[Sidenote:  Where is Hindustan?]

Hindustan, or the land of the Hindus, is a term that never had any geographical definiteness.  In the mouths of Indians it meant the central portion of the plain of North India; in English writers of half a century ago it was often used when all India was meant.  In exact writing of the present time, the term is practically obsolete.

[Sidenote:  Who speak Hindustani?]

Unfortunately for clearness, the term Hindustani not only survives, but survives in a variety of significations.  The word is an adjective, pertaining to Hindustan, and in English it has become the name either of the people of Hindustan or of their language.  It is in the latter sense that the name is particularly confusing.  The way out of the difficulty lies in first associating Hindustani clearly with the central region of Hindustan, the country to the north-east of Agra and Delhi.  These were the old imperial capitals, be it remembered.  Then from that centre, the Hindustani language spread—­a central, imperial, Persianised language not necessarily superseding the other vernaculars—­wherever the authority of the empire went.  Thus throughout India, Hindustani became a lingua franca, the imperial language.  In the Moghul Empire of Northern India it was exactly what “King’s English” was in the Anglo-Norman kingdom in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  French was the language of the Anglo-Norman court of London, as Persian of the court of Delhi or Agra; the Frenchified King’s English was the court form of the vernacular in England, as the Persianised Hindustani in North India.  It was this lingua franca that Europeans in India set themselves to acquire.

[Sidenote:  Urdu literature]

Continuing the English parallel—­the Hindustani of Delhi, the capital, Persianised as the English of London was Frenchified, became the recognised literary medium for North India.  The special name Urdu, however, has now superseded the term Hindustani, when we think of the language as a literary medium. Urdu is the name for literary Hindustani; in the Calcutta University Calendar, for example, the name Hindustani never occurs.

[Sidenote:  Hindi language and literature]

About the beginning of the nineteenth century another dialect of Hindustani, called Hindi, also gained a literary standing.  It contains much less of Persian than Urdu does, leaning rather to Sanscrit; it is written in the deva-nagari or Sanscrit character; is associated with Hindus and with the eastern half of Hindustan; whereas Urdu is written in the Persian character, and is associated with Mahomedans and the western half of Hindustan.[32]

[Sidenote:  The Brahmans]