Nineteenth-century religious reform movements pressed modern Indian languages into proselytizing service.
Evidence
Into this complex and contradictory cultural landscape, however, came three further and quite different kinds of pressures. First there was the pressure of the nineteenth-century reform movements, which were almost always movements of religious reform, some of them deeply tinged with revivalism of one kind or another, even when their actual analyses and projects spilled far over into social and political domains of a secular type. Some of these, notably Brahmo, functioned as much through English as through the old and modern languages of India, but the great majority of these movements – Arya Samaj and Sanatan Dharm, for example, or the Dar-ul-Ulum of Deoband and (somewhat later) the Nadwat-ul-Ulema of Lucknow for Muslims – had the effect, first, of pressing the modern Indian languages into service for proselytizing, and, second, of greatly enhancing, at the same time, the prestige of scholarship in the classical language (Vedic and Sanskritic knowledges for Hindus, Arabic and Persian for Muslims) as the language of religious textuality; reform, after all, could not be carried out without linguistic mastery – and a certain absorption in the reliving, albeit somewhat differently – of that which was to be reformed. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 528