question has affected the rise of nationalities in the East. In Iran there has been a movement that the Irani language should be shorn of the elements which it adopted when Iran was conquered by the Arabs, and that a purely Iranian language should be the national language of Iran. In Turkey too there has been an endeavor to make the original Turkish language, without the accretions of the later times, the language of Turkey. All this shows that language is regarded by people as indissolubly connected with their culture, and necessarily the problem of a lingua franca for India is a matter of great and serious import to Indians.

In order to understand the Indian situation it is necessary to consider how the languages which are being talked of in connection with the lingua franca of India have evolved. The history of languages shows that these languages—Modern Hindi, Hindustani, and Urdu—are all Aryan languages. Philologists are agreed that they are descendants of the original Indo-Aryan dialect. No breath, therefore, need be wasted in proving that the lingua franca of India must be a language which is derived from the ancient Indo-Aryan tongue. This Aryan tongue which came to India with the Aryan conquerors deve­oped and branched out into a number of languages.

It is an interesting fact, which all should keep in mind, that among the different branches of the family it has always been the language of what is called the Madhya Desha which has been the lingua franca of India. The dialect of the Aryan spoken in the Punjab was different from the dialect spoken in the East. But neither Punjabi Aryan nor Eastern Aryan was adopted as the language of learning and culture. It was the Aryan of the middle country, the country around the headwaters of the Saraswati, which developed into Sanskrit; and Sanskrit spread from the Madhya Desha to all parts of India.

Later on when Buddhism arose in India in the beginning of the 6th century B.C., Sanskrit ceased to be the spoken language of the people. From among the spoken dialects one or two dialects, the dialects of the East, Magadhi and Ardha-Magadhi, were chosen by Buddha and Mahavira for preaching their religious doctrines. But the interesting thing is that the languages which Buddha and Mahavira used were modified in contact with the Madhya Desha language, namely Sanskrit, and developed into Pali and the Jaina Ardha-Magadhi, and became steeped with Sanskrit influences. Thus in a way, the Madhya Desha language again triumphed when Pali became the lingua franca of India. The Asokan inscriptions, which are all in Pali, spread the vogue of this Koine.

From the 6th century B.C. to the 6th century A.D. these languages continued to flourish. Then came the period from the 6th century A.D. to the 12th century A.D. when changes took place, and Pali ceased to be a spoken language, as also Ardha-Magadhi. Apabhramsha—that is to say, a form of spoken Prakrit—now occupied the field. This Apabhramsha also developed a literature which is found scattered all over northern India. In the 12th century there were several Apabhramshas in use, but of these one called the Saurseni is of paramount importance. The Saurseni Apabhramsha is the mother of the dialects now spoken in the midland region.

One of these was spoken in the territory from the banks of the Sutlej to Delhi and over western Rohilkhand, another in the Agra and Muttra territory, and another in the Bundelkhand region. These are called by the linguists branches of Western Hindi. Towards the east of the region are spoken branches of Eastern Hindi. Further east, there are other languages: Maithili, Magahi, Bhojpuri; and still further east, Bengali, Assamese, and Oriya. In the west prevail Rajasthani and Gujarati; towards the south Marathi; in the north-west, Punjabi. These dialects—they are known as the neo-Aryan dialects, or the tertiary Prakrits—began developing from the 12th century.

Today Indians speak about 179 languages and 544 dialects (according to Grierson's The Linguistic Survey of India).   But the fact is that a vast majority of these languages and dialects is [=are] spoken by a few hundred people. There are really 12 languages into which India may be linguistically divided, and the problem is which one of these 12 should be accepted as the lingua franca of India. Of these 12, four are Dravidian languages. According to the census of 1931, over 26 millions speak the Telugu language. Next to Telugu comes the Tamil language, spoken by about 21 millions; Kannad, by over 11 millions; and Malayalam, by over 9 millions. Altogether the Dravidian languages account for 71 million people   in India. About 260 millions speak Indo-Aryan dialects.

