Linguistic Identity and National Belonging

Sohini Sengupta

Few remain unaware today of the recent controversy that has been sparked around a certain FIR registered by the Delhi police that came to light in August of this year, where Inspector Amit Dutt of the Delhi police dubbed the language of certain documents found in the possession of an immigrant–requiring translation to English and Hindi, he mentioned –as ‘Bangladeshi’. This comes in the wake of a series of crackdowns against Bengali-speaking migrants in BJP-ruled states of India; many report experiences of humiliation, expulsion and physical violence under suspicion of being illegal Bangladeshi immigrants.

The naming of Bengali with “Bangladeshi” in official discourse has ignited fierce backlash in West Bengal; West Bengal’s CM Mamata Banerjee has rallied against the slip of language terms, and accused the central government of deliberately marginalising Bengali speakers under the guise of anti-infiltration measures. In a statement made on X, Banerjee called the incident “scandalous, insulting, anti-national and unconstitutional.”[1] A similar wave of outrage has spread in the public discourse, evoking articulations of ethnic and linguistic pride and fraternity. In response, Amit Malviya, the national convener of BJP’s IT cell, has attempted to excuse the term used by Dutt as a “shorthand for the linguistic markers used to profile illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.” Malviya’s statement tries to deconstruct the matter by arguing that "no language called “Bengali” …neatly covers all [its] variants… “Bengali” denotes ethnicity, not linguistic uniformity… For context, Ananda Math was written in Bangla of the era, against the backdrop of the Sanyasi Rebellion. The iconic Vande Mataram was composed separately, in Sanskrit, and later grafted into the novel. Jana Gana Mana, originally composed and sung as a Brahmo hymn, was written in Sanskritised Bangla.”[2]

The BJP’s linguistic nationalism prioritises Hindi as a unifying “national” language, with slow but definitely visible efforts of linguistic intervention in non-Hindi-speaking states–whether through billboards and advertisements, public announcements and information, corporate norms, or education in CBSE schools. This is in tandem with their politics of religious-ethnic totalitarianism, with rampant attempts to identify “outsiders” and weed them out. Over decades, migrations–especially of Muslim workers–have been weaponised in political rhetoric, with Bengali-speaking Muslims often stereotyped as “infiltrators” and Hindu Bengalis framed as “refugees”. The BJP’s emphasis on the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) has further polarised the issue, disproportionately targeting Bengali Muslims while offering fast-track citizenship to non-Muslim migrants from neighbouring countries.

In this climate, language has become a proxy for citizenship. The Delhi Police’s casual labelling of Bengali as “Bangladeshi” reflects a dangerous slippage between linguistic identity and national belonging. Such rhetoric evokes memories of past violence, and controversies over linguistic belonging and standardi-sation. After all, the present of Bengal and Bengali’s relation with Hindi and central power is not an isolated, present event only. The glorification of Bengal and Bengali that has been so vocally made by cultural figures hides an undercurrent of xenophobia within itself, occluding Islamic, Perso-Arabic and migrant presences in the historical growth of Bengali. The discourse of both sides has ended up promoting an erasure of the polyvocal, multicultural roots of Bengali, and the erasure of migrant voices, languages and plights. Malviya’s poorly crafted excuse attempts to mollify with the claim that the terminology used applies for “[the language of] immigrants from Bangladesh–not a commentary on Bengali as spoken in West Bengal”[3] (emphasis added). The fact that such a statement can be used–to whatever extent of success–to pacify the people of West Bengal and elsewhere, only signals blatant lack of sympathy for migrant lives, livelihoods, and language.

Even as, with the rule of the BJP, the rhetoric of ‘Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan’ makes a violent comeback, it is a timely moment to look at the past of Bengali, where familiar conflicts of sanskritisation, standardisation, xenophobia and ethnic nationalism may have something to teach and warn us about the present.

