From Persian To English: The Colonial Dismantling Of Pre-Colonial Language Orders In The Indian Subcontinent

Abstract

One of the most significant periods of colonial disruption in the contemporary world is included in the linguistic history of the Indian subcontinent. Persian dominated elite discourse, governance, and culture for centuries before British interference in the Mughal Empire and its precursor, the Delhi Sultanate. Arabic, Sanskrit, regional vernaculars, and a diverse multilingual ecology that represented functional pluralism rather than monolingual imposition coexisted with it. The empirical results based on the document analysis of 1,130 archival sources encompassing the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526), the Mughal Empire (1526–1857), the early British period (1757–1835), and the high-colonial period (1835–1947).  The study uses two main theoretical frameworks: Postcolonial Continuity Theory (Fanon, 1961; Phillipson, 1992; Ngugi wa Thiong'o, 1986; Pennycook, 1998), which tracks the persistence of colonial language structures beyond formal decolonization, and Sociolinguistic Stratification Theory (Bourdieu, 1991; Labov, 1966, 1972; Fishman, 1972). The article reconstructs the institutional and ideological processes that led to the elevation of English and the dismantling of Persian, using primary quotations from foundational sources such as the Ain-i-Akbari, Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi, Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education (1835), Wood's Education Despatch (1854), and the Hunter Commission Report (1882). With an emphasis on Pakistan, it further argues that the stratifying impacts of colonial language policy continue to shape South Asian educational institutions, social hierarchies, national identity formations, and epistemological frameworks in the postcolonial present.