India’s nationalist leaders showed varied bilingual and multilingual capabilities
Evidence
From Rammohun to Gandhi, and from Rajgopal Acharya to Maulana Muhammad Ali, there had been a great tradition of bilinguality and polyglot ease in communication. Nehru could speak Urdu and Hindi well but wrote only in English; Jinnah could not function much beyond English; Azad was an erudite scholar of Arabic and Persian, read English haltingly but was one of the great masters of Urdu in this century. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 119
Categorization
- SHARE: A concrete, memorable catalogue of Nehru, Jinnah, and Azad’s actual language abilities — nerdy enough that a specific friend into South Asian history would enjoy it.