None of the Dravidian languages appears to be destined to fill the role of the lingua franca of India. One reason is that the Dravidian languages themselves have come under the influence of the Aryan languages, and much of their cultural and learned vocabulary has been derived from Sanskrit. Then, they are languages of a peripheral region remote from the centers of life. It is impossible for these languages to push out of that area to occupy the rest of India. In fact these languages have been receding before the advance of Aryan languages. Although in the past sometimes the Dravidian languages had driven the boundaries of Aryan northwards, today the tendency is that the Dravidian languages are losing ground before the Aryan languages. In the regions of Central India and the Deccan, the Aryan languages are gaining more and more territory. It has also to be remembered that 260 millions speak the Aryan languages, and only 71 millions the Dravidian languages.

The eight Aryan languages which are most widely spoken are Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Oriya, Bihari, Rajasthani, and Hindi (eastern and western).

Among these Hindi, with its near relations Bihari and Rajasthani, is the most widespread. Bengali with about 53 1/2 million speakers comes next. Some people advocate the desirability of adopting Bengali as the lingua franca of India. Recently a member of the Indian Civil Service expressed this view in the Statesman. Bengali possesses undoubtedly the richest literature of any among modern Aryan languages. Unfortunately it is the speech of a border province, while the tendency in linguistic development has been for politically central regions to acquire for their language the national status.

For instance, the national language of England is  the dialect of the Midland; of France, the  language of Ile de France, of which Paris is the centre; of Germany, which remained disunited till the fourth quarter of the 19th century, the language of the Berlin stage; of Italy, the speech of Rome; of ancient India, the language of the Madhya Desha. Thus the political and cultural centre of a country tends to be the linguistic centre too, and its language becomes the medium of intercourse between its different regions. These arguments seem decisive against Bengali.

Punjabi, which has 24 million speakers (of both its branches together), is losing its status as a literary language, for the Punjab is replacing it with Urdu. Marathi, spoken by 21 million people; Gujarati and Oriya, by 11 millions each, can hardly claim to compete with Hindi, which is one of the most widely spoken and understood of languages of the world.  According to Dr. S. K. Chatterji, "it is the natural lingua franca of 257 millions, besides being understood by a few millions more, and in either of its two forms, High Hindi and Urdu, it is the literary language of over 140 millions. It is thus the third great language of the world, coming after Northern Chinese and English."

The question is which of the forms of this language ought to be adopted as the lingua franca of India.

Dr. S. K. Chatterji has suggested the simplified Hindustani or the Bazaar Hindustani for this purpose. According to him it is that spoken Hindi speech which eschews the grammatical gender of nouns, adjectives and verbs, avoids plurals, and abolishes certain peculiar verbal forms. It is, however, extremely doubtful if this suggestion will be accepted. Simplified Hindustani may be good enough as "the interprovincial speech of the masses," but it will be a debilitated and devitalized speech for the educated. Such a speech will not do as the medium of literary expression, for it is not going to be merely a patois of the vulgar, it will have to serve as the instrument of the highest education for its speakers, as the language of state documents, of state legislation, and of diplomacy. Hindi in its different styles already possesses a rich and ancient literature, and the adoption of the new-fangled Bazaar Hindustani will cut it off from its moorings.

Simplified or Bazaar Hindustani decidedly does not offer the right solution to the problem.

In order to decide between the various forms of the midland speech, it is necessary to have recourse to the science of philology. Now according to philology every speech is fundamentally a phonetic system, and this system obeys certain morphological or grammatical rules. These two constitute the genius of a language. But a speech is also a collection of words which embody the phonetic values of the language and which express their meaning and change their forms in accordance with the rules of its grammar. The phonetic and morphological structures of a language are fixed, while its vocabulary changes constantly under the impress of sociological changes.

All philologists are agreed that the phonetic and morphological systems of Modern Hindi, Hindustani, and Urdu are identical, and that they differ from the Sanskrit and Persian systems materially. In fact these three are three developed forms of the same dialect, which is designated: by the name of Khari Boli—a branch of Western Hindi. Although this dialect is the lineal descendant of the primary Prakrit, the old Indo-Aryan, which developed into Sanskrit, its sound system is vastly different from that of Sanskrit. Khari Boli has lost a number of Sanskrit vowels e.g., ri ([the semivowel ri in rishi]); it has acquired new vowels, e.g., ai, au (sair, aur).

