109 an argument which can be termed as reductionist. Nevertheless, King's application of Deutsch's theory to the experience in South Asia compels attention. The hard historical facts and evidence that King has packed this study with should be of great use in reconstructing certain aspects of nationalism and communalism in north India. The study begins with an account of the conscious attempt at the College of Fort William to differentiate languages in terms of script and vocabulary5. The college was established for imparting instruction to British civil servants in Indian affairs. Its courses included, inter alia, courses in 'classical' Indian languages and the 'vernaculars', namely Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, and 'Hindustani'. In absence of any suitable textual material available in the 'vernaculars', the college decided to produce its own books. 'Hindustani' (Khari Boli) had a tradition in prose writing, but the prose was literary and often Sufistic, and unsuitable for bureaucrats. Four munshis (authors) were therefore engaged to write books in 'Hindustani'. The different scripts - Urdu and Nagari - were used. In the texts compiled under this scheme, difficult words of Arabic-Persian origin were replaced with synonyms from Sanskrit, or Sanskrit-based local, less formal words and phrases. King states that there was a parallel move also at that time to introduce words of Arabic-Persian or Sanskrit origin into 'Hindustani'. In support of this, he quotes Gilchrist who compiled his Hindustani-English Dictionary in 1798. He adds that while at this time there was an attempt to divide a single language 'Hindustani' into two categories of Urdu and 'Hindi' on the basis of script and vocabulary, there was certainly no attempt by the British to extend this distinction to religion or to the social implications of text production in 'Hindi'. King does not apply methods of historical linguistics to demonstrate conscious deviations introduced by the British in the extant traditions of the 'Hindustani' language6. He records bare facts to support his analyses and arguments. However, he fails to tell us how the language of north India (Urdu) came to be called 'Hindustani'. Grierson reports that the language spoken in India was described by the Europeans as 'Indostani' or 'Hindustani'7. Cust informs us that the early Europeans in India found that 'Hindustani' was spoken all over the Indian sub-continent8. However, despite their identification of a spoken language of India, the problem of its script continued to puzzle early Europeans. They were unable to believe that both the Hindus and Muslims wrote the language in a script that was similar to, and derived from the Arabic-Persian script They were convinced, as per their perception of Indian society, that the Hindus must have a separate and distinct script. Their search for scripts other than Urdu, led them nowhere. It was because of this that the early discourses composed by the Serampore missionaries for the purpose of preaching Christianity among Indians were written in the Roman script9. Modem 'Hindi', the new variant of 'Hindustani', lacked a known past; and therefore, its spokesmen tried to claim for it a consistent and continuous past in the traditions of 'Khari Boli'10. King points out that the protagonists of 'new' Hindi aspired to posit the language as the rival of the Urdu language and therefore they (the protagonists of 'new' Hindi) claimed for the 'new' Hindi the