I remember some years back reading an article (monograph?) by Mahatma Gandhi talking about this issue of polarizing Hindustani in both directions for the sake of mapping a distinct language onto each of the two religions. [Of course he was against this.] I can’t remember and can’t find the reference at this moment, sorry.

Thanks to Ennis and commenters for all the learn-Hindi resources!

No more so than, say, everyone in The Sound of Music speaking English.

As for the importance of spoken, everyday language, I agree completely. Except that it’s difficult to root out Arabic and Persian words because so many of them are so common in Hindi – the Hindustani I grew up speaking with North Indian family is about a quarter Arabic in vocab, as I realised later when studying arabic, and it’s nowhere near as Urdu-fied as some. For example, words like kursi, baad (as in “uske baad yeh hua”), mushkil, natija, lekin, maaloom, khaas, aam, tariqa, sawal, jawab, these are all shared with Arabic, and even a word as basic as “bacche” is shared with Persian. Rooting out these influences would be akin to rooting out French and Latin words from English at this point, they go almost as far back.

There was a good little book some years ago called Hindi Nationalism by one Alok Rai that traced the historical movement for the “restoration” of shuddh hindi and resistance to Urdu in North India.