The Hindi movement in south India was started in the year 1918 by Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi saw the need to unite the northern and southern states of the country in the greatest interest of integration of the nation, as Hindi was spoken by the largest section of the people of India. Therefore, he founded the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha at Madras to propagate the study of Hindi in the then Madras presidency and princely states of Banganapalle, Cochin, Hyderabad, Mysore, Pudukkottai, Sanduru and Travancore. The Sabha was inaugurated by Annie Besant on 17 June 1918.

The movement was inaugurated by the Annie Besant under the presidency at Gokhale hall in Madras. The first Hindi class was taken by Gandhi's son Devdas Gandhi. Hindi training schools were started in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. The number of students increased from 80 in 1919 to hundreds of thousands in subsequent years. Today the movement can claim more than 7000 workers working in 6000 centers, covering the entire area of the five states, viz. Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, with an area of 650,000 square kilometers with a population of about 120 million.

By 1927, the Hindi Prachar Sabha emerged as an independent organization, and Mahatma Gandhi remained its president until his death in 1948. During the silver jubilee celebrations of the sabha, Gandhi stayed for nearly 10 days on the sabha's premises.