URDU ARTICLE

IS URDU A RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE

A provocative inquiry into the linguistic history of the vernacular of India-Pakistan

By Syed-Mohsin Naquvi 9 July 2009

INTRODUCTIONWherever and whenever a new religion has taken roots in the

known human history there has always been a language in use among that group of people and similarly a culture associated with that group When such a movement begins and a new religion starts a new system is formulated and new laws are enunciated either by a person who claims to be an apostle or a prophet or by way of local social forces and prevailing circumstances Usually the leader(s) speak that language which had been in use in that group of people In some areas and times such a language had been used for hundreds of years before the advent of the new religion So all the documentation of new laws and rules is done in that language However as the population base following that religion expands and the followers of that religion migrate to new lands the rules and laws are transferred to the new languages and new documentation is produced Usually this change takes place over a number of generations

However there are two exceptions to that general rule that we have described above which we will bring to our readers presently Let us first see some examples in history of the general rule Christianity began in Bethlehem a city in Palestine Jesus Christ was born raised and had lived among the Jews a community of which he himself was a member It has been suggested by historical linguists that the language spoken among those people at that time was Syriac Some others have opined that it was Aramaic There is also an opinion that since the language of all religious work in the Judaic society was done in Hebrew Jesus Christ may actually have spoken his sermons in that language But nothing is 100 certain in this respect All such opinions are based on the evidence discovered so far by archaeologists historical linguists and philologists

Because of the fact that there is no known copy of the Book of Jesus Christ (a part of The New Testament1) in existence that dates

1 The New Testament as we know it was actually written by the early followers of Jesus Christ many years after the disappearance of Jesus The document contains

URDU- The First and the Last Religious Language by Syed-Mohsin Naquvi 1

back to the time of Christ we are unable to make a statement with any certainty on this Both Christian as well as Jewish scholars have ascertained that the language spoken by the prophet Moses and his people was Hebrew This is evident by the fact that there are numerous Hebrew words found in the Old Testament2 that we read today in the English language An ancient copy of the five books of the Pentateuch which includes (according to the Islamic point-of-view) parts of TAWRAAT (the Torah) Zuboor (the Psalms of David) and some other religious documents is the Vulgate The Vulgate is written in Latin An even older copy of the Bible is the Septuagint This is in the Greek language The Vulgate3 is dated to be of the 5th century AD while the Septuagint4 is considered to be of the 3rd century BC

Reuters news agency has just announced that another ancient Bible known as the Codex Sinaiticus has been completely digitized in its original Greek script after extensive work carried out in the UK Germany Egypt and Russia5

We know for certain that Latin was not the original languages of the Bible The Jewish and Christian scholarship had maintained that the books of the New Testament Bible were written in Koine Greek However there has been a minority group insisting that the New Testament was written in Aramaic This group has recently increased its presence on the Internet Friedman6 has identified five different authors and therefore five different periods during which the Old

sermons and sayings of Jesus Christ According to the Muslim belief Jesus Christ had a Book which was revealed to him and it is known as Injeel in the Qurrsquoan But no such book exists today in actuality Incidentally when The New Testament was translated into Arabic it came to be known as Injeel-e-Muqaddas I am sure this was an after thought by the Christian Arab translators under the influence of the holy Qurrsquoan

2 According to the Jewish and Christian scholars the writing of the Divine word or the Bible begins with Moses According to the Islamic belief there are five Divine books revealed to the five Great Apostles of God namely Noah Abraham Moses Jesus and Muhammad The Books of Noah and Abraham are only identified by the word suhuf this is a plural for saheefa meaning a written document The other three books are identified by names as Tawraat ndash the book of Moses Injeel- the book of Jesus and al-Qurrsquoan the Book of Muhammad The five books contained laws and were revealed to the five respective Apostles whose job it was to establish the Divine Law on earth among the human society Each new revelation superseded the previous one al-Qurrsquoan being the final one Alongwith the three named books of Laws there is also a fourth Book mentioned by name as Zuboor ndash the Book of Songs of David3 This is the oldest version of Latin Bible that contains the New Testament alongwith the Old Testament4 The word means 72 and it points to the fact that so many scholars sat down and collectively produced the work It is the Koine Greek translation of the original Hebrew Bible5 The news was announced on June 6 2009 For details visit the website httpcosmosbcstyahoocomupplayerpopuprn=3906861ampcl=14347129ampch=4226714ampsrc=news

6 Friedman RE Who Wrote The Bible Harper One New York 1997


Testament was compiled Similarly John Robinson7 has made a thorough study of the dates of writing of the 27 books of the New Testament A table of those dates and names of the books contained in both the Old Testament and the New Testament can be found at the websitehttpwwwcarmorgbiblebiblewhenhtm

Today the center of Catholic religion is in the Italian city of Vatican The Pope lives there and all his religious directives are issued from the Vatican in Latin They are then translated into other languages and sent out to various different countries The question arises why Latin Obviously there is history behind that

In the year 313 AD the Roman Emperor Constantine I decreed that Christianity would be accepted and established as the state religion across the Roman Empire When Jesus Christ preached his message Palestine was within the Roman Empire At that time the Roman authorities had opposed the movement in cahoots with the Jewish establishment and the early Christians were persecuted However after three centuries the politics had changed and the once persecuted religion had become the state religion Therefore all religious literature had to be translated into Greek (the then official language as well as that of the elite in the Roman Empire) and then later into Latin Latin was the area language spoken in and around Rome

As the Christians spread across the globe during the two thousand years Christianity found its new followers in various new geographical areas Christian teachings including the original Bible were rendered into the languages of those new areas The Standard English Bible is considered to be the King Jamesrsquo Version8 However in the USA a new American version of the Bible has been produced in the English language The Catholic Church has kept its religious documentation in Latin In July 1971 I visited the city of Cologne (Koeln) As I walked up to the raised ancient Cathedral of that city (the one with twin steeples) I noticed that there was a service in progress To my surprise that service was being conducted in Latin rather than in German

In juxtaposition to that evolution when we look at the development of the religion of Islam we notice that the Arabic language had been well established in the Arabian Peninsula some five hundred years before the birth of the Prophet (pbh) The literary Arabic that was spoken in and around the province of Hijaz was the standard language The word ldquoliteraryrdquo is a kind of an oxymoron here because that Arabic was purely spoken language ndash there was no writing All record was in poetical form and it was preserved in breasts of men that would transfer from generation to generation by a very well

7 Robinson John A T Redating The New Testament Wipf amp Stock Publishers 2000

8 The Catholic Bible is different from the King Jamesrsquo Version


established oral tradition ndash the system of rhyming words and an extensive use of metaphors allegories onomatopoeia and linguistic puns along with music would help the memorization and recital on a large scale

Qurrsquoan is the first ldquobookrdquo in the Arabic language which was preserved as a written document Qurrsquoan does mention the previous prophets and apostles in reverential terms Qurrsquoan claims that all the previous prophets preached and propagated the same religion the Truth from one god Allah But there were some differences in times their respective value systems and particularly the laws Those differences become significant from a political and social point-of-view when the two civilizations come in contact with each other especially the attitude of Christians and Muslims towards each other In recent times two interesting books have come out One is by a Christian scholar9 who was at Oxford and the other is by a Muslim scholar10 who is at Berkeley

The ancient Arabic poetry of the period of Jahiliyya (pre-Islamic) that has reached us shows that the Arabic language had acquired high literary standards by that time While the holy Qurrsquoan accepted a part of the current Arabic vocabulary which we see in words such as WAQT DUA NIKAH KITAB and MEERATH some other words have been accepted in the Qurrsquoan with new meanings which we see in words such as WAHY SALAT ZAKAT EEMAN and JANNAT

The relationship of the Arabic language with the religion of Islam is profound and has worked in two ways All basic principles laws rules on morals and ethics as well as the philosophy of the religion are documented in Arabic in which the terminologies and expressions of the 7th century Arab culture are hard to miss Some of the idioms are so clearly connected to the Arab life-style of that time For example we know that the city-dwellers of Makka were traveling businessmen Many of the verses of the holy Qurrsquoan revealed in Makka have the idiom of selling and buying in them Very much like a good bargain lets the buyerseller make a profit prayers and worship guarantee good rewards in the hereafter For example see Q2207 and Q316 In the city of Madinah on the other hand the greater part of the population was farmers In the Madinan part of the revelation we find that terminology For example see Q2223 in which onersquos women have been equated as onersquos own tilth Once a man has sowed the seeds in his field he takes care of the filed with his life and protects it with all the power and passion Once the field is ripe for harvesting he does it with love and care and also has full control over it That is how a head of the family should look after his family The point is Qurrsquoan spoke to the Arabs in their own terminologies and language with which they

9 Geoffrey Parrinder Jesus in the Qurrsquoan OneWorld Publications 199510 Hamid Algar Jesus in the Qurrsquoan His Reality Expounded in the Qurrsquoan Islamic Publications International 1999


were comfortable and thus made the communication that much more effective

Under the influence of the religion when Urdu came into being it accepted those Arabic words and idioms in its own vocabulary with those respective meanings For example if some one has sacrificed hisher religious values for some worldly and material gain in Urdu we say

یہ تم نے اپنے حق میں گھاٹے کا سودا کیا ہےWhile the above expression is a reflection of that buyingselling

idiom in the Qurrsquoan the poetry quoted below was composed by the 19th century Lucknow poet named Meer Anis The poet is describing a scene from the Battle of Karbala where the women in Imam Husaynrsquos camp are praying for safety and security The poet is describing the prayer in the speech of Imam Husaynrsquos sister named Zaynab The lines are composed in the most eloquent Urdu of Lucknow of that time Zaynab uses the expression of ldquothe glorious Banorsquos tilthrdquo for the family of Imam Husayn This obviously is a reflection of the Qurrsquoanic verse 2223 that we quoted above