Its consonantal sounds too have become different by losses and gains. A number of nasals and one of the sibilants, sh [retroflex sha], have disappeared; some rolled, lateral, and flapped sounds ([retroflex dh, conjunct lh, conjunct rh]) have entered from non-Aryan Indian tongues, others like an uvular plosive ([ka with underdot, for Urdu qaf]) and fricatives ([pha with underdot, for Urdu fe; ja with underdot, for Urdu ze; kha with underdot, for Urdu khe]) have come from Perso-Arabio languages. It has developed certain peculiarities of pronunciation; for example, it drops the ultimate short vowels like a, i, u; it tends to break up compound consonants, and does not tolerate them at the beginning of words; while Sanskrit words end mostly in vowels, Khari Boli words end in consonants.

Not only is the phonetic system of Khari Boli different from that of Sanskrit, its grammatical and morphological rules too are different. One example is enough to prove this. Sanskrit has seven forms of the declension of nouns, of which six constitute the cases of Sanskrit. Khari Boli and its forms Modern Hindi and Urdu have lost all these forms, and the number of its true cases cannot be reckoned at more than three. The difference between Modem Hindi and Urdu then is not a difference of the fundamental and stable aspects of language, but is a difference merely of vocabulary, which is an ever-varying element of language.

Now every language finds the need of new words, for man's mental and material environment is constantly changing. New ideas, new sentiments, new objects, and new processes are always and continually arising, and the old are always passing away. To meet this need, languages have recourse either to borrowing words from other languages, or to building new words from old words. German is a building, English a borrowing, language. Modern Hindi and Urdu are like English. The process of borrowing and building goes on constantly, under the stress of social and historical forces. The Germans tried to expel words of foreign origin from their language during the First World War, and the Russians did the same. In England the name of the ruling family was changed from Hanover to Windsor.

In the case of Modern Hindi and Urdu, the rising tides of communalism and revivalism have flooded them with words   derived from the ancient classics. Hindi is being rapidly Sanskritized, and Urdu Arabicized. Hindi writers eschew words containing sounds which are common to Khari Boli and  Perso-Arabic, Urdu writers hesitate to use sounds which do not occur  in the Perso-Arabic phonetic system. Both forget that it is now too late in the day to modify the sound structure of the dialect which is the basis of both Hindi and Urdu.

That dialect is the spoken tongue of the people inhabiting the region round Delhi and Meerut, and that dialect has its own peculiar genius. If writers of Hindi and Urdu will continue to depart from the genius of their basic speech, they will only succeed in creating two artificial languages which will suffer the fate which befell the literary languages of India in the past. The more artificial a language becomes, the more surely it ceases to be a living tongue.

Now if from philology we turn to literature, much light is thrown upon the relations of Modern Hindi and Urdu. In the period when the Apabhramsha stage of development was passing and the stage of new Indo-Aryan was being ushered in, Muslim conquerors appeared upon the scene in India. Their armies contained men speaking languages which had come under the influence of Arabic, and recognized the Arabic language as the sacred medium of their religious thought. When they settled in Delhi, they made the region of Khari Boli dialect the centre of their power. Naturally as a result of their contact, Khari Boli underwent a profound change. It acquired the new sounds of which mention has been made; it became the medium of intercourse between the newcomers and the old inhabitants, and developed into the modern speech with all its phonetic and morphological characteristics.

When the Delhi armies penetrated into the Deccan which was annexed to the Sultanate early in the 14th century, contact was established between the speakers of  the modified Khari Boli  (which may for the sake of convenience be called spoken Hindustani) and the Southerners. The Sultans encouraged the settlement of people from the North in the towns of the Deccan, and even today one finds their descendants in Aurangabad and Daulatabad. With them migrated Hindustani speech too.

