About the Book: If All the World Were Paper explores how writing and literacy shaped the development of Hindi, one of the world’s most widely spoken languages, through detailed analysis of precolonial handwritten texts and literary works. By examining diverse materials—from illustrated Sufi romances to Bhakti singer’s textbooks—Tyler W. Williams reveals how Hindi emerged as a powerful vernacular literary and scholarly language alongside Sanskrit and Persian. This groundbreaking study not only traces Hindi’s literary formation but also calls for urgent preservation of South Asia’s fragile multilingual archives before they are lost.