خیمے میں جا کے شہ نے یہ دیکھا حرم کا حالککھلے ہیں سروں کے بال چہرے تو فق ہیں اور

زینب کی یہ دعا ہے کہ اے رب ذوا لجلالبچ جائے اس فساد سے خیر ا لنساء کا لال

بانوئے نیک نام کی کھیتی ہری رہے صندل سے مانگ بچوں سے گودی بھری رہے

David Matthewrsquos translation The King beheld the womenrsquos piteous stateTheir hair hung loose their faces pale and whiteZainab made a prayer lsquoOh God Most GreatSave Fatimarsquos darling in this awful fight May Banorsquos crop be green and fresh with sap And may she nurse new offspring in her lap11

On the other side of the equation the Arabic language went through some serious changes under the influence of the newly emerging religion There are numerous examples of that The prime 11 Matthews David The Battle of Karbala Rupa amp Co New Delhi 1995 translation of stanza no43 from the Marsiyya of Meer Anis


example is that all nouns in Arabic have a singular a plural and a dual as well as both masculine and feminine genders There is no plural for the word Allah neither is there a feminine There was a goddess named AL-LAAT in the pre-Islamic period But that concept and that word both have been completely dropped from the language All those words which the holy Qurrsquoan has used for Islamic terminologies were actually in existence before Islam They had their meanings and usage

But the Qurrsquoan changed that For example the word EEMAAN ایمان has

been used extensively in the Qurrsquoan In the Qurrsquoanic terminology it means lsquofaithrsquo However it has its lexical meaning The word is derived from the tri-literal root A-M-N which means lsquoto be safe and securersquo The fourth form derivative verbal noun from that root is EEMAAN which means lsquoto be at peace within onersquos heart and to be fearlessrsquo All other similar Qurrsquoanic words have their pre-Islamic meanings and usage

such as ووۃ رکوع صداق حد ووۃ زک etc صل

In the beginning paragraph we had pointed out two exceptions to the general rule about the relationship between a religion and the language of the progenitorsfollowers of that religion The first of those exceptions is the revival of the Hebrew language in the country of Israel and the second case is that of the evolution of Urdu in the Indo-Pak subcontinent

Israel was created as a separate country in the old land of Palestine in 1948 The people of the Judaic faith and practice were scattered all over the world Once the new country was established those people began migrating to the new country Those people came with their respective languages The problem was to create a new nation-state out of those linguistically diverse people The leaders of the country decided that the best instrument for that process would be a single language They revived a language that had been dead for a long time and gave it currency as the state language The Jewish Rabbis had always memorized some parts of the Torah and the Haggadic literature which they would recite during religious services So the old relationship between the Judaic religion and the Hebrew language was revived and a double sentimentality for the language was created among the Jewish population of the country of Israel Eventhough the Jews of Eastern Europe had created a language of their own which is known as Yiddish the Jews living in the new country made Hebrew their national identity Not only that the local Jewish population though very small in number who had been Arabic speaking they too accepted Hebrew as their new national language

THE RELIGIOUS FOUNDATION OF URDU


The story of the development of the Urdu language in India is also a very interesting one Arabs had always been avid travellers and sea-farers They would travel by land towards the north into the countries of the Byzantium They would also sail on business trips from the port of Aden and from other ports of the Persian Gulf to the Indus delta and all the way up to China The holy Qurrsquoan has briefly touched upon this in Sura Quraysh Islam spread from Arabia proper to Iraq and Iran very quickly That old tradition of travel and sea-faring continued all the same Turko-Iranian and Afghani warriors began attacking other countries in the name of spreading Islam to the four corners of the earth As communities of Muslims established themselves in the new countries experts belonging to various arts and professions also began arriving in the new areas Another type of people who came to new areas and settled were the holy men the Sufis

These three communities the soldiers the business people and the proselytizers all had one common need and a basic need --- the need to be able to communicate with the local indigenous population Thus the coming together of two cultures gave rise to a new language in northern areas of the Indian sub-continent

While the desire existed on both sides of the cultural divide to be able to communicate with the other side the cultural clash between the two was there all the same And we will have to accept that the cultural clash was based on the religious differences A natural consequence of that was that religious literature in Urdu began to be produced from day-one of its very inception

The authors of the book Cambridge History of Islam have dedicated one whole chapter on Urdu in their book Their rationale in including that chapter is that the sole cause of the evolution of the new language in India was the arrival of Muslims

The new arriving Muslim settlers needed a language so that they could communicate with the local population in India ndash a language that would be equally understandable to both of them This statement is often repeated among the academic elite as a matter of fact However if we consider the activities of the Sufi temples and shrines that began sprouting up across the country from as early a period as the tenth century we can see very clearly that the process of the evolution of the new language had yet another force working for it

Let us quote a passage from httpindia_resourcetripodcomsufihtml

For any civilization to blossom there has to be a certain intellectual and cultural space that is relatively free from dogma and hidebound traditions In the earliest examples of the Islamic courts particularly during the reign of the Abbasids in Baghdad there was an informal separation of church and state and Arab civilization was able to make important gains drawing inputs from a variety of eclectic sources - both indigenous and external (such as Indian and Mediterranean)

But once the paramountcy of the Qurrsquoan and the Sharirsquoat laws began to be more strictly enforced - the Islamic courts needed some alternate current to prevent the


newly established Islamic societies from slipping into the dark ages as had occurred in the Christian kingdoms of early medieval Europe Sufism thus emerged as a protestant and liberalizing current that eventually became the primary vehicle for intellectual advance and the dissemination of culture in societies governed by Islamic sovereigns

Sufi currents were essential in easing the transition from the earlier Hindu Buddhist Judaic Christian Manichean and Zoroastrian societies that had existed prior to the victory of the Islamic conquerors Sufism provided a way to reconcile some of the religious doctrines of these earlier cultural andor religious systems Sufi scholars went to great lengths in establishing a sense of continuity and evolution amongst the various revealed faiths - such as Judaism Christianity and Islam In helping to reconcile formally differing beliefs amongst Christians Manicheans Jews and Muslims the Sufis were instrumental in limiting political tensions and in facilitating a modicum of social peace and stability

This type of work was not inimical to the political interests of the Islamic conquerors and was generally tolerated although often Sufi scholars had to take great pains to reassure the orthodox Ulema that their scholarly treatises were not inconsistent with the worldview of Islam Kalabadhi (10th C Bukhara) author of the Taaruf and Persian scholar Hujwiri (11th C) author of the Kashf attempted to situate their work within the broad contours of Islamic tradition Hujwiri suggested that there was a place for high culture and spiritual development apart from the following of religious rules Although equally he emphasized that he was not challenging or rejecting anything contained in the Qurrsquoan

-------------------------------------------------------------------------- end quote

The Sufi shrines and temples thus established began attracting a steady stream of faithful visitors These visitors belonged to various different linguistic cultural and religious backgrounds They freely communicated with each other ndash a natural instinct among the Homo Sapien irrespective of colour and creed The Sufis on the other hand felt the need to translate Islamic teachings into the local languages Thus a mix of languages became current in such gatherings These Sufis who were mainly Farsi-speaking felt a two-fold need to document their teachings in the new language They realized that their teachings had to be easily understood by the locals They also realized that their future generations would not remain Farsi-speaking So to preserve the Islamic teachings for their own future generations they began producing religious literature in the new language

Mawlana Muhammad Husayn Azad has cited (in his AAB-E-HAYAAT) the first Urdu translation of the holy Qurrsquoan by Shah Abdul Qadir and has given its date of publication as 1807 AD I have seen a copy of this work In the preface to this book the author has said ldquoWe are writing this TAFSEER in the Hindi languagerdquo It is obvious from this quote since the entire work is printed in Urdu-Nastarsquoaleeq script that even during the 19th century the new language was being called HINDI rather than URDU Of course the word HINDI itself is a Farsi word


coined by the newcomer Muslims in India for the new language The word simply means ldquoof Hindrdquo

However the process of producing religious literature in HindiUrdu had begun a long time before that date

That brings us back to the original question When did Urdu begin as a language of the people of India

Not surprisingly scholars have differed on this Here is a sample of opinions

Nuqoosh Lahore had published an article in its ADABI MAARKE NUMBER The heading of the article is

کاردو کیوں اور کہاں پیدا ہوئی Urdu kiyon awr kahan payda hui

Muhammad Husayn Azad has asserted in his AAB-E-HAYAAT that Urdu was built on the base of Braj Bhasha That implies that the process began on the shores of the Yamuna River in and around Agra Hafiz Mahmoud Shirani is of the opinion that Urdursquos beginning is rooted in the bazaars of Punjab when in 1027 AD Mahmood Ghaznavi descended on that area with his Afghan hordes Professor Naseer-ud-Deen Hashmi is of the opinion that Urdu began in South India We will elaborate upon this view presently A fourth view is that Urdu began in the province of Sind

This last view is based on the fact that the Muslim Armies under the command of Muhammad bin Qasim had landed at the port city of Deebal12 at the Indus Delta in 712 AD According to the historian Farishteh Muhammad bin Qasim had arrived in Sind on his expedition with a 6000 strong Syrian army leaving Shiraz and passing through Mekran via the land route

The influence of the Arabic language which was the language of these early Muslim invaders had lasting effect on the local language Todayrsquos Sindhi language is written (right to left13) in a set of alphabets which is a modified set of the 27 original Arabic letters

AMIR KHUSRO HIS TIMES AND HIS WORKSIf we go through the oral tradition as well as documentation the

first traces of a language that could be seen as akin to modern Urdu is found in Amir Kusrorsquos poetry Amir Khusro had lived in Delhi during the period 1253-1325 AD In actuality Khusro was a genius in fine arts He wrote Farsi Ghazal as well as other poetry in local dialects (both Avadhi

12 Haig Malcolm Robert The Indus Delta Country A Memoir Chiefly on Its Ancient Geography and History first published from London in 1894 A copy of this book can be viewed at the University of Michigan website 13 As opposed to all other North Indian languages belonging to the Proto-Indo-European family which are written from left to right


as well as Braj Bhasha) that were current in the area He also produced music He is the progenitor of raga Ayman He is also a contemporary of the great saint of Delhi known as Nizam-ud-Deen Awliyya Khusro wrote songs of praise for Nizam-ud-Deen in the dialect of Braj Bhasha See the samples below

