The Nagari Pracharini Sabha, the oldest institution in the country devoted to the continuous advancement of the Hindi language and the Nagari script, was founded by three ninth-class students of Queen's Collegiate School — Babu Shyamsundar Das, Pandit Ramnarayan Mishra and Shivkumar Singh — seated together in the college hostel. The date of 16 July 1893 is thus honoured as the Sabha's foundation day. In the beginning its meetings were held in a stable in the Saptsagar quarter of Kashi. In time, on 18 February 1904, the institution's own building was completed. Babu Radhakrishna Das, cousin of Bharatendu Harishchandra, the father of modern Hindi, became its first president. Within the very first year, such eminences as Mahamahopadhyaya Pandit Sudhakar Dwivedi, George Abraham Grierson, Ambikadatt Vyas and Upadhyay Badrinarayan Chaudhary 'Premghan' had become its members.

When the institution was founded, Hindi could not be used in the courts or in government business, and the provision for Hindi education did not extend beyond the primary schools. Hindi lacked source works. Books such as the Premsagar, the Bihari Satsai, Tulsidas's Ramayana and Malik Muhammad Jayasi's Padmavat were the only ones held to be source works, and these were taught here and there as optional texts. The literature of Bharatendu and his circle remained confined to the study and reflection of literary men alone. Under the aegis of the Sabha and the leadership of Mahamana Madan Mohan Malaviya, sixty thousand distinguished citizens of the Hindi provinces petitioned the government and the courts for permission to use Hindi in the Devanagari script. The rajas and maharajas and the scholars of the Hindi region played a very large part in this campaign. A memorandum in favour of the Nagari script was laid before the government of the day; it is the first detailed, authoritative and universally accepted document establishing the scientific character of the Devanagari script. Many of the Sabha's workers were arrested in the course of this movement, and it is held to have been the first satyagraha undertaken for Hindi. The Sabha succeeded in this endeavour.

The British government had granted the Asiatic Society of Bengal the right to search out Sanskrit manuscripts in the country and to prepare a descriptive catalogue of them. The Sabha requested the government that the Asiatic Society also publish a catalogue of whatever Hindi books were found in the course of this search. The Society did this work for a year or two; the work for Hindi was then entrusted to the Sabha, on the condition that the Sabha might publish the descriptions, but that they would be in English and would be printed by the government. The Sabha accepted this and began afresh the work of searching out Hindi manuscripts. Its workers also began to publish, in triennial form, descriptions of the manuscripts found from village to village and town to town; under this programme the Sabha has brought to light the descriptions of lakhs of manuscripts. These searches were carried out in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and elsewhere. The descriptions obtained from this search are the peerless property of Hindi, and without them the work of research would be impossible. In this same connection the institution gathered into the Sabha's library so vast a collection of Hindi manuscripts as exists nowhere else in the world in a single place; among them are Sanskrit manuscripts as well, for whose study and examination research scholars and savants from across the world have continued to come to the Sabha.

The Asiatic Society began the publication of the Prithviraj Raso of Chand Bardai, the largest poetic work in the Indian languages — a poem greater in extent than any purana — but, owing to controversy, fell silent after publishing a few of its volumes. This work too the Sabha took upon itself, beginning in 1904 and bringing out this three-thousand-page work within a few years.

After the opening of the twentieth century the Sabha's achievement came to be honoured throughout the nation, and it began to receive the cooperation and the company of India's great personages. Among these were people of every class. Some of the Sabha's important works before Independence are these: in 1905 a language conference was held in Kashi, presided over by Sir Romesh Chandra Dutt, and at that conference, in the courtyard of the Nagari Pracharini Sabha, Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak declared that Hindi alone could be the language of India, that the Devanagari script should be used as an alternative script for all the languages of India, and that this work should be undertaken by the Sabha. From that time the Sabha has continually sought out and made possible new dimensions of progress in this direction.

In time Sir Asutosh Mookerjee became chairman of the Sabha's board of trustees, and afterwards Lala Lajpat Rai came to that office. Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru gave the Sabha financial and moral support in that era, amounting then to several thousand rupees. Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant began from 1908 to assist the Sabha with one rupee and fifty paise a month, and he began his social and political life by affiliating his own institution, the Prem Sabha, to the Nagari Pracharini Sabha. Among the rajas and maharajas of the time, the Kashi Naresh and the rulers of Udaipur, Gwalior, Khetri, Jodhpur, Bikaner, Kota, Bundi and Rewa extended it assistance; and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi too assisted it as a member of the executive committee, issuing in Young India in 1934 an appeal over his own signature for the Sabha's support. Pandit Motilal Nehru also assisted the Sabha with funds. C. Y. Chintamani consistently supported the Sabha's views on language in the Legislative Council, and Sir Sundar Lal and others likewise gave it their full assistance.