The earliest use of Hindustani as a literary language was made by the Sufi saints and religious teachers of the Deccan to propagate the faith and to expound its doctrines. Khwaja Gesu-daraz Banda-nawaz, who after Timur's invasion of the North migrated to Gulbarga, about 1412 A.D., appears to have been the first writer. He died in 1421 A.D. Once adopted as a medium of literary expression, the language made rapid progress. The Deccan Sultans patronized it, and in the course of two centuries it became enriched with an abundant literature.

The Hindustani employed by the Deccanese—and called by them Hindi—is redolent of the soil from which it sprang. It is dominated by tadbhava [="indigenous words"] vocabulary and has a sprinkling of words of Persian or Arabic origin. Even these are sometime spelt as they were pronounced, and not as they appeared in books. With the passage of time the borrowed element increased, but it was well-digested. From the end of the 14th to the end of the 17th century this Hindustani style flourished and bore ample fruit.

Then Aurangzeb began his campaigns, which ended in the breakup of the Deccan Kingdoms. With the disappearance of the Sultans and the dissolution of their courts, their protégés—artists and poets—were scattered. Some came to the North and stimulated the growth of the Hindustani literature in its native region. Wali was one of them. Delhi had till then been almost a stranger to the literature of Hindustani. Almost but not entirely, for a writer here and a writer there had appeared from time to time, but there was no serious, continuous literary effort.

While Hindustani was making rapid strides in the South, the North witnessed the rise of literatures, largely religious, in Avadhi and Braj Bhasha. Both Hindus and Muslims patronized these languages. Avadhi was brought into vogue by reformers and poets like Kabir and Malik Muhammad Jayasi, and on the foundation laid by them Tulasidas reared the magnificent structure of Ramcharitamanas. Braja speech became the voice of bhakti to Krishna. If Surdas poured out the yearnings of his heart in his immortal songs, Raskhan, a Muslim, vied with him in composing lyrics of moving beauty.   And Rahim, the son of Bairam Khan, excelled in didactic poems. Here is a miracle of linguistic and cultural history. Sons born of fathers who were complete aliens to the thought and speech of India meet with the highest exponents of the native culture, on terms of equality!

The Mughal court extended its patronage to Braj, for it did not know of Hindustani and of its literature. So Sur, Gang, Bana, Keshav, Misr, Sahaj-Sanehi, Sundar, Siromani Banarsidas, Matiram, Anandghan, and many others received royal favours and princely awards. It was not till the decline of the Empire had set in that Urdu found any encouragement. But when at the end of the 18th century it was taken notice of, the high tide of Braj was on ebb, the mood of spiritual exaltation was passing, and the strident note of sensual amours and amorous rhetoric was beginning to ring.

The practitioners of Hindustani at Delhi were men whose ears were familiar with Persian sounds, and whose tongues were habituated to utter them. The phonetics of the Deccani Hindustani were a strain upon them. To utter the cerebrals, plosives, and palatal affricatives, or the alveolar flapped or rolled consonants, was a task too difficult for their tongues. They naturally started a purification of the  language which robbed it of a considerable part of its inheritance. What, however, Mazhar Jan Janan had only begun at Delhi, Nasikh of Lucknow, the capital of the Persian Kings of Oudh, completed. Thus Hindustani became transformed into Urdu.

Urdu, however, was regarded by both Hindus and Mussalmans of the 18th century as their lingua franca. Bhartendu Harishchandra, one of the pioneers of Modern Hindi, acknowledged in the middle of the 19th century that Urdu was the language of polite speech in the North, even among the members of his community (Agarwals). So when the East India Company ordered the establishment of the Fort William College in Calcutta to teach Indian languages to their officers,   Urdu was the language for which teachers were appointed, as also for the classical languages, Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit, and provincial languages like Bengali and Brajbhasha.

Modern Hindi was till then unknown, for no literature existed in it. It was at this time that it began to be employed for literary purposes. The professors of the college encouraged Lallooji Lal and other teachers to compose books in the language used by the Urdu writers; but to substitute Sanskritic words (tatsama) for Persian and Arabic words. Thus the new style was born which was considered specially suited to the requirements of the Hindus, and the Christian missionaries gave a fillip to it by translating the Bible in it.

