HINDI RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS. Forty percent of India's billion-strong population speaks some form of Hindi as a first language, with the great concentration extending across north India from Rajasthan in the west to Bihar in the east. Urdu, Hindi's sister tongue, is spoken by tens of millions more, and is distinguished from Hindi chiefly by its preference for expressions derived from Persian and Arabic. Urdu is a tongue with Muslim associations, while Hindi has a Hindu flavor that is intensified by vocabulary adopted directly from Sanskrit. The membrane between the two languages is by no means impermeable, however, and the religious situation is similar: many of the practices surrounding Muslim holy men (pirs), for example, closely resemble those associated with their Hindu counterparts (gurus, sants, etc.).

Hindi speakers, who see themselves as occupying the geographic center of Hindu culture—what in earlier times...