From colonial Lahore, a flashback to when Urdu, Persian and Sanskrit were taught side-by-side

As India prepares for its 2027 national census, language has once again become a political flashpoint. Debates over mother tongues, medium of instruction and linguistic identity are intensifying, especially as census categories shape funding, education and cultural recognition.

Which languages will be counted? Which ones will be ranked, ignored or folded into others?

More than a century ago, in colonial Lahore, a different approach to language took shape. The Oriental College, founded in the 1860s, offered a model of higher education where Urdu, Persian, Punjabi, Sanskrit, and Arabic were taught side-by-side. Its founders believed in the existence of a multilingual public sphere.

This college developed curricula that revolved around teaching modern disciplines such as ethics and science in commonly spoken languages at a time when English-medium instruction was spreading.

This was not a romantic or backward-looking project. The College’s leaders saw multilingual education as a way to serve diverse communities, train future administrators and build civic life. Its journals and textbooks became platforms for debating grammar, literary style and the purpose of language itself.

Today, as census categories threaten to harden linguistic hierarchies, the history of Oriental College Lahore offers not a return to the past, but a reminder that pluralism once had institutional form.

The Origins of Regional language Education in Lahore

The history of educational institutions of regional language learning in South Asia can be traced to Macaulay’s minutes – or policy papers – in 1835. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s minutes famously dismissed Indian learning in favor of English instruction reorienting colonial education across British India.

However, regional language institutions endured despite the introduction of Western education, often adapting to English models of thought over the course of the 19th-century.

Along with the growth of missionary institutions, calls for the creation of regional language institutions began to grow as well. And right after the Revolt of 1857, once the British Crown had taken over the administration of India, the idea of a Lahore-based university began to take form.

These developments occurred amid the mid-Victorian boom of print and education in British India. Lithographic printing presses were on the rise and so was steam technology. Eventually, this boom in printing technologies provided a theatre for the aggressive politicisation of grammar, script and language along communal lines.

But in the late 19th century, students, local aristocrats, and colonial officials still had space to negotiate the creation of educational institutions that taught Persian, Sanskrit, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu alongside English.

GW Leitner, a Hungarian-born British linguist, became the institution’s first principal. He had previously taught at King’s College London and had been known for advocating indigenous education over English-only models. Leitner believed in building institutional infrastructure for regional language learning.

He founded the Anjuman-i-Punjab (Punjab Literary Society), launched journals and started a madrasa. He envisioned a university where European administrative concerns met regional language needs and where Persian, Sanskrit and Urdu could sit alongside European sciences and comparative theology.

At the second jalsa (meeting) of the anjuman, the following decisions were recorded: that a committee would form an Academic Senate and draft bylaws; that grammar books would be prepared in Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian; that a plan would be made to distribute literature among schools across the Punjab; and that examinations be held in all three languages.

The agenda was ambitious and multilingual from the outset.

The British bureaucracy was divided. One group hesitated when it came to funding the opening of a regional language institution of higher learning despite the jalsas undertaken by the anjuman.

Letters between provincial officials reveal concerns about how graduates of such a system would become alienated from their “fellow-citizens”.

As one Provincial Government letter dated 11 February 1868 put it: “Whoever has gained higher education instruction from within this new model have all become separated from their fellow-citizens. The ethical effects of this education are therefore defective.”

This was because Western-based regional language institutions of higher learning aimed at the general masses would, it was assumed, alienate people from each other and from the British Raj by entrenching provincial proclivities in quotidian and regional languages.

The archival material does not present a singular viewpoint here and both groups of British bureaucrats of the Raj were divided, one leaning towards hesitation when it came to regional language education.

I. Pleas to the Crown

In order to increase the fervor of the movement, Leitner brought together a separate committee of landholders, aristocrats, local princes and retired British officials, who drafted a petition addressed to the British Government of India.

This petition stated that the signatories supported the establishment of a university. Eventually signed by 77 people and appended with a note by Leitner, the petition stated that the petitioners would contribute a large share of funding themselves.

Within a few months, the larger aristocratic classes – including many Muslim and Hindu petitioners – had joined the call for a regional language university. The most forceful support came from Donald Friell McLeod and EC Bayley, both senior administrators in the Punjab government.

Letters from HM Durand and RH Davies suggested that the university would link practical knowledge with subcontinental literature and better enable clerks and civil servants to serve the local population.

