Languages of India
In 1946, the issue of national language was a bitterly contested subject in the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly of India, specifically what should be the language in which the Constitution of India is written and the language spoken during the proceedings of Parliament and thus deserving of the epithet "national". Members belonging to the northern parts of India insisted that the Constitution be drafted in Hindi with the unofficial translation in English. This was not agreed to by the drafting Committee on the grounds that English was much better to craft the nuanced prose on constitutional subjects. The efforts to make Hindi the pre-eminent language were bitterly resisted by the members from those parts of India where Hindi was not spoken natively. Eventually, a compromise was reached with Hindi in Devanagari script to be the official language of the union but for "fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution, the English Language shall continue to be used for all the official purposes of the Union for which it was being used immediately before such commencement".
Hindi–Urdu controversy
Hindi is a literary register of the Hindustani language, derived from the Khariboli dialect of the Hindi languages. A Persianized variant of Hindustani began to take shape during the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526 AD) and Mughal Empire (1526–1858 AD) in South Asia. Urdu, along with English, became the first official language of British India in 1850. Urdu was being written, spoken and translated to and from English in all courts, schools, official documents, and government institutes. Although the need to have a language for Hindus developed in the 1850s, the irrevocable momentum of the Hindi language movement occurred around 1880. Urdu is a name derived from the Turkic word "ordu" (army) or "orda". When the Turco-Persian Mughals who invaded the Indian subcontinent made camps, the colloquial Persian spoken by the soldiers, known as the "language of the camp", or ""Zaban-i-Ordu"", became gradually more and more Indianised, as they themselves settled and married into the local communities, until the dialect they spoke was readily intelligible to the native Hindu population.