Q.Why did Mahatma Gandhi think Hindustani should be the national language?
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →Gandhi advocated for Hindustani as the national language because it was a naturally blended, spoken language of the common people, capable of uniting India’s diverse linguistic communities without favouring one region or religion over another.
Mahatma Gandhi’s vision for a national language was rooted not in linguistic purity but in practical unity. He observed that across northern India, ordinary people in markets, villages, and railway stations already spoke a mixed, everyday language that drew from both Hindi and Urdu. This spoken form, which he called Hindustani, was neither the Sanskritised Hindi promoted by some Hindu leaders nor the Persianised Urdu favoured by some Muslim elites. Instead, it was the living, flexible tongue of the masses — simple, inclusive, and understood by millions.
Gandhi’s thinking was shaped by his deep commitment to non-violent mass mobilisation. If India was to fight for freedom together, he argued, it needed a common language that could be learned quickly by people from different regions. Hindustani, written in both Devanagari and Persian scripts, offered a middle path. It did not demand that a Tamil or Bengali speaker abandon their mother tongue; rather, it provided a second, shared language for national communication. This was not about replacing regional languages but about creating a bridge between them.
Gandhi himself used the term “Hindustani” deliberately to avoid the communal overtones that had begun to surround Hindi and Urdu in the early twentieth century. For him, the language of the people was above religious division.
He was also deeply practical. A national language, he believed, must be easy enough for a peasant to learn in a few months. Sanskritised Hindi, with its complex grammar and literary vocabulary, was too distant from everyday speech. Persianised Urdu, while beautiful, was equally inaccessible to the common person. Hindustani, by contrast, was already the language of the bazaar, the folk song, and the simple conversation. It required no special schooling to understand. …
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