As in the fields of astronomy and medicine, the British engagement with the Indian languages and forms of written communication mirrored the changing nature of colonial dominion. It also sheds light on the types of linguist and informant with whom the Europeans dealt, and consequently on new sources of power within Indian society. In the earlier eighteenth century, the British tried to grapple with Mughal diplomatics and to corral its chief expert, the Persian munshi. From about 1760 the massive growth of military activity along the Ganges valley and the swell of peculation and trade in its slip-stream led to an interest in ‘Moors’ or the ‘vulgar tongue of Hindostan’ written in the Persian script. The British selected out Hindustani, or Urdu as its more refined form was generally known, as a military and commercial tongue, but also as one which, despite its mongrel origins, could convey a sense of style and aristocracy. After 1840, however, missionaries, populist administrators and officers of the Bengal Army began to register the importance of ‘Hindi’ written in the Devanagari, or Sanskritic script, though its final triumph was to be long delayed. It was Hindi-writers among the commercial classes, the pandits, and the sepoys of the Bengal Army as much as missionaries and populist officials who promoted the future official ‘link’ language. Indian agency, as much as colonial policy, remained vital at all stages of this evolution. Their mutual interactions provide the focus for this chapter.

The pre-eminence and decline of Persian

In the 1770s and 1780s Warren Hastings had patronised the study of Persian and the written record of the Mughal Empire as a means of understanding the Indian ‘constitution’.