In today’s India, where language policy fuels contentious debates from the imposition of Hindi in non-Hindi-speaking regions to the erosion of regional dialects in school curricula, one truth rings clear: language is never neutral. It is a carrier of culture, a marker of community, and a site of power. Behind every alphabet choice or vocabulary shift lies a battle over memory, belonging, and legitimacy. These present-day tensions echo a momentous literary and political upheaval in colonial North India in the late 19th century, a time when Hindi was reimagining itself and the future of its poetic tradition hung in the balance.