Languages as Women: The Feminisation of Linguistic Discourses in Colonial North India

This article locates and analyses the gendered discourses of Hindi and Urdu linguistic identity in late nineteenth‐century colonial north India. Using a new concept of language woman, it characterises the multiple discourses of feminisation through three distinctive terms of linguistic femininity, linguistic morality and linguistic patriarchy. These three modes of representation and articulation of feminised discourses over Hindi and Urdu languages are explored using the concept of heteronormativity as a political, ideological and social–cultural construct. The paper argues that language woman established an intimate bond between nationalisation and feminisation of the dominant Hindi linguistic identity in private and public domains as not mutually opposed but complementary and reproducible of each other.