The new style (which is now known as Hindi) took a long time to become popular. In fact it was only after the Mutiny of 1857, that Modern Hindi began to attract attention. Special efforts were made to foster it. It was about this time that Beames, Kellog, and others wrote grammars to establish its claims. Even Provincial Governors went about dissuading people from the use of Urdu.

After a few years (about 1872) the anti-Muslim bias began to die out, and a reaction came in favour of Urdu. The Ilbert Bill agitation in Bengal, and national stirrings in other parts of India, were causing alarm; and it was not politic to keep the Muslim community perpetually under disfavour. Sir W. W. Hunter and some other officers began to advocate their cause, and to promote cultural particularism. When the Indian National Congress was founded, the Muslims considered it in their interests to remain aloof. In the atmosphere of communal rivalry, the seeds of Hindi-Urdu controversy germinated.

Although Modern Hindi is, a recent growth, for its beginnings do not go beyond the 19th century and its real development has taken place within the last sixty years, it has made rapid strides; and today the situation is that a large number of people read and write it, and numerous books and journals are published in it, so that its popularity is daily on the  increase. Urdu literature has also made great progress, and at least one University in the country has adopted it as the medium of instruction.

But the unfortunate feature of their advance is that these languages are becoming identified more and more with special communities, and communalism in politics is invading the field of culture. This is a deplorable development, for throughout the period of  Mughal rule in India, Urdu and Braj languages flourished side by side, and there was no rivalry between  their votaries, for both were patronized by Hindus and Mussalmans alike!

The situation then is that Urdu and Modern Hindi are both claimants to the status of the lingua franca of India. The advocates of Urdu point out that it is older in age, that it is a product of fusion of Hindu and Muslim cultures, that members of both communities have shared in its growth, both have regarded it till recently as their common speech. It is spreading outside India. The presence in it of words of Persian and Arabic origin is a meritorious  feature, for through them it maintains its links with the classics of  the second-largest community in India, and with the two modern living languages spoken by the Asiatic and African neighbors of India with whom our relations are likely to grow in intimacy in future.

Modern Hindi claims a close kinship with such Indian languages as Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi, Oriya, etc, which are all descendants of a common Indo-Aryan mother-tongue. Hindi is therefore easier for the speakers of these languages than Urdu. Sanskritization of Hindi makes for closer relationship between the modern Indian languages of the same family. Even Dravidian languages are saturated with Sanskritic vocabularies, and on that account come nearer to Hindi than Urdu.

The arguments of the protagonists of the two are weighty, but not decisive. Language is a medium of social intercourse. The nature of society and its needs must determine its characteristics, and not merely considerations of convenience. Today India exists largely as a geographical unity; if it is to grow into a living unified society, into a consolidated nation, it can only do so by the fusion of the communities. Such a fusion will be possible only when each community is assured that its language, religion, and culture is preserved as an organic part of the whole.

If then our dream of one society and one nation for our one country is to be transformed into reality, and if we desire that this society should, as the expression and symbol of its unity, have one lingua franca, then it is inevitable that the lingua franca should be a composite speech, containing elements from the speech of the communities. It is impossible for this common speech to draw its sustenance exclusively from one culture source, as Urdu and Hindi are tending to do today.

The solution of the linguistic problem is simple. All today agree that the dialect of the Delhi region which is the common basis of Modern Hindi and Urdu should be recognized as the common medium of interprovincial intercourse. This dialect has certain fixed phonetical and morphological features, but it assumes two separate styles on account of the use of two different types of vocabularies. What is needed in order to bring them together is to evolve a common vocabulary in accord with the phonetic genius of the dialect.

As the dialect (to which the name Hindustani may be given) is not to serve merely as the speech of the market place, as "Bazaar Hindustani" in the words of Dr. S. K. Chatterji, but also as the language of culture and learning, of science and literature, of state documents end international diplomacy, it must be an elevated and dignified speech, rich in words and phrases and flexible to a degree.

