Hindi Religious Traditions
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 was called the Middle Country (Madhyadeśa), where Aryan culture in India flourished—often suppose that regional distinctiveness is something characterizing other areas of the subcontinent more than their own. Local and regional identities are indeed strong in India, even within the Hindi-speaking area; nonetheless, there is a core of religious literature and tradition that sets the Hindi region apart from other areas of India and makes it possible for people whose personal religious emphases vary widely to communicate as members of a single, if large and complex, family.
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