Surprisingly enough, I recently found myself reading books! For someone like me, whose academic history with literature was mostly marked by red ink and total confusion, this is a plot twist of strange proportions.

I was reading “The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration” by Claire Alexander, Joya Chatterji, and Annu Jalais. As I turned the pages of Chapter 6, co-authored by Claire Alexander and Annu Jalais, I read a passage that hit me as almost comical, yet had rarely been stated so elegantly in academic prose:

"Yet if this ''Bihari'' population in Pakistani East Bengal was neither exclusively 'Bihari', it must be emphasized, nor was it uniformly 'Urdu-speaking'... given the association of Urdu with the Lucknow court and the professional services groups of the United Provinces, and its distinctive development as a literary language separate from bazaar Hindustani, it was hardly a demotic tongue."