This week on NL Hafta, Abhinandan Sekhri, Raman Kirpal and Jayashree Arunachalam are joined by historian S Irfan Habib.

In the context of Fabindia’s ad campaign “Jashn-e-Riwaz”, which the company withdrew after backlash, Irfan points out that Urdu is not a religious language. “This whole association of language with religion is a political agenda,” he says. He also explains how languages survive when they’re “linked with bread and butter”.

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