Book Review of 'From Hindi to Urdu : a social and political history' by Tariq Rahman, Karachi : Oxford University Press, 2011.

Urdu is the only national language of Pakistan. It is the official language of five states in India and is one of twenty-two scheduled languages according to the Indian Constitution. The Urdu language is also mutually intelligible to Hindi, at the spoken level. However, the relationship between Urdu and Hindi is not as simple in the history of South Asia as it would appear now (Shackle and Snell 1990). There have been a lot of political, ideological, and historical debates on the relationship between the two languages. Rahman’s well researched book From Hindi to Urdu offers such debates from a historical perspective by discussing the origin and development of the Urdu language. Although the name Urdu started to be used for the language in the eighteenth century (pp.18–54), Rahman has traced its roots centuries earlier, intertwined with the development of the Hindustani language, which later split into Hindi and Urdu. Rahman has supported his arguments in the book by using excerpts of classical texts like those of Amir Khusrau (pp.66–78) as well as personal interviews that he carried out with linguists, educationists, and historians over several years.