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Language, Ideology and Identity in Post-Partition Pakistan in the Light of Bausani’s Notion of ‘Islamic Languages’


The present contribution approaches the linguistic ideas that permeated the post-Partition Pakistani language debate in the light of Bausani’s notion of ‘Islamic languages’. This will help us to try to make sense of the occasionally naive, at times apparently nonsensical, and often non-scientific linguistic arguments that characterized the political discourse of the time in an attempt to clarify the implicit assumptions and ideological charge behind those statements.
Beyond the official discussions, we will seek to understand how Muslim communities in the area developed common cultural representations concerning their sociolinguistic identities and conceptualized affinity and diversity among their languages.
Finally, we will look at the particular case of Bengali, a language that even in the post-Partition period was not partitioned into two distinct language varieties (one for the Muslims and one for the Hindus) and that thus constitutes, in the context of the Indian subcontinent, a sort of ‘exception that proves the rule’.