Hindi Diwas is celebrated on September 14 every year because on this day in 1949, the Constituent Assembly of India had adopted Hindi written in Devanagari script as the official language of the Republic of India. The fourth most widely spoken language in the world has been the medium of communication for Indians with a number of diverse mother tongues.

It is no wonder that Hindi has a centuries-long literary history. With social media dictating what content we consume, Hindi may not be getting the same space as English. We spoke to Ankush Kumar, Founder of Hindinama, a community that seeks to connect and interact with people who speak, write, and like Hindi and wish to see it established as a literary language. “Social media has generated interest in reading among the youth. Many literary platforms and publishing institutions have also made access to books easier which has served as a bridge between literature and readers,” said Ankush.

Historically, Hindi literature has been shaped by various female voices who’ve brought to the forefront the invisible stories of women. As readers, there is immense value in reading stories in our regional languages to discover real stories of women around us. We spoke to Rahul Srivastava, a millennial who has grown up reading Hindi literature, “The culture of female wordsmiths has been rooted deep in our history with several hymns and verses of Rigveda attributed to Brahmavadinis. From the devotional verses of Mirabai to poems on valor by Subhadra Kumari Chauhan, and stories questioning the traditional patriarchal domination by Krishna Sobti, female writers have done a profusion of remarkable work for centuries. To call them the bards of Hindi literature wouldn't be an overstatement."