India, Oct. 4 -- How do writing and literacy reshape the ways a language and its literature are imagined? Combining close readings of literary and scholarly works with the study of hundreds of handwritten books from the pre-colonial era, If All the World Were Paper explores this question in the context of Hindi, the most widely spoken language in India and the fourth most widely spoken language in the world today. Emerging onto the literary scene of the subcontinent in the mid-14th century, Hindi quickly acquired a place alongside "classical" languages such as Sanskrit and Persian as a medium of literature and scholarship. Here, Tyler W Williams forcefully argues for a new approach to the history of languages. This book is both a history of Hindi's literary formation and an urgent call to engage differently with the fragile multilingual archives of South Asia before time and neglect erase them....