History

Parts of the Bible began to be published in Hindustani in 1811. The complete Hindi Bible was printed in 1843. It was only after the Bible had been published the Hindi, that the first Hindu who ever wrote in Hindi, Bharatendu Harishchandra, was born – in 1850. He began his literary activities by founding the first Hindi literary magazine, Kavi-vachana-sudha, in 1867. His very first book, a translation from Bengali, was published in 1868.  No part of the Vedas had been translated and published in Hindi, before Dayananda Saraswati’s translations of excerpts began to appear from 1875. After his death in 1883, additional work by his followers resulted in the first-ever unorthodox translation of the Rig Veda being published – only in 1899.  However, that was rejected by traditional Hindus  because it made clear to anyone who read it  that the Vedas do not teach idol worship and other traditional Hindu practices. The first translation of one of the Vedas which was accepted by many traditional Hindus is by Ramgovind Trivedi. It was published only in 1954. The first society to publish religious literature in Hindi that supported traditional or orthodox Hindu thought and practice was Gobind Bhawan Karyalaya in Gorakhpur, operating through its unit, the Gita Press. That was established only in 1923. During the century and more of its existence, it has published some 418 million (41.8 crore) books in fourteen Indian languages. However, it has refused to publish the Vedas — the most sacred of Hindu scriptures. Many Hindus ask: If the Vedas are a source of wisdom and goodness, why not make them available to the whole world, at least to all Hindus? Well, that is best explaind by asking the related question: : why do orthodox Hindus prevent lower caste Hindus from worshiping in their sacred temples? The answer is that the Hindu gods are different from the Bible’s God. He invites sinners to repent and become His children,  beloved and holy. Orthodox Hinduism teaches that a soul is born into a lower caste or as a female because of bad karma in previous lives. Polluted souls cannot find salvation without first re-incarnating as a Brahmin male. Gods and goddesses cannot make a sinful soul “holy”. That is why Hindu scriptures prohibit the lower castes from hearing, let alone reading or teaching the sacred Vedas. Caste-based and gender-based discrimination is justified on the basis of the theories of karma and reincarnation. These theories have  had serious civilizational consequences: – The Brahmin refusal to share Sanskrit with fellow Hindus and non-Hindus made it necessary for the Mughals to make another language the normal  court language -Persian. – In order to educate the oppressed, Christian missionaries had to develop peoples’ dialects so that they could be used for education and literacy. Muslims ruled Delhi for close to seven centuries, from 1192 to 1857. But no ruler, whether Muslim, Sikh, Maratha or Hindu, saw any need to develop a vernacular such as Hindi. For it is easier to keep people enslaved if they are ignorant and divided by local dialects as well as castes. Inspired by the Bible thousands  of people devoted their lives, money and energy to develop and teach the heart languages of the people. We Indians did not pay them, nor did the British Raj. Missionaries served India because they were inspired by God’s love – because God, the Bible says, wants to liberate the downtrodden — dalits and shoshits. Missionaries developed Urdu before they developed Hindi because, before them, Muslims had been ruling most of north India for centuries. Missionaries published the first Urdu New Testament in 1805. It is worth remembering that, back then, the average Muslim did not read or write Urdu. Missionaries had to set up schools to teach Urdu. It was the education system set up by missionaries which made Urdu the main literary language of northern provinces, including Punjab and Pakistan. That is why Hindus such as Bhartendu Harishchand (1850-85) and Munshi Premchand (1880-1936) began their literary careers in Urdu. Most educated Indians do not know that missionaries such as Alexander Duff, Indian reformers such as Raja Rammohan Roy, and colonial rulers such as Lord Macaulay promoted English education primarily to enrich Indian vernaculars. They wanted Indian intelligentsia to access the intellectual wealth created in the West so that it can be transmitted to the common man in vernaculars. Bible translators standardized Urdu and Hindi by using the works of the following pre-British poets: — Surdas (1478–1583) who grew up around Mathura and expressed his poetic devotion to Sri Krishna in a dialect called Braj Bhasha. — Mirabai (1498–1547) who composed her devotional poems in Merta, Rajasthani and Braj Bhasha.  — Rahim (1556–1627) who grew up in Delhi/Agra region as a Mughal courtier and composed his couplets (dohas) in Braj Bhasha and Awadhi.  — Tulsidas (1532–1623) who composed his epic Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi (notably, he did that in spite of strong opposition by the Brahmin community in Benaras). None of these poets had used “Hindi” because it did not exist in their day. Hindi  was born only when Bible translators and missionary educators fused Awadhi with a dozen other north Indian dialects in order to create a language rich enough to communicate complex and wide-ranging ideas which could not be expressed in any of the pre-existing dialects  Following  the work of the Bible translators who created Hindi, here are examples of the people who became pioneers of Hindi literature. It is important to note that none of them was a Brahmin: Brahmin intellectuals decided to support Hindi only in the 1890s. They were alarmed that Urdu, written in Arabic script, was becoming north India’s literary language. This fear motivated them to team up with missionaries such as Rev. Edwin Greaves of Varanasi to establish the Devanagari Pracharini Sabha (1893). Fear of Urdu motivated them to toil and develop Hindi vocabulary in “Hindi Shabd Sagar.” This massive work was published between 1922-29. However, the standardized Hindi dictionary was developed by a Jesuit