Bengali And the Hindi-Urdu Controversy
Bengal has been quite (in) famous for its resistance to Hindi imperialism. By the 1980s, Calcutta, Bengal’s urban centre, was being perceived as hostile and defiant to mainstream Hindi literary traditions. As literary critic and linguist Namvar Singh provocatively stated: “The atmosphere in Calcutta was like a dangerous parasite, which would bring litterateurs under its control and compel them to act according to its will; ‘Nirala’, ‘Ugra’ etc. all came from here, ruined.”[4] Nevertheless, since the invention of modern Hindi, Bengalis, and Calcutta have had a conflicted and bifurcated relationship with Hindi. Bengalis had played a notable part in the Hindi-Urdu language debate–a debate which, beginning from the North Western Provinces, evolved into a pan-Indian issue in the context of producing national and official languages of the Indian nation. Besides also heatedly arguing for a linguistic nationalism of their own, Bengalis during the nineteenth and early twentieth century remained invested in promoting, to various extents, the cause of Hindi and Nagari. As prominent mobilisers in different parts of the country–whether for nationalism or for local welfare of caste-Hindus in the North Western Provinces–Bengalis turned to Hindi as a means to produce a broader transregional network. At the centre of this, however, was a sense of sanctified home–that is, a preserved Bengali identity characterised by a protected, standardised Bengali language.

This ‘protected, standardised Bengali language’ was visibly one that moved towards Sanskriti-sation, and the exclusion of Perso-Arabic and Urdu loanwords. Bengalis’ bias against Urdu, or Persoarabic scripts, emerged from an understanding of the language as foreign, which, again, came from the deep-seated sense of Bengali-ness being equated with caste-Hindu identities and the otherisation of Bengali Muslims, a problem that persists even in present times. The development of a modern, Sanskritised Bengali or sadhu bhasha presents both a contrast to the production of Sanskritised Hindi–as Alok Rai has argued [5]–and a template for the growth of sentiments of Bengali intelligentsia towards Hindi. Iswarchandra Vidyasagar famously advocated for the removal of Perso-Arabic words from Bengali and for the shift towards a more Sanskritised Bengali [6].

Perso-Arabic words were often deemed as ‘vulgar’ elements in Bengali; there was a marked distinction between the Bengali of educated Brahmins and those of the populace. As early as the eighteenth century, the Bengali poet Bharatchandra complained about Persianised Bengali as impure (“jabani misal”) [7].  In the preface to Grammar of Bengal Language, Nathaniel Halhed stated that the use of Arabic and Persian in Bengali lent it to the danger of becoming “unintelligible”, and located the “genuine simplicity” of the Bengali unburdened by these additives. Halhed stated that Bengalis have been forced to destroy the purity of their language due to the state system imposed by Islamic invaders who ruled over them. For Halhed, [w]hat the pure Hindostanic is to upper India, the language which I have here endeavoured to explain is to Bengal, intimately related to the Sanskrit both in expressions, construction and character [8].

In the case of Bengali Muslims, there had historically been tensions on whether to use Bengali or Urdu for secular and literary work. In the mid-nineteenth century, further pressures began to appear on this front with the rise of English and Hindi in the realm of public affairs. The first Bengali periodical run by Muslims was published in 1831, and was called Samachar Sabharajendra; it was a Bengali-Persian bilingual paper. However, its linguistic dimensions soon saw a vast transition. Fifteen years later, its page layouts consisted of five columns, quite tellingly organised in terms of centrality: English at the centre, flanked by Hindi and Persian, with Bengali and Urdu on either edge. Swapan Chakravorty notes how “[t]his illustrates the curious co-existence of inter-lingual translations, a rare typographic image and also bears witness to the unstable identity of Muslims in Bengal under Hindu cultural dominance and British political rule’’.[9] Therefore, by the mid-nineteenth century, one sees–from a tentatively multilingual literary production in the intellectual sphere–a definite bias of upper-caste Hindu Bengalis towards Hindi-Nagari as a language they saw as carrying originary affinity with Bengali, and beneficial for cross-provincial transmission of ideas. Bengali Muslims, on the other hand, faced cultural instability as the structure of a caste Hindu-dominated print market and intellectual world, and the British separatist policy of Hindi-Urdu forced them to negotiate between cultural and identitarian strategies.