The first poem is all in Braj Bhasha It has been transcribed in Devnagari as well as in Nastarsquoaleeq for line-to-line comparison The next row gives transliteration in English on the left and the translation on the right

बहत कठिन ह डगर पनघट क

क स म भर लाऊ मधवा स मटक

पनिनया भरण क जो म गई थी$

दौampड़ झपट म र$ मटक फटक


खसर निनजोम क बला बला जोईऐ

लाजो रख म र घ-घट पट क

म र अचछ निनजोम निपया जो$


کی پنگھٹ ڈگر ہے کٹھن بہت

مٹکی سے مدھوا لائوں بھر میں کیسے

تھی گئی میں جو کو بھرن پنیا

پھٹکی مٹکی موری جھپٹ دوڑ


جائیے بل بل کے نجام خسرو

کی پٹ گھونگھٹ مورے رکھو لاج

جی پیا ننجام اچھے مورے


bahut KaThin hai Dagar panghaT ki kaisay main bhar laaun madhva say

maTki paniya bharan ko main jo gayi thi dauR jhapaT mori maTki phaTki

bahut kaThin hai Dagar panghaT ki Khusrau Nijaam ke bal bal jayyiye

laaj rakho moray ghoonghaT paT ki

more achey Nijam Piya jibahut kaThin hai Dagar panghaT ki

The road to the Well is much too difficult (I do not know) How to get my pot filled When I went to fill the water-pot In the furor I broke my pot Khusrau May you be the ransom time and again Oh Nijam Would you please take care of my veil (or self respect)

My dear NijamThe road to the well is much too difficult


The most interesting work of poetry that Khusro produced is the one where he mixes so artfully his Farsi shersquor with Braj Avadhi and Khari Boli poetry Of course poetry is a thing for recital more than writing See the following couplet by Khusro

Khusro dariya prem ka ulti va ki dhaarلٹیY خYسرو دریا پریم کا اواکی دھآر

Jo utra so doob gaya jo dooba so paar ترا سو ڈوب گیا جوY جو اڈوبا سو پار

Trans Khusro the river of love flows backwards anyone who enters it is drowned and the one who drowned came ashore Consider Khusrorsquos vocabulary hereDariya = Farsi word which actually means an oceanVa ki = this is from Braj Bhasha in Khari Boli it will become uskiUtra dooba doob gaya = the verb endings of long lsquoarsquo in these words indicate that they are all from Khari Boli14

Khusro had called his language as Hindavi In this couplet he is expressing the very standard and profound Sufi thought Anyone who is out to seek his(her) Lord has to lose himself(herself) in that process It is only after one has totally lost his(her) self in that search that one finds the Lord-Creator

Nizam-ud-Deen Awliyya died in the same year as Khusro (1325) Khusrorsquos poetry is profoundly influenced by the teachings of Nizam-ud-Deen This is what we have been arguing in this article that the evolving language that we now know as Urdu has a long history of Sufi influence in it

Anyone who has read Khusrorsquos work would be rightly justified in assuming that the Urdursquos sapling germinated in and around Delhi and flourished there It would also be logically correct to assume that since Urdu is a language in the PIE15 group of languages and the PIE languages have traditionally flourished in the northern part of the subcontinent

However we shall see presently that Urdursquos young sapling did not take roots in and around Delhi In fact it took roots in the Deccan

14 There are three basic vowels in the spoken word a i u All other vowels are variations on these three Urdu has borrowed its vowels from Khari Boli and they are ten in number Each verb has to end in one of the three basic vowel sounds Braj Bhasha verb endings are in lsquoursquo Khari Boli endings are in lsquoarsquo and those in Bundel Khandi dialect are in lsquoirsquo The reason that KHARI BOLI (standing or upright speech) is called as such is because in both the DEVNAGRI as well as in the NASTrsquoALEEQ script the long vowel lsquoarsquo is depicted by a vertical line ndash an upright standing line For greater technical details on vowels see McGregor Outline of Hindi Grammar OUP Delhi 197215 Proto-Indo-European family of languages


an area of Dravidian influences It did in later years spread across northern India though

There were many reasons for that which we will discuss presently According to Ahsan Marharvi in his book titled Tareekh-e-Nasr-e-Urdu the main reason for that was the event of shifting the capital of the Sultanate from Delhi to Daulatabad a city in the Deccan south India16

At this point we present a summary of the history of the Muslim rule in the Deccan

Arabs used to sail from both the Arabian coasts in the Persian Gulf from Aden as well as the Egyptians from Alexandria to the western coastal cities of India Their main stop used to be at Kerala

16 This was done by Muhammad Tughlaq Muhammad Tughlaqrsquos reign begins in Delhi the same year in which both Khusro and Nizam-ud-Deen Awliyya had passed away Marharvirsquos book can be seen at the website wwwdeedahwarcom


due to the active growth of spices in that region The Arabs were merchandisers and it was good business to buy and sell spices There are reports that many Arabs had settled down in Kerala long before Islam It is reported that Kerala was the first outpost of Arab Muslim early in the 7th century One name that is found in the Malyalam chronicles is that of Malik ibn Deenar There is also a mosque in Kerala dedicated to Malik It is not certain what was the exact time of Malik17 Was he a companion of the Prophet Some Malyalam chronicles date his coming to the Malbar coast in the year 644 AD That date obviously is 12 years after the passing away of the Prophet Some other reports suggest that one of the Malyalam kings actually became Muslim and proceeded to Hajj During that Hajj he is reported to have met with the Prophet of Islam That does not sound credible However that first Muslim settlement in the south western part of India did not seem to have an impact on the region either linguistically or culturally

The first real contact of Muslims with the Indian subcontinent is

accepted to be the invasion of the province of Sind by Muhammad bin Qasim We said lsquothe first real contactrsquo because it is this beginning of the Muslim culture in India which had left an indelible mark both culturally as well as linguistically on the sub-continent Then there is a series of such invasions in the Peshawar area and beyond up to Delhi We discuss those a little later

Some Muslim conquerors who came to Delhi via Punjab did not stay there Instead they moved on to the southern provinces of the subcontinent and established themselves in that part of the subcontinent In the 14th century two sizable kingdoms were established in the Deccan one was the Bahmani Sultanate of Bijapur and the other was the Qutub-Shahi Kingdom of Golcunda In 1347 the Turkish military ruler named Ala-ud-deen Bahman Shah established the greater Bahmani Sultanate of Bijapur This Sultanate extended from the shores of Bay of Bengal in the East (todayrsquos Chenai or Madras)) all the way to the shores of Arabian Sea (todayrsquos Maharashtra and Bombay) Its northern limits began at the foot of the Vindhyachal to the center of the triangle of the peninsula in the south (including Karnatak) The capital of the Bahmani kingdom was in Bidar which in those times was known as Muhammadabad That Sultanate flourished for the good part of two hundred years The Sultanate began to weaken in the early parts of the 16th century and finally it broke up into smaller parts In 1490 Berar broke off and became an independent state The capital city of Bidar became an independent kingdom in 1518 About the same time Sultan Quli Qutub al-Mulk established the Qutub Shahi kingdom at Golcunda This is the same area where the 17 My research on the life and times of Malik bin Deenar is not completed yet As soon as I get that information I will supplement this text accordingly


modern day city of Hyderabad is located The ancient fort of Golcunda is located some eleven kilometers outside of the city of Hyderabad This was the most powerful kingdom in the Deccan and it lasted for 171 years The Mughal king Aurangzeb conquered it in 1687 The fifth king of that kingdom known as Quli Qutub Shah is considered to be the first Urdu poet who had his own Deevan18

BAHMANI KINGDOM OF THE DECCAN IN INDIA

On the other side Ahmad Nizam Shah had established the Nizam Shahi kingdom at Ahmadnagar in 1494 The city of Ahmadnagar still 18 A documented collection of poetry


exists today with that name in the province of Maharashtra in India which has a majority Muslim population It was at Ahmadnagar that an illustrious woman regent named Chand Bibi had ruled for ten years(1580-90) During her reign as regent the Mughal king Akbar had attacked Bijapur which was successfully repulsed under the leadership of Chand Bibi After the break up of the greater Bahmani Kingdom Ibrahim Adil Shah established the Adil-Shahi Sultanate at Bijapur in 1527 which lasted until 168619

Fine arts literature and architecture flourished during all the Deccan kingdoms As we pointed out Quli Qutub Shah wrote poetry specifically Marsiyya for the martyrs of Karbala He used the most popular language of his time that was understood by the Telgu-speaking indigenous people as well as by the Muslim settlers He thus introduced Islam and particularly a loving and passionate portrait of the Prophet of Islam and his family to the local population Chand Bibi in spite of being a woman regent knew Arabic Farsi Turkish as well as Telgu and Tamil languages and she had a great presence among her subjects ndash most of whom were Dravidian Hindus So we can see that the society in Deccan was evolving on a very pluralistic platform ndash pluralism that was rooted in the popular language

Why was it that the Delhi kings could not do anything to strengthen the development of the language during the 14th and 15th centuries in spite of the fact that Khusro had started his work on the language in Delhi as early as the 1300s As opposed to that the kings in the Deccan were able to popularize the language The main reason as we stated above was the fact that the Delhi Sultans and conquerors were much too busy in the palace intrigues killings and lootings in the area to establish their own rule They were neither inclined to any work on language nor did they have the time It is quite clear from these historical facts that the kings who established themselves in the Deccan were made of a different human material and their preferences in life were different than those of the Delhi kings Not only did they write poetry in the new vernacular that was developing in the area they chose a dialect that was easily understood by all classes of people in the society and they also chose topics for their poetry which appealed to every class and every section of the society

THE BEGINNING OF THE SUFIS IN INDIANearly a hundred years before the time of Khusro and Nizam-ud-

