Prachi Gupta’s Scroll.in article of 14 September 2022 argues that the literary legacy of Bharatendu Harishchandra (1850–1885) is more linguistically mixed than the title “father of modern Hindi” suggests, and that this mixture complicates purist accounts of Hindi identity. Its central example is a poem published in his journal Harishchandrika in 1874, which switches between Hindi and English to describe the ordeals of Indians trying to get access to government offices. Gupta reads that poem alongside Bharatendu’s experiments with several languages and scripts, and draws a contemporary lesson for present-day arguments about who owns Hindi.
Who Bharatendu was, and why the label matters
Bharatendu Harishchandra is widely regarded as the “father of modern Hindi,” a designation that rests on his influence over modern Hindi literature and on his work promoting the language in the later nineteenth century. Scroll’s account describes modern Hindi as having been standardized around Khari Boli written in Devanagari for official and literary use. That standard is the backdrop against which Gupta tests the label. If the founder of modern Hindi is shown writing across languages and scripts, the claim that Hindi was always a pure, single-script tradition becomes harder to sustain.
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The 1874 poem in Harishchandrika
The poem is the article’s anchor. Scroll reproduces the following English rendering of a passage attributed to Bharatendu’s 1874 poem. The spelling and punctuation are as printed in the article; they are not checked against an original-language edition.
“When I go Sir, molakat ko, these chaprasis
Trouble me much.
How can I give daily Inam, ever they ask
Me I say such
Some time they give me gardania
And tell bahar niklo tum
Dena na lena mufta ke aye yaha hain
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What the lines describe
The speaker is a petitioner trying to reach a government office. The chaprasis, the attendants who controlled access, demand inam, which the article glosses as a payment or gratuity. When the speaker refuses or cannot pay, he is abused and ordered out. The closing lines, in Scroll’s rendering, mock the figure of the doorkeeper who turns up for free and then stands guard. The satire is aimed at the petitioner’s ordeal rather than at any language as such, which is why Gupta treats the mixing as part of the poem’s social argument.
Why the mixture is not a simple “Hinglish” category
Gupta’s comparison with contemporary Hinglish is the article’s own. “Hinglish” is a retrospective label applied to the poem, not evidence that Bharatendu described his own work that way. Readers should treat the comparison as an interpretive bridge between nineteenth-century colonial writing and present-day mixed-language speech, not as a historical classification the poet himself used.
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Reading the mixture as Gupta does
Gupta’s reading treats the English-inflected lines as a sign of a heterogeneous literary practice: a writer who moved between languages because the subject, a colonial bureaucracy, was itself multilingual. This is an interpretation. The article does not establish Bharatendu’s intentions in writing the poem, whether he meant it as a manifesto on language, or whether he would have endorsed the political use Gupta makes of it.
Scripts as well as languages
The article extends the argument beyond vocabulary to script. Gupta reports that in a 1877 eulogy to Queen Victoria, Bharatendu mixed Nagari, Roman, and Persian scripts while writing Hindi. Alongside the Hindi dialects, Gupta also says he wrote in or used Gujarati, Braj Bhasha, Sanskrit, and Urdu, and experimented with the three scripts.
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The colonial context matters here. Scroll describes disputes over vernacular education and over whether Nagari or Persian script should be used in administration. According to the article, colonial administration adopted both Nagari and Persian in 1900, and the Hindi movement later spread beyond the north-western provinces in arguments for Hindi’s national status. Those administrative details come from this single article and have not been independently checked here; readers who need them for citation should consult historians of colonial north India.
The role Gupta assigns to standardization
According to Gupta, the experiments with mixed scripts and languages were later marginalized by standardizing tendencies, and she attributes a key role in that movement to Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi. The claim describes a shift in literary norms as Gupta presents it; it is not a separate finding about Dwivedi’s individual decisions.
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The 1877 line on “one’s own language”
Gupta also cites a line from Bharatendu’s 1877 poem, quoted in transliteration: “Nij bhasha unnati ahai sab unnati ko mool.” She translates it as “one’s own language is the root of all progress.” This line is why the article does not cast Bharatendu as a simple pluralist. It shows him promoting Hindi as a vehicle of national progress while his own practice crossed language and script boundaries.
That is the tension at the centre of the piece. The movement he helped shape made “one’s own language” a rallying cry, and the same writer produced work that resists the idea of a single pure idiom. Gupta does not resolve the tension into a verdict on Bharatendu. She uses it to show that the modern Hindi canon contains its own counter-evidence.
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Hindi, Urdu, and the separation of script from language
The article’s history depends on keeping two distinctions apart. Hindi and Urdu are not defined by script alone, and the political processes Scroll describes gradually aligned Hindi with Nagari and Urdu with a Persian-derived script. Bharatendu’s own practice, by contrast, shows continued mixture across both scripts and languages. Readers should not read the poem as evidence that Hindi and Urdu were one language, nor as evidence that script choice was settled in his lifetime.
What the argument does and does not establish
| Claim | Who makes it | Status in the source |
|---|---|---|
| Bharatendu is widely regarded as the father of modern Hindi | Scroll.in, describing common usage | Reported as a conventional label |
| The 1874 poem in Harishchandrika mixes Hindi and English | Gupta, using the text as reproduced | English rendering as printed; no critical edition checked |
| Bharatendu mixed Nagari, Roman, and Persian scripts in a 1877 eulogy to Queen Victoria | Gupta | Reported by the article; not independently verified |
| Colonial administration adopted both Nagari and Persian in 1900 | Gupta | Reported by one article; check against historical scholarship |
| Standardizing tendencies, led in part by Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, marginalized mixed experiments | Gupta | Interpretive account from the article |
| Bharatendu opposed standardization or held a pluralist political position | Not claimed by the source | Not established by the poem or the article |
| Mixed-language writing complicates uniform, exclusionary, or Sanskritizing accounts of Hindi | Gupta’s contemporary judgment | Attributed argument, not a historians’ consensus |
How to use the example in current debates
The poem is most useful as a counterexample to a single origin story. A reader who accepts that Hindi was shaped by a colonial bureaucracy, a print culture, and a writer who worked in several idioms will find it harder to defend a purity narrative that treats the language as fixed from the start. The poem does not, on its own, settle what Hindi should be today. It shows that the founder of modern Hindi did not write in a single register, and that the Scroll article reads this as a reason to question claims of linguistic ownership.
The full article is available at Scroll.in, “What today’s Hindi supremacists could learn from a ‘Hinglish’ poem by ‘the father of modern Hindi’”, by Prachi Gupta, published 14 September 2022.
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