It involved not just censoring certain representations of women and their cultural spaces, but also using the issue of ‘vulgar’ representations as a premise to marginalize certain languages and their literature.
But it is precisely the fact that gender seems self-evident which makes the study of gender interesting.This article takes the linguistic space of North India during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and tries to see how a nationalistic linguistic ideology that was shaping up at that time, creating Hindi and Urdu linguistic communities, used gender as a tool to portray and assert a masculinist vision of language and nation. This is not easy, for gender is so central to our understanding of ourselves and of the world that it is difficult to pull back and examine it from new perspectives. Doing this requires that we suspend what we are used to and what feels comfortable, and question some of our most fundamental beliefs. It is precisely because gender seems natural, and beliefs about gender seem to be obvious truth, that we need to step back and examine gender from a new perspective. As scholars and researchers, though, it is our job to look beyond what appears to be common sense to find not simply what truth might be behind it, but how it came to be common sense. The world swarms with ideas about gender – and these ideas are so commonplace that we take it for granted that they are true, accepting common adage as scientific fact.
Gender is embedded so thoroughly in our institutions, our actions, our beliefs, and our desires, that it appears to us to be completely natural. It is ever-present in conversation, humor, and conflict, and it is called upon to explain everything from driving styles to food preferences. We are surrounded by gender lore from the time we are very small.
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