Deen another Sufi of great piety and knowledge had come to India and had settled in Rajasthan Khwaja Mursquoeen-Ud-Deen Chishti was born in 19 Brief history of the Deccan kingdoms taken from McLeod John The History of India Greenwood Press 2002 pp 46-47


1142 in Seestan Iran He had moved through (todayrsquos) Afghanistan and after a short stay first in Lahore and then in Delhi he had moved to Rajasthan and had settled down in Ajmer where he passed away in 1236 AD So after his death his place of burial in Ajmer became a place of pilgrimage for Hindus and Muslims alike That was because of his teachings which were based on pluralism tolerance and love for the universal human brotherhood It is likely that by the mixing of the Muslim immigrants and the indigenous Hindu population at that shrine a mixed spoken language developed in that area It is also likely that that spoken language spread out into other neighbouring areas

There are many other Sufi saints who came to India and had settled in different parts of the country Many of those are nameless local saints whose gravesites are adorned by local people where they go to show their devotion and gratitude for their fulfilled wishes and vows20

SOUTH INDIA AND AJMER IN RAJASTHAN

20 See for example Russell Ralph Islam in A Pakistan Village Some Impressions article in his book ndash How Not to Write a History of Urdu Literature OUP 1999


Within a century or so of Khwaja Muinuddin Hasan Sijzi21 establishing a Khanqah22 at Ajmer the cultural landscape of the subcontinent came to be dominated by a large number of khanqahs tracing their lineage from the great Shaikh and his successors Centers of other Sufi silsilas23 did emerge but it was rare to see any of them acquiring a long-lasting a status in its respective area as most of the Chishti khanqahs came to command This initial phenomenal success is often explained in terms of the cosmopolitanism of the Chishtis and their ability to identify themselves with the concerns of the masses rather than with only those of the elite or ruling classes At the same time one can notice a tendency to reject the religious exclusivism and the narrow limits set out by the jurists These early Chishtis seldom practised adherence to a particular school of law Enough data exists from various Chishtis centers in northern and southern India to enable a bold generalization on the issue of religious pluralityhelliphellip24

At this point let us have a brief overview of the history of Muslim raids and conquests in the Punjab and Delhi In 997 AD Mahmoud Ghaznavi had established himself as the ruler of Ghazni Mahmoud was a Perso-Turk from his fatherrsquos side as well as from his motherrsquos side His father was Subuktageen of Ghazni and his motherrsquos father was Alaptageen He attacked the Gandhara kingdom around Peshawar in 1000 AD He then attacked Multan which was at that time under the control of the Ismaili Fatimi rulers That endeared him to the Abbasi rulers in Baghdad From then on he ravaged the North Indian kingdoms every year in the name of Islam destroying temples and looting their wealth all the way up to Gujrat This continued until the year of his death that was 1030 AD25

Mahmoud Ghaznavi is the first Muslim conqueror who had coined himself as Sultan Mahmoud is a unique commander who is rated alongside Alexander the Great in that he was never defeated on the battlefield by any enemy His character is though controversial in history

The first conqueror who actually established a Muslim kingdom in Punjab and up to Delhi is Muhammad Ghawri He too came from Ghazni and defeated Prithivi Raj Chawhan whose kingdom had extended from Delhi to Rajasthan This was in 1173 AD

It was around this time or sometime soon after that Khwaja Mursquoeen-Ud-Deen Chishti had arrived in India That also explains why the Khwaja proceeded all the way to Ajmer He wanted to take his message to the farthest end of the Muslim Sultanate

21 This is the same person whom we have identified above as Mueen-ud-Deen Chishti22 A Sufi temple23 The word means lsquoa chainrsquo and it is used in Sufi terminology to indicate the four lineages24 Jafri Syed Zaheer Husain Religious Plurality in the Chishti Tradition article in Malik and Reifeld p221-22225 Kulke Herman and Rothermund Dietmar A History of India Routledge 2004 pp163-165


Muhammad Ghawri had no children of his own Although he himself was an Afghan his contingent was full of Turk soldiers Ghawri had treated his soldiers like his own sons After him the kingdom of Delhi passed to those soldiers The most prominent among them were Sultan Qutub-ud-Deen Aybak Sultan Iltutmash and his daughter Razia Sultan According to John Mcleod26 Delhi which had been an economic and communications center in North India but it was a never the capital of any state It was Sultan Iltutmash who established Delhi as the capital of his Sultanate first time in history of India The cityrsquos glory and its importance as the capital of India has never waned since This dynasty of Turk Sultanate was threatened first by the Mongols However Kulke and Rothermund have paid rich tribute to Iltutmash for resisting the Mongol invasion and holding his ground Not only that but actually for establishing the Delhi Sultanate in 1206 against those odds while the rest of Central and South Asia had succumbed to the Mongol onslaught27 And then it was replaced by the Balbans Another Afghani Commander named Jalal-ud-Deen Khilji took over the Delhi Sultanate in1290 AD

Jalal-ud-Deen was a very kind ruler His nephew Ala-ud-Deen conspired against him and had him assassinated by trickery He then took over the Sultanate for himself Ala-ud-Deen extended his kingdom and he could be called the first Muslim king of India Ala-ud-Deenrsquos rule is marked with conquests but also with extensive ravaging of Hindu temples and the erecting of mosques in place of those destroyed Hindu temples The signs of that destruction and reconstruction can be found all the way from Gujrat to Benaras According to one report Ala-ud-Deen Khilji had attacked the fort of Chittawr in 1303 AD at the head of a huge army reportedly lusting for a Rajput princess named Padmani While the Rajput young men came out of the fort with a vow to fight till death when the princess saw how hopeless the cause was she along with other 700 women gave herself up to the flames of JAWHAR This was an old Rajput tradition that women would die rather than allow a ldquodirty infidel28rdquo to touch them The Khilji dynasty came to an end in 1316 In 1321 Giyas-ud-Deen Tughlaq established the Tughlaq kingdom at Delhi In 1325 Muhammad Tughlaq came to rule the Delhi Sultanate after Ghiyas-ud-Deen This is the same year when both Amir Khusro and Nizam-ud-Deen Awliyya passed away in Delhi Muhamamd Tughlaq was an eccenetric He took the unwise decision to move the capital of the kingdom from Delhi to Dawlatabad in the Deccan Hundreds of people

26 McLeod John The History of India Greenwood Press 2002 p 3527 Kulke Herman and Rothermund Dietmar A History of India Routledge 2004 p16828 That is how early Muslim warriors and rulers came to be identified among the indigenous Hindu population There are references in the existing Hindi poetry to such epithets


died during the move due to bad logistics Muhamamd Tughlaq had appointed Ala-ud-Din Bahman another Turkic commander as his governor in the Bijapur district It was this same governor29 who declared his own rule at Bijapur and had established the greater Bahmani Kingdom in 1347 as we have explained above30 Towards the 1390s the Tughlaq kingdom was showing weaknesses and finally it came to its end in 1398

The main cause and the trigger event for that was the disastrous invasion of North India by Timur the Lame31 His armies ravaged the city of Delhi for three days killing people indiscriminately and looting property32 Order was restored by an Afghan commander named Afghan Khizr Khan after ten years of chaotic rule at Delhi This was the beginning of the Syed Dynasty of the Lodhis at Delhi The Lodhi dynasty of Delhi began in 1414 AD which lasted for over a century Sikandar Lodhi who ruled during 1489-1517 moved the capital of the Sultanate from Delhi to Agra33 where it would remain until the middle of the Mughal period Babur establishes the beginnings of the Mughal kingdom at Delhi by defeating Ibraheem Lodhi in 1526

As we can see from this brief overview on the one side there was all that invasion by foreign raiders palace intrigue killing and looting going around Punjab and Delhi on the other side Muslim Sufis were coming to India and settling down in various parts of the country spreading their message of love tolerance pluralism and of course Islamic values

Both those forces working in parallel had influenced the evolution of Urdu The fighting soldiers and conquerors were imbued with a militant philosophy of Islam and believed in forcing their way into other peoplersquos life-style to spread Islam in the world This was the force propagating an exclusivist-elitist thinking The Sufis on the other hand were motivated by the universal human brotherhood ndash also a factor in Islamic philosophy and actually an inclusivist attitude Their message gave rise to a very strong current of pluralism tolerance and love in the society where Urdu was evolving It was fortunate for the new language to have not been associated with the early conquerors in any big way They all used the language nevertheless but they were not in a position to influence the language in its natural evolution Urdu was not blessed with any support from any kingrsquos court until first in the Muslim kingdoms established during the 14th century in the southern areas of India the Deccan and then in the 19th century at the 29 Stein has mentioned his name as Zafar Khan see Stein Burton A History of India Wiley-Blackwell 1998 p 15130 McLeod p 4631 In typical Eastern chronicles he is known as Timur Lung the Anglicised name is Tamerlane32 McLeod pp3833 Ibid pp 39


declining Mughal Court of Delhi By that time the Sufisrsquo message and influence had already made its mark on the language This language had evolved by way of people of different religious and cultural backgrounds mixing together freely albeit in a religious ambience inside Sufi shrines

However the military adventures (or misadventures) of the Ghaznavis and the Khlijis and their like did damage the cause of Urdu to a great extent Eventhough these raiders and conquerors were fighting in the name of Islam a cause they much needed to arouse the fervour of their own soldiers they were far removed from the true spirit of Islam The comment made in the quotation below is only an academic observation and a very recent one

Furthermore the main reason for religious wars appear to have been not so much animosity between the religions themselves but rather the obsession with or the thirst for power on the part of individuals and human groups (realms dynasties and nations) where religion has been used in order to satisfy personal and collective ambition With regard finally to contemporary conflicts information must be checked carefully and critically before it is simply ascribed to religious motivations34

