But in due course they learned to their great annoyance that people kept their land and tax records in their local dialects. After taking control of the region in the mid-1700s, the British retained the Mughal official language, Persian, as their official language. One of the difficulties the company faced in Bengal – and really a tough one – involved settling disputes related to land ownership and contracts as well as tax collections. Incorporated on December 31, 1600, the company acted as a part trade organisation, part nation state and earned huge profits from trade with India, China, Persia and Indonesia for more than 200 years. This massive corporation, founded under Queen Elizabeth I, was the world’s largest entity of its kind to be engaged in foreign trade then. This was a time when Bengal – then India’s most prosperous part – was in the grip of the British East India Company, whose main aim was to make lots of money for its owners. To prepare for it, they embarked upon patching together an administration that could keep Indians under tight control and, at the same time, extract hefty tax revenues from them. The fight has a history going back to 1800s when the British started thinking they were going to rule India for a long time. The government has backed off for now in the face of strong opposition from non-Hindi speakers, who account for 75% of the country’s population, but the war still rages on.

With Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-centric Bharatiya Janata Party pushing to impose Hindi as India’s national language, linguistic chauvinism is back to being centre stage in this nation of 1.4 billion people. The Bengali-Persian quarrel may be dead, but the politics of language is very much alive and well in India even today, nearly 200 years after the earlier episode played out. The idea was killed after it faced stiff resistance from no one but Bengalis themselves, the rich and powerful ones, who favoured Persian. It may come as a surprise to many people, but it’s true: Bengali had a chance to be India’s top language.

Hindi vs bengali alphabets