The Hindi Heartland: A Study (Aleph, 2025)
The Hindi Heartland, by eminent journalist and author Ghazala Wahab, is a provocative and engaging deconstruction of the eponymous ethno-linguistic and geo-cultural formation that seems to exert disproportionate influence on Indian political life, public discourse, electoral destiny, and national outcomes.
Wahab defines the Hindi heartland geographically (Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, and Delhi), and she attempts to reveal it as the pivot of modern India. At the same time, she argues that this region is the country’s most persistently impoverished and socially fraught area, and, in diagnosing that backwardness, attempts to recover a more plural, historically layered understanding of the region. In that act, Wahab’s book is likely to be most welcomed by those who believe—or have experienced a reality wherein—majoritarian definitions of Indian ways of life tend to manifest as legally sanctioned realities.
The Hindi heartland is, according to Wahab, a sociopolitical configuration with its own discrete habits of thought and moral economy. Seen in that light, India’s problems of communal rifts and marginalization are perhaps not accidental eruptions. They are, unfortunately, the effects of a sustained set of practices—ranging from mob violence to administrative action—that in fact begin as everyday policing choices, such as the marginalization of the interests of minorities through economic boycotts, social shaming, and legalistic surveillance.
In one passage, Wahab discusses a viral video from Amroha in which a young boy and his brothers were expelled from school after a conflict over tiffin (allegedly containing “nonvegetarian” biriyani). There are more unspeakable instances, culminating in murders, in a larger catalogue of hate crimes allegedly committed along communal lines. She notes that, instead of empathy for the sufferers of such extrajudicial punitive action, the state often endorses public rituals of retribution—like bulldozer action—and valorizes alleged perpetrators of hatred against minorities. She also adds that new administrative practices have become ritualized in ways that curtail civil liberties and are often directed at Muslims, Dalits, and tribal communities. This supports one of her theses: India’s majoritarian moods are often seamlessly integrated into the instruments of the state—a state that she believes is predominantly “upper caste.”
One of the best aspects of the book is its restraint, which helps the reader attend to the credibility of the formation of the “Hindi Heartland” rather than to immediate outrage against it or to the author’s temerity. The book is an index of how lived experiences of minorities in India are seen and represented today in elite Indian public discourse and in global human-rights discourses—that is, minority lives characterized by fear, tactical withdrawal, everyday resilience, and sometimes complicity with majoritarian structures. More troublingly, as Wahab theorizes, when everyday rifts owing to religious differences do not manifest naturally, the state seems to foster them by other means, such as support for majoritarian religious processions that can spark anger and disorder.
It is not surprising that those like Wahab, who see the Hindi heartland possibly from outside—albeit with compassion—might think that the region’s socioeconomic backwardness contributes to an overt reliance on God, religion, and supra-constitutional mechanisms for the meanings of people’s lives. The question is whether there are complexities that are not discussed even in a book as clever and well-researched as Wahab’s.
For instance, this reviewer read Wahab’s book in Jharkhand—one of the states she counts within the Hindi heartland. Those living here know of landed communities who, on the basis of their administrative caste classification, may appear to belong to generally underprivileged sections but are nevertheless economically and socially influential. Further, the seemingly effortless pairing of “Dalits” and “Muslims,” for example, within the construct of the “Indian minority” is challenged by ground realities where this reviewer wrote these lines—where a large number of conflicts have arisen along communal lines between underprivileged Hindu groups and Muslims. That, however, does not gainsay the fact that caste atrocities have also been a significant part of this society.
Wahab’s attention to comparative socioeconomic positions among Hindi-heartland states, such as Bihar, is likely to astonish the reader. Goa, India’s smallest state, which had the highest per-capita income according to official 2021–2022 figures, recorded a per-capita income roughly ten times that of Bihar. Meanwhile, the most prosperous state in the Hindi heartland, Uttarakhand, stood at less than half of Goa’s per-capita income.
Juxtaposed with Wahab’s historical lens—which positions the Hindi heartland as a land of political strife rather than of religious crusades—is its role as a doorway for influences from Greeks, Turks, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Persians, Afghans, and others. What began under the British as a series of economic exploitations and selective readings of the region’s history has, Wahab claims, culminated in socioeconomic backwardness and an impoverished knowledge of its own pluralistic past—much to its own peril. But she also adds that the region is not merely a flotsam of colonial dispossessions and weaponized histories. It can become an icon of an India where people live and collaborate for collective struggles without the interference of the inimical sides of religious and ethnic identities.
Readers of Wahab’s book may find it useful to consult additional information and alternate theories—not to undermine but to supplement her framing of the Hindi heartland. The NITI Aayog’s Sustainable Development Goals Index has shown that almost every state in the Hindi heartland has improved recently. Uttar Pradesh’s SDG score leapt by 25 points between 2018 and 2023; Madhya Pradesh’s rose by 15 points; and Rajasthan and Bihar also made strong gains. Likewise, multidimensional poverty fell sharply from 2015–16 to 2019–21: Bihar (which had the highest poverty rate) saw its poor population drop from about 52 per cent to about 34 per cent; Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh reportedly now have roughly 22 per cent of their populations in multidimensional poverty. While many districts remain poor, broad indicators (literacy, health, and housing) have improved year by year in much of the Hindi-speaking belt, and outcomes vary widely by district. This nuance seems to be overlooked when we cast the label of “backward” onto the whole region.
Similarly, official crime statistics show that communal rioting in states like Uttar Pradesh declined: total riots reportedly fell from 8,990 in 2017 to 5,302 in 2021, and “communal riots” were minimal during those years. Courts have convicted accused individuals from all sides in communal cases. (This is not to deny miscarriages of justice; it cautiously suggests that claims of uniformly “selective” policing may require more evidence). In the same light, a more complex view of the region’s public religiosity—its temple pilgrimages and festivals—than simply seeing it as primarily aggressive or regressive is in order.
Importantly, Wahab does not disavow the positive aspects of India’s religious traditions. Her goal is to drive home a well-taken point about the misadventures that religious discourses create in the nation’s political life, especially in the Hindi heartland. Her mission is not to celebrate religious heritage nor to provide a complete picture of it; that may be someone else’s calling. And, a key milestone on that journey will surely be Wahab’s book.
References
Buzinde, C. N., Kalavar, J. M., Kohli, N., & Manuel-Navarrete, D. (2014). Emic understandings of Kumbh Mela pilgrimage experiences. Annals of Tourism Research, 49, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2014.08.001
NITI Aayog. (2024, July 12). Release of SDG India Index 2023–24: India accelerates progress towards the SDGs despite global headwinds. Press Information Bureau. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2032857®=3&lang=2
Pew Research Center. (2021, June 29). Religion in India: Tolerance and segregation. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/religion-in-india-tolerance-and-segregation/
United Nations Development Programme. (2023). National multidimensional poverty index: A progress review 2023. https://www.undp.org/india/national-multidimensional-poverty-index-progress-review-2023
Wahab, G. (2025). The Hindi heartland: A study. Aleph Book Company.
Arup K. Chatterjee 