Hmmm. From what the linked article says, the roots of the controversy go back well before the POD. It also doesn't seem like one that can be easily resolved: the Hindus wanted Hindi, the language of the majority, to have coequal status, while the Muslims wanted Urdu to maintain the primacy it had under the Moghuls. In the United Provinces, where the controversy became heated during the 1860s, Hindus were a large majority but Muslims were greatly overrepresented in the urban population and had a strong incentive to keep Urdu as a language of government and the Urdu script as the official form of writing. Any controversy that involves a majority wanting to take away a minority's entrenched privileges is guaranteed to be bitter, and I don't see that the politics would work out better in TTL than OTL.
What could happen is for someone - possibly even Sir Syed - to get Gandhi's idea of creating a combined Hindustani language written in both scripts. If that idea comes from a conciliatory Muslim (a Belloist who believes that communalism should transcend religion?) and is adopted by one or two leaders on the Hindu side, then it might convince Sir Syed that inter-religious cooperation still has a future. The actual implementation of Hindustani will probably remain the province of starry-eyed idealists - getting people to speak a new language, even one similar to (and based on) their own, is never an easy proposition - but the very fact that the idealists are promoting language unity rather than language separatism might be enough to keep the Muslims fully on board with the *INC.
I'd say that a missing eastern panhandle would be most likely. TTL's Civil War started off with the Confederates in a marginally better position (part of Missouri under a secessionist government); the Union more than made up for it later, but at the time of West Virginia's countersecession, the Confederacy might still hold the pro-secession counties in the east. If changes on that scale will show up on B_Munro's base map, that's the way to go.
Fair point. New Jersey had a householder franchise, and female householders could vote on the same terms as males; I believe this was also the case in Massachusetts during the 17th century, as well as some municipal governments in medieval Europe. This is one respect in which a householder franchise could actually be more egalitarian than universal male suffrage, although of course it is less so in other respects.
Anyway, I apologize for the delay in updating; I'm planning one more quick narrative update to the Egyptian timeline (in addition to the one just posted) to complete a story arc, and then I'll return to this one. Figure midweek for the French West Africa/Congo update, and the weekend for the Haiti-related interlude (part, but not all, of which will take place in Haiti).
