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The boundary between Hindi and Urdu has been a perennial subject of debate among scholars of South Asia. Conventional wisdom--shared by linguists, ethnographers, and political scientists--would argue that the boundary is amorphous. Because of this contextually shifting character, any venture to examine differences between Hindi and Urdu must be highly detailed and discerning, especially with regard to the always loaded question about whether scholars might read too much into specific changes of syntax and style when it comes to distinguishing between languages in a highly charged political context.
In Tracing the Boundaries between Hindi and Urdu, Christine Everaert undertakes a close reading and comparison of Hindi and Urdu short stories. Arguing that the short story genre is "closest to representing moderate, grammatically correct language" (p. 3), Everaert selects three stories each from eight authors: Sajjad Haider Yildirim (d. 1943); Premcand (d. 1936); Bacan Sarma Pandey or 'Ugra' (d. 1967); Sa'dat Hasan Manto (d. 1955); Mohan Rakes (d. 1972); Qurrat ul-'ain Haidar (d. 2007); and the contemporary writers Gulzar and Abdul Bismillah. Of the twenty-four stories, half were published in both Hindi and Urdu while the remainder in...