The literary Hindustani must, therefore, evolve a copious vocabulary, an abundant terminology; which it can do if the attempt at exclusiveness is abandoned. Let Hindustani lay under contribution Sanskrit and Prakrit, Arabic and Persian, English and other languages, but let it not succumb to the domination of any one of them. Whatever is borrowed must receive the stamp of Hindustani, its phonetic system and its grammatical rules. Otherwise Hindustani will lose its soul and become a dead imitative automaton.

And although Hindi and Urdu are mainly borrowing languages, there is no reason why Hindustani should not develop the capacity to form words and derivatives from its original words, or from borrowed words. Even Hindi and Urdu are showing this tendency, but unfortunately they make their derivatives not always in accordance with their own genius, but in accordance with rules of Sanskrit and Arabic.

In regard to technical terms it is necessary to adopt a defined policy. The present situation is extremely chaotic. Words are being adopted or framed quite arbitrarily. Writers of Modern Hindi take their terms from English and Sanskrit, those of Urdu lean upon Persian and Arabic. The gulf between the two languages, whose structure is identical, is thus being widened. It is quite evident that neither Sanskrit nor Arabic can really meet our needs satisfactorily. These languages do not possess the necessary terms.

In their absence, what is being attempted is to take the roots from Sanskrit or Arabic and form terms from them. This process has limitations, apart from the drawback that it does violence to the genius of the language. Sanskrit words have phonetic values unsuited to Hindi, Urdu, or Hindustani speech. Arabic suffers from the additional defect that it has little capacity to form compounds. Neither of them can provide enough terms for all sciences, and some dependence upon European languages is therefore inevitable.

Instead of laying down general rules regarding all the sciences, it appears to be more practical to consider groups of sciences separately, and adopt the rules of borrowing or forming terms for each. It must be remembered that the number of technical terms is quite large for different sciences, and is daily growing, as a reference to the dictionaries of technical terms in English will show.

Now sciences may be grouped according to their linguistic or literary requirements as follows:

(1) Mathematical sciences, which require exact and extensive terminologies, but not many general words;

(2) Natural Sciences like Chemistry, Physics, Zoology, Botany, Physiology, Anatomy, Geology, Geography, where again terminology dominates, but descriptive matter is increased;

(3) Sciences relating to man, such as Anthropology, Sociology, Economics, Philosophy, Politics, Jurisprudence, Psychology, etc., where the amount of general vocabulary is still larger;

(4) Subjects like History, Biography, Travel, etc., where terminology is subordinated to general expression;

(5) Pure literature, including Poetry, Drama, Fiction, Short Story, Belle-lettres, etc., where expression and style is everything.

Now in the first two groups the most practical solution is the adoption largely of the English terminology. Only it must be adapted to the linguistic peculiarities of Hindustani, for which definite rules can be framed.  In the case of the third group, borrowing from English is not easy. Here it may be possible to lay the classics—Sanskrit and Arabic—under contribution, and a search in the kindred languages, in the tadbhava elements, may lead to satisfactory results. So far as the fourth group is concerned, the resources of Hindustani itself should be explored, and any shortcomings made up by loans from Indian classics and modern languages

Pure literature cannot be regimented, and no attempt should be made to force any vocabulary on any writer of creative literature. The demand of people cured of their communal hysteria will determine the supply, and the nearer an author is to the people, the more his language is bound to be the simple speech common to all. Literature in every language comprises numerous styles, from the difficult and learned, which appeals to a limited coterie, to the easy and simple, which attracts ever larger masses of men.

If agreement is arrived at on the question of technical terms, on such principles as these; if care is taken not to burden speech with sounds and expressions foreign to its genius; and if due respect is paid to its structural principles and grammatical rules, then it will not be difficult to arrest the growing separation between Urdu and Modern Hindi, and to evolve a language which will not merely solve the problem of medium of education in the vast region stretching from the Indus to Kosi and the Himalayas to Satpura, but also supply the need of India for a lingua franca.