The Hindi Heartland: A Study
By Ghazala Wahab
Aleph Books, 528 pages, Rs 999

When the elections results started being analysed live on TV in the 1980s, we started hearing this term: ‘Hindi heartland’. Soon, a vague image developed around it. This was the region somewhere in the centre, at the heart of India, without well defined boundaries. In TV debates back then, its importance was due to the fact that the largest state (in population terms) in India, Uttar Pradesh, was also at the core of this ‘Hindi Heartland’. Sending over 40% of the parliamentarians, the region determines the contours of national politics. Out of the 15 prime ministers India has had, eight have been from the Hindi belt.
The term ‘Hindi Heartland’ continues to rule the political discourse, especially around the general-election time. 

It is a bit surprising, then, that there was no book devoted to this topic – the Hindi Heartland. Now, that gap has been filled by Ghazala Wahab, the author of ‘Born a Muslim: Some Truths About Islam in India’ and the editor of ‘FORCE’, a magazine on national security and defence. Her new book occupies a middle ground between a scholarly tome full of footnotes and journalistic work replete with anecdotes. That makes it useful for both kinds of readers. On the whole, this is a ready-reckoner for a region that is critically important in Indian politics. 

Comprising Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh, it covers nearly 38% of the country’s area and is home to over 40% of its population. Yet, despite its political heft, the Hindi belt is among the most impoverished regions in the country. It consumes the bulk of the country’s resources, but lags behind on various economic and welfare indices. It is plagued by violence, illiteracy, unemployment, corruption, poor life expectancy, and numerous other ills.

Centuries of war, conquests, invasions, political movements, and religious unrest have made the heartland a place of immense paradox. Despite its extraordinary and timeless religious heritage—some of the country’s most revered spiritual leaders were born here and it is home to innumerable shrines and places of pilgrimage—it has also witnessed some of the worst communal riots in the country and has been troubled by long-running, divisive sectarian politics. Many of India’s founders, who gave the country its secular identity, hailed from the heartland, but so too did those who have spread religious discord. And the land of Ganga–Jamuni tehzeeb routinely witnesses lynching and murder in the name of religion.

The book is divided into five sections. Section I explores the geography of the region. The author then looks at society – caste, religion, the rural–urban divide, and the tribes of the region. (Caste is possibly the single most important and single most misunderstood factor when it comes to this heartland. This chapter proves to be an unparalleled primer on this topic.) In the chapter on the economy, she attempts to show how the economic backwardness of the Hindi belt has come about through faulty and myopic policies conceived by various governments—these have come in the way of sustained and inclusive development. The chapter on language chronicles both the emergence of Hindi as the primary lingua franca of this region at the cost of other languages, as well as the politics that linked language with religion. The last chapter in this section explores the influence of the heartland on what is today popularly understood to be Indian culture.

Section II looks at the medieval and modern history of the region and covers the emergence of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, the Marathas, and the East India Company. Section III examines British colonialism through the lens of empire building, and shows how the imperialists distorted history to facilitate their divide and rule policy. It also dwells on the deliberate economic impoverishment of the Hindi belt and how this continues to impact the region even after Independence.

Section IV analyses the freedom struggle—and covers among other things the emergence of the idea of India and the increasing ‘Hinduization’ of that idea. It establishes the Hindi belt’s criticality to Gandhi’s satyagraha, and the success of the British Indian government’s experiments with strategies that divided communities, which eventually led to the partition of the country.

Section V appraises developments in the region after Independence. It outlines the government’s struggle to rehabilitate refugees coming in from the west and the adoption of a liberal Constitution for the citizens of the newly independent nation. It examines the Hindi belt’s political peculiarity—the metamorphosis of the socialist movement into a movement that ended up furthering caste and religious divisions in the region; the book analyses the rise of temple politics (incidentally, all three temples that are mired in disputes and controversy are located in the Hindi belt) that threaten the very idea of a multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-lingual India that has held sway for almost a century.

Wahab’s writing is based on meticulous research and interviews with key stakeholders, and it helps that she is a native of the region too.