Another meeting was held on September 11, 1860. During this meeting, academic curricula were debated and the publication of a college journal was proposed. From these discussions emerged the Anjuman-i-Punjab journal, which began to tackle local issues and were printed in regional language languages.

The anjuman sought to admit students of the highest calibre; the purpose of this university, which was established in the 1860s, would be to refresh regional language thought, and further, to spread finesse, urbanity, and propriety or shayastagi.

The anjuman and the university eventually became theatres where binaries such as refined and crude, and urban and rural cultures came to mingle. It was also, strangely, the anjuman’s idea that Hindi and Urdu language education would never be quite perfected without the teaching of Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit, which the British Indian Association agreed with.

II. A place where everyone could learn.

Within a few years of its launch, the university began a journal. The earliest volumes of the journal reflect this multilingualism. An essay might be published in English, with a Persian translation printed side-by-side. A history of Persian poets might be followed by a Sanskrit poem or an Urdu essay on moral instruction.

This was not an accident. Leitner viewed this multilingual production as part of a larger pedagogical plan: to preserve regional language knowledges while adapting to colonial expectations.

Under his stewardship, the Oriental College curriculum came to include comparative theology, classical literature, modern science, and political economy, all of which were taught in multiple languages.

Grammar books were prepared for Sanskrit, Urdu, Arabic and Persian. Translations were undertaken between English and Hindi, between Persian and Sanskrit, and between Urdu and Arabic.

This curriculum was not insulated from contemporary debates. As the colonial state leaned increasingly toward English-medium instruction, the Oriental College and its affiliate journal, the Oriental College Magazine, offered a counter-model.

These concerns were not anti-English. Rather, they embedded European and English questions within regional language frames, provincialising them in the process. It is no surprise, then, that in the early years of the twentieth century, the pages of regional language journals produced by institutions such as Lahore’s Oriental College became key forums for nationalist contestation – especially around the politics of language, nation, and ethnicity.

III. Printing pages from within the walls of the college

By the late 1870s, Oriental College Lahore had become a publishing institution in its own right. It published textbooks, lecture notes, dictionaries, and annotated editions of classical works.

Scholars such as Shibli Nomani and Altaf Hussain Hali participated in lectures and editorial boards. The college invited Sanskritists, Arabic grammarians, Persian historians and Urdu poets to contribute to its curriculum.

Shibli Nomani, later a foundational figure in modern Muslim thought, studied Arabic at the college and was involved in grammar book committees. European scholars such as Georg Thibaut, a Sanskritist and principal of the college, encouraged comparative philology.

One striking example of the college’s reach is its attraction of international scholars. Among them was MAR Barker, an American linguist and professor of Urdu, who studied at Punjab University and later directed the South Asian Studies department at the University of Minnesota.

Barker authored several Urdu grammars and even created a fictional language for his academic fantasy novels. His time at the college highlights its global footprint.

The college also hosted debates within the pages of its journal. One early entry debated whether regional languages were to be simplified to serve bureaucracy or enriched to serve poetry.

Another considered whether Hindi and Urdu were different languages or different registers of the same linguistic field. The articles of the journal from these meetings suggest that no consensus was ever reached, but that the act of debating itself was pedagogical.

IV. Post‑Partition and the Urdu Conference

In the immediate aftermath of Partition, Oriental College Lahore became one of the few institutions in Pakistan with a documented multilingual legacy. Its archives still held materials in Hindi, Sanskrit, Arabic, Urdu, and Persian. But institutional shifts began to narrow this scope.

A final All‑Pakistan Urdu Conference was held at the college in 1948 – the last great institutional mobilisation around regional language education at the institution.

The conference resolutions called for Urdu to be made the national language but also called for continued respect for regional languages. Reports from the event note that Sanskrit was no longer taught, that Hindi publications were discontinued and that most editorial committees were now Urdu-only.

Still, the conference served as a closing note in the college’s long history of multilingualism. The college’s history serves as a moment when past ambitions were remembered, even if no longer realised.

Conclusion

The clarion calls for regional universities were heard in surrounding provinces as well. In the late 1860s, similar petitions emerged in Delhi, Lucknow, and Bhopal. But it was Lahore that became the testing ground for regional language education as an institutional model.

What Oriental College Lahore offered was not an answer to colonialism, but a reorientation within it. The grammar books, petitions, lectures, and jalsa minutes were not marginal to the education system but were its very blueprint. They proposed that languages could coexist without hierarchy, that students could be trained in ethics without English, and that debate and pedagogy itself was a political act.

Vipin Krishna is a historian of language politics in South Asia.