Hindi, Urdu or Hindustani? Revisiting ‘National Language’ Debates through Radio Broadcasting in Late Colonial India
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Asking how the nationalist intelligentsia and Hindi literati sought to interact with and shape the new medium of radio in a period of time that witnessed the establishment of All India Radio’s Lucknow station in 1938, this article embeds colonial discussions of radio broadcasting into the cultural, literary and linguistic debates over Hindi, Urdu and Hindustani. The vibrant debate on the standardisation of Hindi, set against the background of All India Radio policies, is discussed from the perspective of those literary actors and institutions that envisioned diverse oral forms of Hindi and Hindustani for the rural and urban population residing in the Hindi belt and the rest of India. In addition, the article compares the radio broadcasting language to other contributions published in Hindi to show how languages operated not only in parallel but also in intersecting literary spheres. The article shows that language debates over radio broadcasting functioned as a site to probe the flexibility of what was to be officially projected as the language of the nation-to-be.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".