Communalism in India

Communalism is an ideology that treats religious communities as internally unified groups whose interests are separate from, or opposed to, those of other communities. It recasts a flexible linguistic identity as a religious boundary by assigning languages, scripts and literary traditions to supposedly exclusive faith communities.

How the boundary is constructed

Communalism converts language from a shared means of communication into a marker of collective religious belonging. It does so through selective association, repeatedly linking a language, script, vocabulary and literary tradition with one faith while excluding evidence of shared use.

• Political mobilisation presents the religious community as the natural owner and protector of a particular language.
• Language choices in education, administration or public life are interpreted as signs of religious loyalty, rather than as matters of region, class or personal preference.
• Standardisation privileges selected scripts and vocabularies, reducing space for dialects, mixed speech and overlapping cultural traditions.

The Hindi-Urdu illustration

Hindi and Urdu developed within an overlapping north Indian linguistic environment, but communal politics increasingly portrayed them as mutually exclusive religious possessions. Hindi in Devanagari became associated with Hindus, while Urdu in the Perso-Arabic script became associated with Muslims.

• Contests over official recognition, education, employment and print transformed linguistic preferences into competition between supposedly unified religious communities.
• This binary obscured shared grammar, everyday speech, literary interaction and the fact that neither language was confined to one religion.

Social and constitutional significance

Such recasting hardens fluid identities into boundaries between an imagined religious "us" and "them". It can produce cultural exclusion, linguistic prejudice and political conflict by treating multilingualism or linguistic borrowing as disloyalty.

• Article 29 protects the right of any section of citizens to conserve its distinct language, script or culture.
• Article 30 protects the right of religious and linguistic minorities to establish and administer educational institutions, recognising religion and language as distinct grounds of minority identity.