When Decolonising a Culture Means Purifying It

When Decolonising a Culture Means Purifying It

Safed became shvet. Naraz became kruddh. Small substitutions, repeated across a generation of Hindi textbooks and journals, until an entire living vocabulary - the one people actually spoke in the marketplace, the court, the temple - was replaced by a Sanskritised register built for purity rather than use.

TAN's position is that this single word-swap is the doorway into a much larger paradox: movements that call themselves decolonisation often end up recreating the very structures of exclusion they claim to be dismantling.

The Colonial Rupture and the Nationalist Response

Pre-colonial northern India did not run on one fixed "mother tongue." People moved fluidly across Persian, Awadhi, Braj, Kaithi and Perso-Arabic scripts depending on context - trade, poetry, courtly administration, worship.

It was the colonial state's need to classify and govern efficiently that first froze this fluidity into rigid categories, when the East India Company replaced Persian with vernaculars in 1837 and the 1900 United Provinces resolution turned script choice into a communal marker.

Indian nationalist institutions, ironically, did not undo this colonial rigidity - they perfected it. The Nagari Pracharini Sabha and the journal Saraswati, under Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, built a Sanskritised, "pure" Khari Boli by systematically purging the Persian and Urdu words ordinary people used every day, while simultaneously claiming the entire medieval poetic tradition - Braj, Awadhi, Apabhramsa - as ancestrally "Hindi" whenever it was convenient to widen the past.

A Parallel from a Different Era: Meiji Japan's Manufactured Shinto Purity

The same structural move appears in a strikingly different setting. When Meiji Japan modernised in the late nineteenth century, it did not simply revive an ancient Shinto tradition - it manufactured one. Centuries of shinbutsu-shūgō, the everyday syncretic fusion of Shinto and Buddhist worship practised across ordinary shrines and temples, were forcibly separated through the 1868 Shinbutsu Bunri edicts, creating an artificially "pure" State Shinto stripped of its Buddhist inheritance to serve a new national identity.

Like Dwivedi's Saraswati, the modernisers claimed continuity with an ancient past while inventing a present-day singularity that had never actually existed in that clean form.

What the Comparison Reveals

Held side by side, Hindi's Sanskritisation and Japan's State Shinto reveal something neither case shows alone: nation-building movements reach for purity not because purity is historically true, but because it is administratively and emotionally simpler than pluralism.

Genuine decolonisation, then, cannot mean returning to an imagined pre-colonial purity - because that purity never existed. It means doing the harder work of absorption: letting a language or a tradition remain visibly composite, Persian and Sanskrit, Buddhist and Shinto, without needing to purge one strand to legitimise the whole.

Ek Bharat, Shreshtha Bharat is only a genuine act of decolonisation if unity is built from coexistence, not from a manufactured singular voice.