Akhil P. Veetil (South Asia Studies / Comparative Literature, Penn) focuses on the predicaments of the Hindi-speaking intelligentsia in early postcolonial India, proposing that there was a rhetoric of moral harm that the Hindi intelligentsia perceived and articulated. For instance, at a “Banish English” Conference held in Ahmedabad, India in 1970, Ganesh Mantri, a participant, criticizes the English-speaking Indian elite for perceiving themselves as the carriers of the nation’s intelligence and wisdom. This conference was an extension of a larger social movement to remove colonial English from all domains of India’s new political project. For many Hindi-speaking intellectuals, this was a necessary step towards India’s self-rule. While there is insufficient evidence that this rhetoric gained currency among the Hindi-speaking followers, there was a lack of trust towards this class from speakers of other regional Indian languages. Taking this fraught context into consideration, how do we understand the role of the Hindi intelligentsia in comparison to those of English and other regional languages? How did this position between English and other regional languages shape the political and emotional orientation of the Hindi intelligentsia across the political spectrum? Veetil examines correspondences between Hindi leaders from the Socialist Party and the Indian National Congress roughly between mid 1950s to 1965 when, amidst great political unrest, the Indian government decided to use English and Hindi as two official languages.