Modern Hindi

Modern Standard Hindi is, as literary languages go, young. It was standardized in the nineteenth century on Khari Boli, the speech of the Delhi region, written in the Devanagari script and consciously furnished with a Sanskrit derived vocabulary, and it became the official language of independent India in the twentieth. But the devotional culture it carries is old, and Hindi stands as the modern heir of a family of North Indian literary languages that had already sung for centuries.

The Braj Bhasha of the Krishna poets, the Awadhi of Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas, and the mixed idiom of the sant poets such as Kabir all flowed into the region's shared devotional inheritance, and modern Hindi speakers receive Surdas, Tulsidas, Mirabai and Kabir as their own classics, printed in Devanagari in Hindi anthologies even though their languages differ from the modern standard. The result is a devotional register with unusual depth of field, a modern standardized language behind which stand five centuries of bhakti verse that remains fully alive in performance. A Hindi speaker at a temple aarti or a kirtan gathering moves without effort between compositions of the sixteenth century and the twentieth, and the modern language's own devotional production, from printed prayer books to film bhajans, continues the line without a break.

Modern Hindi is the working language of North Indian popular devotion. The aarti repertoire is its clearest showcase, above all Om Jai Jagdish Hare, composed in Hindi in the 1870s and now sung at the close of worship in temples and homes across India and the diaspora, so universal that most singers assume it is ancient. Around the aartis stands the bhajan culture, devotional songs in Hindi performed at satsangs, temple gatherings and festivals, a repertoire fed continuously by new composition and, in the twentieth century, transformed by mass media. The Hindi film industry made devotional song a national possession, with film bhajans passing directly into worship, and cassette, television and streaming culture each renewed the flow, while the televised Hindi serializations of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in the 1980s became religious events in their own right.

Print did the same work earlier. The Gita Press of Gorakhpur, founded in 1923, made inexpensive Hindi editions of scripture, prayer and commentary ubiquitous in North Indian homes, its Hindi Ramcharitmanas and Bhagavad Gita among the most printed books in any Indian language. Hindi thus functions as the vernacular liturgical language of much of Hindu North India, the language in which the tradition is actually sung, prayed and read by hundreds of millions.