At the popular level that fine point was difficult to be understood The large majority of the Hindu population could not separate the looting and plunder done by the Muslim soldiers under the command of the Ghaznavis and the Khiljis from the evolution of the Urdu language which to them was purely a Muslim language The Muslims of India were seen and are still seen as the heirs of the Ghaznavis and the Khiljis of the past centuries That has undermined the work done on pluralism by the Sufis As a consequence it has been hurting the cause of Urdu as a language of the masses That is in addition to the ongoing sectarian conflict between the two communities in India that has lasted to this day

PLURALISM IN URDUIn spite of that strong conflict Urdu did grow and evolve in a

very pluralistic culture As Muslim settlements began appearing in almost every part of the subcontinent a system of communication cultural exchange in the form of attending each otherrsquos festivals weddings and other social events as well as business transactions did give rise to understanding and sympathy at an extensive scale The Sufis played a very important part in that process Of course a common language played yet a greater role in that process

Let us bring some specific and concrete examples to support our views here

34 Troll Christian W Plurality of Religion and Plurality in Religion in Malik and Reifeld Religious Pluralism In South Asia and Europe OUP New Delhi 2005 p83


Consider the word JAWHAR as used in the paragraph above How did this terminology become current among the Rajput rulers of Rajhastan The tradition of the women burning themselves to death rather than surrendering their selves to a Muslim invader must be inherently Rajput35 But where did the name JAWHAR KI JWALA come from The word JWALA is of Sanskrit origin But JAWHAR36 is an Arabic word which is variably translated as lsquothe essencersquo lsquomettlersquo lsquojewelrsquo and the such like This was the time when the Rajputs had been fighting the Muslim invaders How could they accept the hated invaderrsquos language to define one of their own traditions

Our contention is that such language became current and was accepted in the vernacular only because of the influence of the Sufi saints who had settled in the area By the time Ala-ud-Deen Khilji attacked the fort of Chittawr three generations had passed after the settlement of the Chishti Dargah at Ajmer Chittawr is located in the province of Mewar (a part of larger Rajhastan) some 150 miles south from Ajmer

Another Rajput princess named Mira Bai was born in 1498 AD in a town named Kurkhi which is located some 12 miles south of Ajmer By that time three centuries had passed since the settlement of the Ajmer shrine It is very likely that the stream of devotees visiting the shrine had multiplied not only that but new shanty towns must have come about around the general area of the shrine These visitors belonged to various different classes of people and they used a mixed vernacular That spoken language had even filtered inside the Rajput palaces Mira Bai was married to another prince in the area She was widowed young Soon after the death of her husband she declared herself to be a devotee of Lord Krishna She wrote poetry and sang those songs of devotion openly She became a JOGAN37 and wandered around singing her songs of devotion It is not unlikely that she had visited the shrine at Ajmer and spent time there Let us look at some of her poetry

पनितया- म क स लिलाख پتیاں میں کیسے لکھوں लिलाखया र$

न जोए لکھیو ری نہ جائے

35 Please note that the concept of SATI or the widow burning herself on the funeral pyre of her dead husband is totally different from this36 I am grateful to our learned friend CMNaim for pointing out that the word JAWHAR could be a variant of JIV-HARAN which means suicide It is very plausible that the RAjput women would jump in fire anticipating the killing of their own men in battle field and that would be another form of the tradition of SATI37 HindiUrdu word for a woman saint who wanders from place to place


कलाम धरत मर कर कमपत ह نمرو کر کمپت ہے کلم دھرت नन रह झड़ लाए نین رہے جھڑ لائے

PatiyaN maiN kayse likhuNLikhyo ri na jarsquoeKalam dharat mero kar kampat haiNayn rahe jhaR larsquoe

Trans how may I write a letter I cannot

When I pick up the pen my hand tremblesAnd my eyes begin shedding tears

The interesting word here is lsquokalamrsquo another purely Arabic word38 The influence of the local dialect is very apparent The soft guttural Arabic sound has been replaced by the Sanskritic lsquoKrsquo In the larger part of India this word is extensively used and it is pronounced as depicted here This is not an isolated instance Mirarsquos poetry is replete with words such as lsquomahalrsquo (Arabic for palace) lsquoawaazrsquo (Farsi for voices) and lsquotaraajarsquo (a distortion of the Arabic Taraazu with the lsquozrsquo sound replaced by the Sanskrit lsquojrsquo) We will quote some more examples of Meera Bairsquos poetry presently

How were the proud Rajputs accepting the language of their avowed enemies Not only that how was this language seeping through indoors to the women folk

We have to accept that this new vernacular had been taking shape naturally without any force or pressure from the conquerors

Keeping this model in view I am going to make yet another claim It is very likely actually strongly likely that such groups of mixed people had come about in many other parts of India and in all those groups a mixed spoken language like that of Meera Bairsquos was developing Now we have lost the actual hard evidence to that in history but the circumstantial evidence is there All such groups with their own newly developed dialects were instrumental in the shaping of a new vernacular in Northern India which we now know as Urdu

38 The word in Arabic means lsquoto cutrsquo lsquoto trimrsquo or lsquoto prunersquo In the olden days pens were made out of reed The reed would be cut into a manageable size then its end would be trimmed into a flat and thin point which would be trimmed to make a nib-like end for writing The English word lsquopenrsquo is derived from the Latin lsquopennarsquo which means lsquoa featherrsquo That is because in Europe writing was done with a quill which was made by trimming the hollow shaft at the end of a birdrsquos feather The original PIE speakers must have had a word for lsquopenrsquo which is now lost It is interesting that the Indian languages have also lost that word and they are extensively using the Arabic lsquoqalamrsquo for it


As we quoted above every province of North India is claiming to be the original home of Urdu I do not consider this to be a clash of opinions and views This only goes to show the intra-country universality of the language


THE 20TH CENTURY LANGUAGE POLITICS IN INDIAThe Indian nationalist leader named MKGandhi had returned to

India in 1916 from South Africa after he had campaigned in that country very successfully for the rights of the people of Indian descent The Congress party had already been formed and the Indian Independence Movement was visible A part of that movement was the new poetry that had emerged in India Before we go into that topic let us follow the time line a little further Before the arrival of MK Gandhi on the Indian political scene the Congress Party had a very pluralistic and secular outlook and the partyrsquos structure was also based on the pluralism that was a part of the Indian social milieu The party was actually formed in 1885 on the suggestion of a British civil servant named Allan Octavian Hume The main purpose and aim of the party was to create a forum for dialogue between the British Government and the educated Indian elite In the early days there were such people at the helm of the party as Dada Bhai Naoroji (a Parsi) and a secularist MA Jinnah had admired Naoroji from his student days in London when Naoroji had stood in elections for a seat in the British Parliament and had won it There was though a very strong lobby of Hindu nationalists in the Party from the earliest days When the party took its political character those colours became very apparent Muslim leaders such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan who had a keen eye for such movements had seen it earlier on and had looked at the Congress Party with suspicion Jinnah himself was a secularist and he was hailed as the lsquoapostle of Hindu-Muslim unityrsquo by a colleague He therefore joined the Congress Party in 1896 right after his return from England and becoming a barrister Sir Syed passed away in 1899 when Jinnah was a young practicing lawyer in Bombay and also active in politics However during his lifetime Sir Syed had made the momentous announcement urging the Muslims of India to accept and declare Urdu as their national language All indications were that Urdu had become the lingua franca of the larger Indian population and it was freely accepted by Indians of all classes and interest groups In 1906 when the Muslim League was formed Jinnah refused to join it saying that it was much too religion-oriented However there were factions showing up in the ranks of the Congress Party There were some among the leadership cadres who were looking to a very strong Hindu-nationalist stamp on the party The name of Bal Gangadhar Tilak was at the top of that list39 It was Tilak who had used the term swaraj for the future of India Such a strong nationalistic slogan was a red flag for both the secularists as well as the Muslim leadership However soon the secularists were able to force extremists such as Tilak out of the party But the respite turned

39 It is interesting to note here that Tilak was charged with the crime of sedition by the British Government It was the young Jinnah who had defended Tilak in his trial Jinnah had pleaded the case brilliantly but Tilak had lost and he was sent to prison


out to be only temporary Gandhirsquos leadership fed a very strong dose of Hindu nationalism in the party While conservative and people strongly oriented towards religion such as Vallabh Bhai Patel and Pandit Ballabh Pant rose under Gandhirsquos tutelage more enlightened people such as Nehru with his secular-socialistic agenda had to take a back seat when it came to the language politics

Most prominent leaders published their autobiographies several years before the actual partition of India in 1947 Nehru wrote his MERI KAHAANI which was all in beautiful Urdu Dr Rajendra Prasad published his biography which was printed in Devnagari script but the language is uncannily Urdu Moreover the involvement of a Muslim cleric in his early education was highlighted Here is an excerpt

Gandhi wrote his biography in English which was later translated into Hindi and published only in Devnagari script

Jinnah had gone into a self-imposed exile to London when the negotiations at the 1916 Lucknow Pact failed between the Congress Party and the Muslim League It was not until 1934 that he was persuaded back to India by the Muslim League leadership to take charge of the Party which he did and led it into the formation of Pakistan

Jinnah was a Sindhi by virtue of the place of his birth and a Gujrati by way of his community association ethnically he was a converted Rajput However he had become totally anglicized while living in England He spoke absolutely immaculate English But when Pakistan was created he declared Urdu as the national language of the country This was a very perceptive and far-reaching decision He knew that the Muslims of Pakistan who came from different provinces and therefore from diverse cultural backgrounds could only be united into one nation-state by way of a common language

The country of Israel would repeat the same technique a year later to create a unified nation in 1948 While the experiment was very successful in Israel it did not work in Pakistan and the country of Bangla Desh was formed only 25 years later on the language issue out of the Eastern Wing of Pakistan It was a great achievement for Jinnah to have been able to persuade the Bengalis in the first place to accept Urdu as the national language of the one country The fact that the country lasted for 25 years indicates that the people allowed one whole generation to pass before they took the decision to separate The experiment could have worked had there not been a 1000 mile gap between the two wings of the country Of course ineptness of the successive governments and the military dictatorship of General Ayub Khan only aggravated the problem