The oldest research journal in Hindi is the Nagari Pracharini Patrika, which is held in remarkable esteem throughout the world of scholarship. It has been appearing since 1897. It is worth remembering that its editorial board has included such great scholars as Babu Shyamsundar Das, Gaurishankar Hirachand Ojha, Acharya Ramchandra Shukla, Chandradhar Sharma Guleri, Vidyalankar, Dr Sampurnanand, Acharya Narendra Dev and Hazariprasad Dwivedi.

Saraswati is the first regulative journal of Hindi. The Nagari Pracharini Sabha inaugurated it and edited it for three years, thereafter entrusting its editorship to Acharya Mahavirprasad Dwivedi.

In its Varanasi premises the Sabha established the Aryabhasha Library, which holds the files of thousands of newspapers and journals, some fifty thousand manuscripts, and a vast collection of Hindi works otherwise unobtainable. It was made richer still by the bequests of Dr Shyamsundar Das, Pandit Ramnarayan Mishra, Hiranand Shastri — the revered father of Agyeya — Mayashankar Yajnik, Dr Sampurnanand, Nanddulare Vajpeyi, Pandey Bechan Sharma 'Ugra', Krishnadevprasad Gaur 'Bedhab Banarasi' and Acharya Mahavirprasad Dwivedi, who each dedicated their entire collections of books to this library. Research scholars from across the world have continued to benefit from it.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the Sabha undertook to prepare a dictionary of Hindi on the most modern scientific lines. The work was begun in 1904 and completed through twenty-five years of unremitting labour. Its editor was Babu Shyamsundar Das, and the board of assistant editors comprised the foremost scholars of the Hindi world: Shri Balkrishna Bhatt, Acharya Ramchandra Shukla, Shri Amir Singh, Shri Jaganmohan Varma, Lala Bhagwandin and Shri Ramchandra Varma. In that era, as today, this lexicon was held to be the most extensive and authoritative among the modern Indian languages.

In science and in various other subjects the Nagari Pracharini Sabha, with the cooperation of scholars from across India, framed a scientific terminology and set in motion the writing of serious books on scientific subjects.

In 1910 the Nagari Pracharini Sabha established the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan in its own courtyard, and from this Hindi Sahitya Sammelan arose the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha and the Rashtrabhasha Prachar Samiti, Wardha. Some sixty institutions of Hindi language and literature have been affiliated to it.

At the time the Sabha was founded Hindi possessed neither an authoritative grammar nor a history. With the cooperation of the foremost scholars of the Hindi world — Babu Shyamsundar Das, Acharya Mahavirprasad Dwivedi, Chandradhar Sharma Guleri, Lajjashankar Jha and others — the Sabha had authoritative books written. From Kamta Prasad Guru it had a grammar of the Hindi language prepared, which is the universally accepted grammar of Hindi. In the same way it had Acharya Ramchandra Shukla present a history of Hindi literature as the introduction to the Shabdasagar, a work held in singular esteem throughout the world to this day.

At Gandhiji's request the Sabha had the Nishkam system of shorthand devised for Hindi and established a school of shorthand, whose first students were Lal Bahadur Shastri, T. N. Singh and Algu Rai Shastri, and who through it reported the Cuttack Congress.

The Bharat Kala Bhavan, the most important art museum of North India, belongs originally to the Nagari Pracharini Sabha, and the Sabha transferred it to the Banaras Hindu University for its preservation, enrichment and development. The Sabha also organised lecture series on various scientific subjects in Hindi.

The Sabha instituted prizes for writing. It determined the present form of Hindi and laid down the policy of drawing words principally from Sanskrit and the other Indian languages in order to make Hindi intelligible — a policy that was accepted in the Constitution of India as well. This policy was determined at a conference of the Nagari Pracharini Sabha in the year 1934.

The Nagari Pracharini Sabha published the collected works of the older writers of Hindi, and those volumes remain to this day a treasury of the language. They number about a hundred.

The Sabha published the Hindi Vishwakosh in twelve volumes, to which several thousand scholars of national and international renown contributed their essays. Among them were Dr C. V. Raman, Gopinath Kaviraj, Rajagopalachari, Acharya Narendra Dev, Daulatram Kothari, Professor Barannikov and Dr Sampurnanand.

The Nagari Pracharini Sabha published the Brihat Itihas of Hindi literature in sixteen volumes, prepared collectively by more than a hundred scholars of national standing. That the history of any language should be presented at such length is an achievement of the intellectual life of this country. Among the scholars who, seated in the Nagari Pracharini Sabha, contributed to this work in independent India were Dr Ramprasad Tripathi, Dr Dhirendra Varma, Dr Phuldevsahay Varma, Dr Gorakhprasad, Dr Bhagwatsharan Upadhyay and Acharya Kishoridas Vajpeyi.

From their originals this institution presented translations of such works as the Humayunnama, the Akbarnama, the Jahangirnama, the Mughal Darbar, the Jangnama, the travel accounts of Hiuen Tsang and Fa-Hien, and ancient numismatics. The Abhinav Vyakaran composed by Acharya Kishoridas Vajpeyi was made possible under the aegis of the Sabha and was published under the title Hindi Shabdanushasan.