Thus one sees a factionalising impulse that considered Sanskrit, and by extensions Hindustani (in Nagari script), to be of close affinity to Bengali, and that attributed foreignness to Arabic-Persian vocabulary and script, appearing early in Bengal. A secularising impulse came from Vidyasagar and Rammohan Roy, the former of whom wrote in several registers of Bengali, while the latter produced writing and translations in numerous languages–including Hindustani or Hindi. Roy wrote three books in the language: Vedantagrantha (1815), Vedantasara (1815) and Subrahmanya Sashtrî ke Sahit Vichar (1820) [10]. A letter by Roy, written in Hindustani in the Persian script, was among the 21 collected in the appendix of J Garcin de Tassy’s Rudimens de la Langue Hindoustani [11]. Rammohan Roy’s promotion of multilingualism can be largely connected to his role as a founding figure of the Brahmo Samaj, and consequently, to Hindu revivalism in Bengal at the time. The Brahmo Samaj had a major role in the promotion of Hindi. Considering the wider reach that Brahmo religious and cultural discourse would find through multilingual preaching and translation of texts, reformers like Roy, Keshab Chandra Sen and Debendranath Tagore found themselves directly and indirectly promoting Hindi. Debendranath Tagore invited Arya Samaj leader Dayanand Saraswati in 1872, and for four months, the close contact of Dayanand with Brahmo leaders like Tagore and Sen influenced him to turn from Sanskrit to Hindi as the language of preaching. The influence of Brahmo reformers like Sen would thus transform the ascent of Hindi as the lingua franca of India, as the Arya Samaj played a seminal role in the Hindi-Nagari movement. Even during the mobilisation for Hindi-Nagari, the Arya Samaj received support from Brahmo leaders [12].

The push against Urdu was an almost pan-Indian occurrence, again one in which prominent Bengali intellectuals played a role. Bhudev Mukhopadhyay (1827-1894), who served as the Inspector of Schools in the later half of his life, argued that Hindi carried a greater degree of national quality (deshiya bhav). Mukhopadhyay submitted his appeal to Eden, arguing that Hindu boys of Bengal should study Bengali, English and Sanskrit, and Muslim boys Bengali, English and Arabic. Mukhopadhyay declared that Persian was a foreign language imported by Muslim rulers which distorted the purity of languages such as Hindi or Bengali. Mukhopadhyay (and his biographer and son Kumardeb Mukhopadhyay) believed that Bengali Muslims–or all Muslims–should leave behind “Musalmani Bangala” and Urdu in favour of Sanskritised Bengali and Hindi respectively, in order to promote national unity [13]. Here is a shift in Bengali intellectuals towards rallying for ‘one language/script’ in uniting communities. One of the remarkable steps in this direction led by Bengalis was the foundation of the ‘Ek Lipi Vistar Parishad’ (Society for the Promotion of One Script) in 1905 by Justice Sarada Charan Mitra. This anti-colonial organisation was created to promote the Devanagari script as the common script for all Indians. That being said, the responses from Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims were quite different in terms of their support of Hindi and Urdu. While, as can be seen so far, many Bengalis were more than amenable to the establishment of Hindi as the lingua franca of the modern nation, the idea of Urdu as the lingua franca of Muslim India was opposed by delegates from Bengal in the 1937 Lucknow session of the Muslim League [14].

The undercurrent of Islamopho-bia tied to perceptions of Urdu continued even when the dream of Hindi as a harmonious lingua franca had transformed to the threat of Hindi imperialism for Bengali intellectuals. To take a look at an essay titled “Bangalir Hindicharcha” (1959) by scholar and lexicographer Rajsekhar Basu–this essay is aimed at placating Bengalis agitated at the promotion of Hindi, and attempts to explain that there has historically been an organic connection between Hindi and Bengali. Basu argued in favour of the practical benefits of learning Hindi as a professional language–all the while cajoling the reading by stating that Hindi as a language does not have a richness that can compete with Bengali, and thus destabilise its position in the minds of the Bengali speaker as mother-tongue. What is particularly worth noting in the Basu’s essay is the following:

