Abstract
In a certain sense, every time World Hindi Diwas is celebrated, not only does it evoke the idea of the monolingual identity of the Indian nation but also invents certain linguistic claims and imaginaries about the Hindi-Hindu past. One dominant way in which such linguistic assumptions around Hindi are imagined and practised is by insisting on a binary choice between Hindi-Hindu and Urdu-Muslim. This social binary of two languages exists despite their fl uid meanings in medieval India. The article argues that while Hindi and Urdu are assigned distinctive historical genealogies, what is often missed is the context of fl uidities of medieval India where such vocabularies of linguistic and social binaries hardly existed.