THE BOLLYWOOD FILM INDUSTRY HELPS PROMOTE PLURALISM WITH URDU

The Indian film industry began with three separate and independent establishments(1) Prabhat (1929) in Poona(2) BN Sircars New Theatres Ltd in Calcutta (established in 1930) (3) Himanshu Rais Bombay Talkies (1934) in Bombay These were all business ventures relying on the demands of the times No government support was involved in any of the above ventures Then the industry was so fortunate to find a genius such as Himanshu Rai He was a very educated man Rai was born into a wealthy Bengali family which owned a private theatre He took a Law degree from the University of Calcutta and studied with Tagore at Shantiniketan in Switzerland He trained as a lawyer in London in the early 1920s and also began acting in plays there amongst them Niranjan Pals The Goddess Himanshu Rai had the vision along with the intellect for fine art to explore the most modern technology for his venture And he used it Rai collaborated with Germanys famous studio UFA and made Shiraz (1928) and A Throw of Dice (1929) there The films were known for presenting Indian exotica to the West Rai also had the good sense to consider some of the classical literature for his works He adapted Edwin Arnolds poem The Light of Asia for a film on the biography of Gautam Buddha Rai went into partnership with the German producer Peter Ostermayer whose brother Franz Osten directed the film The Light of Asia (1925) starring Rai as Gautam Buddha The film co-produced by the Great Eastern Film Corporation in Delhi was presented in the press as the first specifically Indian Film by Osten and was fairly successful in Central Europe Rai encountered both good luck as well as bad luck during his career It was his good luck that he met with Devika Rani in London Devika was not only one of the most beautiful women of her time in India she was an excellent actress and intellectually very mature According to one legend Devika Rani would just see (years later) Dilip Kumar (real name Yusuf Khan a young man originally from the Hindko tribe of the NWFP whose family had been in fruit merchandizing in Peshawar and Bombay for a couple of generations) and pick him out as a prospect Rai later married Devika Rani and they both starred in many successful films


After the break out of the Second World War the British interned all prominent people of German and Italian descent living in India Rais ventures suffered a set back due to that Bombay Talkies settled down to a schedule of about three films a year Their films were of a high technical standard and had a glossy look to them reminiscent of the films of MGM Devika Rani would be lit up in a manner not unlike Greta Garbo Because of his charm his business acumen and his abilities Rai attracted good financing too to his venture The real fame came when Rai decided to tackle a very controversial issue in the Indian society This was a film named Achhut Kanya(the untouchable maiden) the story of a love affair between a Harijan girl and a Brahman boy Years later Bimal Roy would make yet another film on the same lines named SUJATA (with Sunil Dutt and Nootan in lead roles) The second phase of the development of the industry comes in the 1940s This was the influence of music and lyrics in films The tradition of Urdu Ghazal was well established among the middle classes Urdu poets flocked to Bombay in search of their fortunes and found it there Because of the old Awadh kingdom Lucknow had been a center of fine arts in India Both poets and musicians were to be found in great numbers in Lucknow Some of them found their way to Bombay and gave a new impetus to the industry

Musicians like Naushad and poets such as Shakeel Badayuni Majrooh Sultanpuri Sahir Ludhyanavi even Majaz and Josh ended up in Bombay and made their mark in the industry Minorities also prospered in Bombay Suhrab Modi (a Parsi) made some memorable films such as PUKAR Nadira (a woman from a Jewish family who recently passed away in Bombay) prospered first under Mahboob Khan (AAN) and then with other producers

THE INFLUENCE OF MUSIC AND POETRYIndia is famous for its classical music which was patronized by

Kings Rajas and Nawabs in various parts of the subcontinent However the music that became popular in the films was of a lighter tenor and it appealed to the masses

Hand in hand with that popular brand of music poetry played its own part Urdu poets (as well as writers of prose) assembled in Bombay seeking their fortunes As we said even such great poets as Josh Malihabadi and Majaaz found their way to Bombay However the commercial life of Bombay was hard to endure for such people and they returned to their bases after a short stay There were though some names which became permanent fixtures of the Bombay film scene For example Majrooh Sultanpuri came from Sultanpoor in the early 1940rsquos and spent all his working life in Bombay He became a very successful song-writer as well as being a great poet of Nazm and


Ghazal Majrooh was born Asrar-ul-Hasan Khan in 1919 in Sultanpoor a city in Uttar Pradesh He qualified as a Muslim physician (HAKEEM) in 1938 but then took to poetry very soon after

Majrooh was a socialist and he could have actually become as great an INQILABI poet as was Josh But his fortunes were waiting for him elsewhere Consider these lines

نن دار پہ رکھتے چلو سروں کے چراغ ستوجہاں تلک یہ ستم کی سیاہ رات چلے

Sutoon-e-daar pa rakhte chalo saroN ke chiraaghJahan talak yeh sitam ki siyah raat chaleTrans Let us keep lighting lamps of (our) severed heads on the gallows As long as this dark night of oppression would continue

However he kept his socialist thinking and his socialistic poetry quite separate from his work in films He hit the jackpot with his memorable song

غم دئ مستقل ےGhum diye mushtaqil for the film ShahJahan

The song was composed by music director Naushad and sung by K L Saigal The song acted as the springboard for Majrooh to the forefront of film lyricists where he would remain until his death in 2000 His contributions to films and to the world of Urdu poetry were recognized and rewarded with many awards Majrooh became the pioneer in writing lyrics for a scene which had already been set in the film and the musical tune for it has already been composed So the lyricist had to fit the poetry with the tune so that it could be sung properly and he had to choose words and phrases which could relate to the situation in the story and the screenplay Later on that became the standard system of writing film poetry in Bombay Sometimes the poet had to write silly words just to go with the music and at other times words could not really fit the situation except for the best lyrics writers

As opposed to that one situation in the Bombay film scene lent itself to reversing that mechanism completely This is about a poet named Sahir Ludhyanavi and his works Sahir came from a feudal family in the Punjab However he faced difficulties in his early life He was dispossessed of his properties by his other relatives and he had to fight for his survival He grew up into an angry young man who was bitter about the hypocrisy injustice and oppression in the society His


poetry reflected all that in so many words Guru Dutt produced directed and played the leading role of a poet in his famous film Pyaasa This was based partially on Sahirrsquos own life story and entirely on his poetry that had already been published TIME has rated the film Pyaasa among the 100 all time great films of the world

We saw that the Indian film industry sprouted in the 1930s during the British Rule and it took substantial shape in the 1940s

By the decade of 1940 the Indian independence movement had really hotted up Every section of the society had been playing their respective role in the movement Urdu poetry played its role too Poets such as Josh Malihabadi rose to fame by writing and publishing anti-British anti-Imperialism and pro-independence revolutionary poetry The high point of that movement was that precious little poetry of that genre is to be found that was composed and published in the Devnagari script All revolutionary poetry that was published in that period was in Urdu That is yet another indication that the Indian population had accepted Urdu as its lingua franca Urdu had become the language of all classes of people in India

Urdu gave the deep pluralistic character to the Indian film industry that remains so even to this day in 2009 And that is in spite of all the sectarianism that has taken over the Indian society in the last 65 years

The first indication of that force of multiculturalism was seen in the 1940s in films such as SHAHEED The film had starred Dilip Kumar in the leading role as a militant anti-British young Indian who is the son of a Judge employed by the British authorities The title song of the film had the line

وطن کی راہ میں وطن کے نوجواں شہید ہوWatan ki raah maiN watan ke nawjawaN shaheed hohellip

Trans O the young man of the land give your life for your landhellip

While the sentiment of patriotism and sacrifice for onersquos own mother land is a universal one the language used to express it here was purely Muslim and Islamic The words watan and Shaheed are Arabic Raah and Nawjawaan both are Farsi words Particularly the word Shaheed is a Qurrsquoanic terminology in which the soldier who gives his life fighting in Allahrsquos way is seen not as dying but going to live for ever because he had witnessed (in his martyrdom) Allahrsquos truth The word Shaheed which is usually translated as a martyr actually means an eyewitness to some significant event

That phenomenon still exists in the film industry Let us look at another song that dates back to the 1950s The name of the film was Seema (meaning lsquolimitsrsquo in Hindi) That was the story of a misguided but highly intelligent and spirited young woman who had become a juvenile delinquent and sent to an orphanage The teacher in the


orphanage is out to tame the young woman into a useful member of the society In that process he leads the young woman to God That process is depicted by a song The song has been reproduced below

त पयार क सगर हनितर$ इक ब-दौ क पयास हमलाampट जो ठिदौया त नचला जोएग जोह- स हमघएला मन क पगला पछी9 उड़न क बकररपख ह क मला आ-ख ह धधला$जोन ह सगर परअब त ह$ इस समझ रह भला थी कह- स हम त पयार क सगर इधर झम क गया जिgtनदौग$उधर ह मampत खड़$क ई कया जोन कह- ह स$म उलाझन आन पड़$कनA मB gtर कह दौ क आए कampन ठिदौशा स हम त पयार क सगर ह

تو پیار کا ساگر ہےتری اک بوند کے پیاسے ہم

لوٹا جو دیا تو نےنئنگے جہاں سے ہم چلے جاگھائل من کا پاگل پنچھی

کاڑنے کو بیقرارآانکھ ہے دھندھلی پنکھ ہیں کومل

جانا ہے ساگر پار

اب تو ہی اسے سمجھاراہ بھولے تھے کہاں سے ہم

تو پیار کا ساگر ہے ادھر جھوم کے گائے زندگی

کادھر ہے موت کھڑینa کیا جانے کہاں ہے سیما کو

آان پڑی کالجھن کانوں میں ذرا کہہ دے

ندشا سے ہم آایئں کون کہ تو پیار کا ساگر ہے


As we can see the song is written in the popular Hindustani language that will pass for both Urdu and Hindi The song could be sung by a Muslim a Christian a Hindu or even by a godly theosophist or theist without any qualms The words highlight the dilemma of a young lost soul seeking guidance The highpoint of the lyrics is the pluralistic tone and the very inclusive language of the song The only words that can be said to come from Hindi are DISHA (direction) and SEEMA (limit) The rest of the lyrics would be easily understood on the streets of Bombay Lucknow Karachi and Lahore equally well