By a stroke of luck, Hindustani or Urdu has not been elected as the official language (rashtra-bhasha). In the Constituent Assembly, those that fought for Hindi are now enthusiastically attempting to establish a ‘pure Hindi’ or Sanskritised Hindi. Sanskrit vocabulary is the thread connecting the primary languages of India. If the number of Arabic and Persian words … are reduced and the number of Sanskrit words increased, then even at the cost of 2-3 crore Urdu speakers, the much larger majority … will be benefited. … it would be easier for the understanding of all–Bengalis, Assamese, Oriya, Gujarati, Marathi and South Indians [15].

Basu’s argument makes an exact repetition of the logic inherent in even the earliest appeals for Sanskritised Hindi, which began over a century before the publication of his essay. Thus, even post-independence and partition, when the space of Urdu had become negligible in the official language system of India, Urdu still haunted language debates in Bengal as a phantasmic other.

Secret Fascisms
In thinking about migrants’ crises of today, one is brought back to the lives of Bengali migrants in North India, who wrote extensively, hoping to prove their worth as natural and well-meaning residents and not encroachers. They were torn between their own language and the demands made by the evolving language of the land they occupied. For instance, in his testimony as a migrant Bengali in the NWP, the author Satischandra Banerjee argued that the primary responsibility of the migrant Bengalis should be to maintain their identity and culture as Bengalis, and only then, alongside, work for the cause of Hindi [16].

The migrant exists in a liminal space–unmoored from the land that once anchored their identity, yet perpetually othered in the places they seek refuge. For Bengali-speaking migrants of today, particularly those targeted as “infiltrators” in the current political climate, as with their (perhaps more elite) counterparts in the twentieth century, language becomes the last vestige of belonging. It is not merely a tool of communication but a repository of memory, culture, and resistance. Yet, the very language that should unite them is weaponised, its nuances flattened into markers of suspicion. The Delhi Police’s reduction of Bengali to “Bangladeshi” is not just a bureaucratic slip; it is an erasure of history, a denial of the migrant’s right to claim their voice as their own.

Bengali, with its rich tapestry of Perso-Arabic, Sanskrit, and indigenous influences, has long been a battleground for competing visions of purity and power. The caste-Hindu-led standardi-sation of the language, which sought to align Bengali with Hindi-Nagari as a strategic move for national relevance, now haunts its speakers. This exclusionary project–rooted in the erasure of Muslim contributions and the marginalisation of dialects deemed “impure”–has unwittingly paved the way for Bengali’s assimilation into the rhetoric of pan-Indian Hindu nationalism. The same Sanskritised sâdhu bhâcâ that once elevated Bengali as a “respectable” language now renders it vulnerable to the homogenising forces of Hindutva, which sees linguistic diversity as a threat to its monolithic vision of nationhood.

The irony is bitter: a language that resisted Hindi imperialism in the 20th century now risks being subsumed by it, precisely because its defenders have too often internalised the logic of exclusion. The Bengali pride invoked by today’s public intellectuals, while necessary as a bulwark against centralising forces, falters when it fails to acknowledge the polyvocal roots of the language. To celebrate Bengali only as a Hindu, Sanskritised entity is to replicate the very fascism it claims to resist. It is to forget the “Musalmani Bangla”, or the “Khamar Bangla”, the syncretic folk traditions, and the layered histories of migration that shaped the language’s evolution.

The migrant’s Bengali–inflected with the cadences of their village, the idioms of their displacement, the borrowed words of their survival–is a testament to this multiplicity. Yet, in the eyes of the state, it is reduced to evidence of illegitimacy. The BJP’s linguistic nationalism, which conflates Hindi with patriotism and regional languages with parochialism, thrives on such reductions. It is a politics that demands not just territorial borders but borders around identity itself, severing language from its lived complexities. When Amit Malviya dismisses the outcry over “Bangladeshi” as a mere matter of profiling, he exposes the chilling calculus of this regime: to speak is to be suspect, to belong is to be branded.

But the migrant’s voice cannot be so easily silenced. Their language, fractured and adaptive, carries the echoes of a past that refuses to be standardised. It is in the colloquial Bengali of the domestic worker in Delhi, the hybrid slang of the undocumented labourer in Assam, the defiant verses of the refugee poet in Kolkata. To hear these voices is to confront the truth that Bengali is not a static artifact but a living, contested thing, that it too has its demons of exclusionary politics that it must now recognise. Its survival depends not on purist gate-keeping but on embracing its contradictions. Bengali pride, if it is to mean anything, must be a pride that refuses to forget. It must reckon with the casteism and Islamophobia that have shaped its standardisation, and resist the allure of a homogenised past. Otherwise, it will succumb to its own secret fascism–a fascism that, in its quest for purity, betrays the very people who have kept the language alive. The migrant’s belonging lies not in the soil they are denied, but in the syllables they refuse to surrender. To honour that is to fight for a Bengali that is as unmoored, as resilient, and as boundless as they are.

References:
1   Amit Malviya [@amitmalviya], “Mamata Banerjee’s reaction to Delhi Police…,” Tweet, Twitter, August 4, 2025.
2   Mamata Banerjee [@Mamata Official], “See now how Delhi police…,” Tweet, Twitter, August 3, 2025.
3   Namvar Singh, “Patra Visheshank,” Pakshik Sarika, 1 April, 1982, qtd. in Krishna Bihari Mishra and Ram Vayas Pandey (ed.), Hindi Sahitya: Bangiya Bhumika (Calcutta: Manimaya, 1983), 19.
4   Amit Malviya [@amitmalviya], “Mamata Banerjee’s reaction to Delhi Police…,” Tweet, Twitter, August 4, 2025.
5   Alok Rai, “Cultural Translations: Bengal in the Making of Modern Hindi,” Economic and Political Weekly 49, No. 18 (2014): 25–28.
6   Literary and linguistic registers in Bengali split apart to the point that Haraprasad Shastri in the essay “Bengali Language” published in 1881 described the existence of three varieties of Bengali: Sanskritised Bengali, Anglicized Bengali and Persianised Bengali. [Swapan Chakravorty, “Purity and Print: A Note on Nineteenth Century Bengali Prose,” in Print Areas: Book History in India, by Swapan Chakravorty and Abhijit Gupta (Orient Blackswan, 2004), 197-226, 197.]
7   Jaban or yavana carries connotations of impurity in the ‘non-Hindu’ or ‘mleccho’ (low caste) sense. Swapan Chakravorty, “Purity and Print”, 198.
8   Nathaniel Halhed, A Grammar of The Bengal Language, (Hooghly, 1778), xiv.
9   Swapan Chakravorty, “Purity and Print: A Note on Nineteenth Century Bengali Prose,” in Print Areas, 208-209.
10   Ajitkumar Ghosh ed., Rammohan Rachanabali, (Calcutta: Haraf Prakashani, 1973), 607.
11   “Lettres”, Garcin de Tassy, Rudimens de La Langue Hindoustani, à l’usage Des Élèves de l’École Royale et Spéciale Des Langues Orientales Vivantes (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1829). Appendix, 30-31.
12   Kenneth W. Jones, Arya Dharm/ : Hindu Consciousness in 19th-Century Punjab (Berkeley/ : University of California Press, 1976), 34, 70.
13   Kumardeb Mukhopadhyay, Bhudev Charit, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Bhudev Publishing House, 1923).
14   Tariq Rahman, “The Urdu-English Controversy in Pakistan”, Modern Asian Studies 31 (1997): 177-207.
15   Rajsekhar Basu, “BâEalir Hindîcarcâ,” Bicintâ, (Calcutta: Indian Associated Publishing Pvt. Ltd., 1959), 56-57.
16   Gyanendramohan Das, “Uttar-Paúchim Pradeú, Ayodhyâ o Panjâbe Bângâlî,” Prabâsî, Vol. 1, (Allahabad, 1901): 444-448.

Back to Home Page

Frontier Autumn Number
Vol 58, No. 14 - 17, Sep 28 - Oct 25, 2025