THE ANCIENT HISTORY THE PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES AND PEOPLES

Urdu is basically a language of India and by extension of Pakistan ndash it is a member of the Proto-Indo-European (henceforth PIE) family of languages

There is no university in the west where research on the Proto-Indo-European and its original speakers is not in progress In some institutions this work is being done under Historical Linguistics in other places under Social and Cultural Anthropology and in yet other places in South Asian Cultural Studies departments

There is still a strong lobby within India which believes and propagates the idea that the languages of India are very local But this is now a minority view Linguists archeologists and historians have brought forth overwhelming evidence to show that the North Indian languages have developed over the centuries as a result of the ancient people settling in India who were the original speakers of PIE and had come from far off areas of Eurasia in to the north

In fact nearly two-thirds of the world population speaks a language or another which is a member of the PIE group40

Evidence points to the finding that the original speakers of PIE lived during the last centuries of the latest Ice Age or some ten thousand years ago They began dispersing from their original habitat to other areas around 2500-1500 BC41 Their original abode is though still under discussion There are three opinions The first view is that these people lived in the valley of the southern end of the Ural Mountain range The Ural Mountain chain begins below the North Pole from the shores of the Arctic Ocean and runs North-South on the edge of the Siberian Tundra The Chain is divided in four separate units The valley at the foot of the southern most part which is part of Northern Russia is fertile and full of tall timbers The second view is that these people lived in the valley of the Caucus Mountains In the popular American terminology White people are called Caucasians from that association A third view is that these people lived in the Pontic-Caspian region This area is defined as starting from the southern tip of the Ural Mountain range running East-West including the valley between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea up to and including the valley of the Caucus Mountain Today the countries of Ukraine Georgia Romania and Kazakhstan are included in this area So are the disputed provinces of South Osetia and Abkhazia where the Russian forces fought a brief battle with those of Georgia (7 August 2008) This

40 According to Anthony some three billion people in the world speak languages of the PIE group see Anthony David P The Horse The Wheel and Language Princeton 2007 p 541 Toynbee A Mankind and Mother Earth OUP 1976


third view has gained more credence in the academic circles in the last few years42

As we mentioned above the theory is that these people spread out of their original abode some time around 2500 BC Since the area of the Pontic-Caspian region is equally accessible to both Europe and Asia it was easy for them to reach both parts of the continent One group of such migrants found their way into Europe another went up to the Iran-Afghanistan plateau and a third ended up in the Indian sub-continent They took their language with them but under the local influences of the new homelands the original mother-language went through changes and new daughter-languages were born In Europe the Romance (Greek and Latin) languages as well as the Saxon tongues were created In Iran Avesta came into being that gave rise to Pahlavi and then Farsi as well as Pashto in Afghanistan In India Sanskrit took shape in which the collection of the Vedas was documented What facilitated the spread of the PIE-speakers to these far off areas was the fact that those people had invented the wheel43 had domesticated the horse and were able to build two-wheeler and four-wheeler vehicles drawn by horses44

The summary that we have presented to our readers in the paragraph above took some two hundred years of hard work by numerous anthropologists linguists and archeologists as well as forensic scientists to find out research analyse and document in so many words Numerous books have been written on this topic The latest and one of the better ones is David Anthonyrsquos The Horse The Wheel and Language This book came out in 2007 and because of being a new publication it has all the latest research as well as methodologies documented in it It is a goldmine of information for research students and scholars Another book is James P Malloryrsquos In Search of the Indo-Europeans This book was published in 1989 but the findings in the book are still valid after all these years We have drawn our material for this work from those two books in addition to many others

The studies on these lines were initiated as a result of the findings of Sir William Jones(1746-94)45 Jones was sent to India as the Chief Justice on the request of East India Company to Calcutta back in the middle of the 18th century Jones knew some 28 languages before he came to India In India he also learned Sanskrit That opened a completely new world to him When he returned to England he

42 For details on this and other related points see Mallory as well as Anthony43 According to one estimate the invention of wheel took place some four thousand years ago44 The most up-to-date and thorough discussion on this subject will be found in David Anthony The Horse The Wheel and Language Princeton University Press 2007 45 Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language p 296


delivered a lecture on the Indian culture in 1786 In that lecture he made his most celebrated comments which we quote here

The Sanskrit language whatever may be its antiquity is of wonderful structure more perfect than the Greek more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely defined than either yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar than could have been produced by accident so strong that no philologer could examine all the three without believing them to have sprung from some common source which perhaps no longer exists There is a similar reason though not quite so forcible for supposing that both the Gothic and Celtic though blended with a different idiom had the same origin with the Sanskrit and the old Persian might be added to the same family (helliphellipquoted in Mallory p12)46

Since Jones was a very prominent person in the society and his intellectual abilities were well recognized among the learned elite in England the work caught on Work continued on these lines and such lineage as SanskritmdashAgni LatinmdashIgnis and EnglishmdashIgnition were quickly recognized Within a period of fifty years extensive work followed In the middle of the 19th century August Schleicher a German linguist brought out new ideas Schleicher(1821-1868) was basically a biologist47 so he presented his linguistic theories in those terms Schleicher was the first scholar to propose the theory of a tree-structure for the languages belonging to one family (Stammbaumtheorie48)

Before Jonesrsquo and Schleicherrsquos works came to light all studies on linguistics were limited to philology lexicography grammar and etymology Jones Schleicher and other scholarsrsquo work brought out the universal application of the science of linguistics It turned out that the science of linguistics on the one hand was closely associated with anthropology and therefore with history and archeology on the other hand it was also associated with sociology psychology economics and political science

More than 1200 Proto-Indo-European roots have been identified and documented with ample evidence to show their authenticity and credibility49 Also the cognate words associated with those roots in various languages mainly English Latin and Sanskrit have clearly been identified50

Anthony has listed five PIE roots which form the basis of the theory of invention of the wheel travel on two-wheeled and four-46 James P Mallory In Search of the Indo Europeans Thames and Hudson London 1989 p1247 According to Mallory48 Cambridge Encyclopedia of Languages p29249 See for example The American Heritage Dictionary of the Indo-European Roots Houghton Mifflin 200050 See for example Sanskrit Grammar by Mueller


wheeled carriages drawn by horses and the consequent spread of the language and the people Cognates of those five PIE roots are found in all languages of the world belonging to the PIE family from Eastern Europe to Western Europe Asia and other places51 Those roots are as follows

(1) k-w-e-l The word lsquowheelrsquo is derived from this root(2) w-e-g-h This word was used for a wheeled vehicle The English

and German words lsquoWAGONrsquo is derived from this root52

(3) r-e-t The word lsquorotatersquo is derived from this root53

(4) r-e-i-d-h the word lsquoridersquo is derived from this root(5) s-k-e-p this was used for the long wooden pole which connects

the wheeled vehicle on its one end and its other end rests on the shoulder of the animal pulling the vehicle From this we have the Latin word lsquoscapularsquo for the shoulder blade which is used in English too

Towards the beginning of the twentieth century research on historical linguistics intensified and more and more western institutions began sponsoring works in that science More formal works began to appear on those lines Several methods have been proposed for classifying the hundreds of languages spoken all across the world We quote below the major classes and methods of classification

THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORICAL LINGUISTICSWhen Karl Marks analysed the world history he saw it as an

ongoing struggle between the working class and the capitalist class The workers were always exploited by the capitalist to make more money thus making the capitalist richer and the worker poorer This was a view of history very different from what had hitherto been thought natural History would be written to tell who conquered which country and when--- Which king ruled which people and for how long Marxrsquos work brought a completely new perspective in the science of historiography

The study of the historical evolution of language gave a yet another totally new view to historiography For example quoting Nicholas Ostler

The language history of the world shows more of the true impacts of past movements and changes of peoples beyond the heraldic claims of their largely self-appointed leaders They reveal a subtle interweave of cultural relations with power politics and economic expediency It also offers some broad hints for the future It suggests rather strongly that no language spread is ultimately secure even the largest languages in the twenty-first century will be subject either to the old determinants of language succession or some new ones that that had

51 Anthony pp 59-8252 The UrduHindi word BAGGHI is also from the same root in English it is ldquobuggyrdquo53 The English word lsquochariotrsquo and UrduHindi lsquorathrsquo both are from this root


arisen in the last five hundred years or the last fifty Migrations population growth changing techniques of education and communication --- all shift the balance of language identities across the world while the focus of prestige and aspiration varies as the worldrsquos economies adjust to the rise of new centers of wealth Future situations may well be unprecedented with potential for languages to achieve truly global use but they will still be human And human beings seldom stay united for long54

THE TAXONOMY OF WORLD LANGUAGESAccording to the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language there are

some 4000 languages spoken in the world55 However David Anthony believes this figure is greater than 6000 Some 23 different families of languages have been identified

In connection with Urdu we are mainly concerned with three language families However before we list those let us first discuss the classification of the world languages There are three main methods of classifying languages

(1)The Genetic Method(2)The Typological method and(3)The Areal method

We give below the definition of each of the above by quoting Joseph Greenberg56

Of these the genetic is the only one which is at once non-arbitrary exhaustive and unique By ldquonon-arbitraryrdquo is here meant that there is no choice of criteria leading to different and equally legitimate results This is because genetic classification reflects historical events which must have occurred or not occurred If the classification is correct it implies events which did occur By ldquoexhaustivenessrdquo of a classification is meant that all languages are put into some class and by ldquouniquenessrdquo that no language is put in more than one class57 Genetic classification as has been seen is based on criteria of sound-meanings resemblances of linguistic forms Related languages are likely to be in the same geographical region but usually are not in continuous distributionhelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphellipTypological classifications are based on criteria of sound without meaning meaning without sound or both For example using a phonetic criterion only we might divide the languages of the world into two typological classes those with tonal systems and those lacking tonal systemshelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphellip

54 Ostler N p1355 Cambridge Encyclopedia p8556 Joseph Greenberg (1915-2001) was a New Yorker who worked on and taught Linguistic typology and Language Classification at Stanford University57 Readers who are experts in database design techniques would have noticed the strong resemblance to data normalization in this description by Greenberg This is the third normal form of data It tells us how far ahead Greenberg was in his thinking The concept of data normalization was not introduced until the 1970s


Typological classifications are arbitrary as has just been indicated exhaustive and unique They have no necessary historical implicationshelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphellipAreal classifications are based on effects of languages upon one another whether they are related or unrelated Among the relevant data are borrowings involving both sound and meaning and influences in sound only or meaning only which are the result of historical contacthelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphelliphellipAreal classifications are therefore arbitrary within limits They are neither exhaustive nor unique58

We shall see that the study and classification of the languages belonging to the Proto-Indo-European family of languages of which Urdu and Hindi both are members has been done by the genetic method A comprehensive tree-structure has been proposed which has been largely accepted by the scholars of linguistics Before we discuss that let us give the details of the other two families of the languages which are relevant to the discussion on Urdu

One of the oldest or perhaps the oldest language family of the world is the Semitic family of languages The term lsquoSemiticrsquo signifies an association with the Biblical name Sam a son of the prophet Noah Even though the term has come to signify Jewish people and everything else Jewish in modern times both RA Nicholson59 of Cambridge as well as Philip Hitti60 of Princeton have maintained that the only people who could be called purely Semitic are the Arabs

Nicholson lists the Semitic languages61 with their respective dates as follows

(1)Babylonian or Assyrian (3000-500 BC)(2)Hebrew (from 500 BC)(3)South Arabic otherwise called Sabean or Himyarite (inscriptions

from 800 BC)(4)Aramaic (inscriptions from 800 BC)(5)Phoenician (inscriptions from 700 BC)(6)Ethiopic (inscriptions from 350 AD)(7)Arabic (from 500 AD)

58 Greenberg JH Essays in Linguistics Chicago University Press 1957 pp 65-69 Please note that we have only quoted the salient points of the essay for those who are interested in the subject of classification of languages we recommend that they read the full essay59 Reynold Nicholson (1868-1945) was an English orientalist of great repute He was the professor of Arabic Farsi and Islamic studies at Cambridge England He has translated the poetry of Mawlana Rum and that of Allama Iqbal into English60 Philip Khuri Hitti (1886-1978) was a Maronite Christian Arab from Lebanon He taught at Columbia University and later held the Chair of Arab Studies at Princeton until his retirement in 1954 Hitti is credited with introducing Arab Studies to the US Academic circles61 Nicholson RA A Literary History of the Arabs Cambridge University Press 1907 and 1979 p xiv


The above list is important for our discussion because Urdu as well as Hindi both are influenced by Arabic the youngest of the Semitic languages Our contention is that Urdu and Hindi though identified in modern times as two separate languages for political reasons are actually the same except for the two scripts Much discussion has ensued in academic circles on this highly controversial and contentious topic See for example (1) Amrit Rai A House Divided The Origin of Urdu and Hindi OUP 1992 (2) Abdul Jamil Khan UrduHindi An Artificial Divide(Politics of Languge) Algora Publishing 2006 (3) Christopher King One Language Two Scripts OUP 1999 The Indian scholar of Allahabad named Giyan Chand Jain wrote a book in Urdu on this topic ndash Ek Bhasha Do Likhavat Do Adab Educational Publishing House Delhi 2005 This last book caused a lot of controversy in India and Pakistan The well-known critic Shamsur-Rahman Faruqi wrote a rebuttal of the main ideas presented in the book 62

The third group of languages that is significant for us is the Dravidian family of languages These were the languages spoken in India before the PIE speakers arrived in India as settlerconquerors around 2500 BC The Indus Valley civilization is identified with those languages In this group two languages are very important namely Tamil and Telgu Tamil is one of the official languages of India It is spoken in Tamil Nadu Sri Lanka and Singapore There are some 70 million speakers of Tamil in the world It has its own script Telgu is also a Dravidian language but unlike Tamil it has been overly influenced by Sanskrit over the centuries It is also one of the official languages of India and it is spoken in Andhra Pradesh Orissa Karnatak and on some islands in the Indian Ocean Telgu also has its own script Indus Valley civilization is considered to be the third of the three oldest human civilizations It is significant for us in this study because the first Muslims landed in this area back in 710 AD For that reason that area is called Bab-ul-Islam in todayrsquos Pakistan Some recent excavations in the area and further research seem to shed more light on the Indus Valley Civilization

No longer is the Indus the plain cousin of Egypt and Mesopotamia during the 3rd millennium BCE Archeologists now realize that the Indus dwarfed its grand neighbours in land area and population

62 The reason we have mentioned here both names is that we want to emphasize that the Hindi which had remained strictly Hindi without much relationship to Urdu has also been influenced by Arabic as we have shown in quoting the poetry of Meera Bai whose language is Rajasthani Hindi And now in the last sixty years the language that is spoken in India and also used in the media has been deliberately overloaded with made-up words from Sanskrit to make it as much different from Urdu as possible Similarly in Pakistan the language that is spoken and used in the media has been over-loaded with Arabic The famous episode of the late dictator Zia-ul-Haq forcing people to say Allah-Hafiz instead of the more popular and fluent Khuda Hafiz (as a parting greeting) is a typical example of that However as long as the Bollywood film industry flourishes the common language will flourish


surpassed them in many areas of engineering and technology and was an aggressive player during humanityrsquos first flirtation with globalization 5000 years ago The old notion that the Indus people were an insular homogeneous and egalitarian bunch is being replaced by a view of a diverse and dynamic society that stretched from the Arabian Sea to the foothills of the Himalayas and was eager to do business with peoples from Afghanistan to Iraq And the Indus people worried enough about the privileges of their elite to build thick walls to protect them ldquoThis idea that Indus was dull and monolithic --- that is all nonsenserdquo says Louis Flamm an archeologist at the City University of New York who has worked in Pakistan 63

It is now an accepted view among the western scholars that the PIE speakers came to India around 2500-1500 BC and pushed the original inhabitants (aadi basi) down south and established themselves in the Northern part of the country These invaders are called Aryans or Indo-Aryans

The Aryan group of IE languages consists of Sanskrit and the other IE dialects of India Iranian and the Kafir languages of North-west India The original homeland of the Indians or rather of the IE tribes who had penetrated into India can be traced to a region outside India north-west of India itself From here probably around the middle of the second millennium BC the fore-bearers of the Indians moved into India conquering the non-IE native peoples These people had a flourishing civilization the so-called lsquoIndus Valley Civilizationrsquo whose most important archeological remains have been recovered by the excavation of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa64

Very similar ideas are expressed by Nicholas Ostler a more recent writer

Sanskrit first appears to us as do most of its Indo-European sister languages as the speech of conquering warriors well capable of using horses and wheeled vehicles to establish domination over their neighbours and turn them into serfs and subjects The way of life is familiar from heroic poetry of Indo-European peoples in every direction men who fought from chariots speak forth rightly and care for their own personal honour more than life itself65

However our learned friend professor Gabriela Ilieva66 of New York University maintains that this was a gradual settlement over a time and there was no sustained warfare between the settlers and the original inhabitants In support of that view she presents the statements in the Rig Veda which speak of the destruction of the areas

63 Unmasking the Indus article in SCIENCE 6 June 2008 Vol 320 p 127664 Lazzeroni Romana Sanskrit article in Ramat and Ramat The Indo European Languages Routledge London 1998 p 9865 Ostler N Empires of the Word Harper Collins New York 2005 p 19566 Gabriela Nik Ilieva has done her PhD on the feminine voices recorded in the Rig Veda She is a historical linguist and teaches Hindi at NYU(private conversation)


in the Indus Valley in the past tense There is no statement saying that ldquowe destroyed such and suchrdquo etc

THE VEDAS AND OTHER ANCIENT INDIAN LITERATUREThe oldest Indo-Aryan linguistic samples are found in the four

Vedas which form the basis of the various sects found within the Hindu religion of India The oldest of those is the Rig Veda which consists of hymns dedicated to gods Indra67 and Agni68 The language of this document is the Vedic Sanskrit Its period has been estimated as 1700-1100 BC It has strong resemblances to the oldest Iranian religious document the Avesta which has been dated to be of 2000 BC Avesta is a sample of the Proto-Indo-Iranian language that derived from the PIE as did the Vedic Sanskrit

The next two of documents from the point-of-view of linguistic history are Mahabharata and Ramayana both written in a later version of Sanskrit Mahabharatarsquos date is estimated to be between the 8th and the 4th century BC It is the longest epic in the known world literature comprising of some 74000 versesstanzas Ramayanarsquos date is estimated to be between 400 and 200 BC

The PIE speakers who came to the Indian subcontinent formulated an elaborate social system and a very formal religion that was kept inside the temples and was administered to the common folk by an elite class of priests who named themselves as the Brahmans The theory they created was that the human society consisted of four classes each in turn was produced from the four parts of the body of god ndash the Brahmans were from the mouth of the god therefore they claimed to be the speakers of godrsquos language and His commands the Chhatris or the warriors from His chest the Vayshyas or the business class from His stomach and the Shudras from His feet Thus the fourth one were the lowest in class distinction The Brahmans called their language or the Divine language Sanskrit meaning lsquoperfectrsquo lsquocompletersquo or lsquoculturedrsquo Being the custodians of the temples and of the religion only they could recite the devotional hymns to the gods And only they could speak the divine language Sanskrit In fact they were afraid that if they allowed the common folk to speak the divine language it would be polluted To protect the language from that corruption a priest by the name of Panini authored his much celebrated Sanskrit Grammar called asht-adhyaye or lsquoeight lessonsrsquo He claimed to have been inspired by the Lord Shiva in that authorship It is the oldest work on descriptive linguistics in the world and is amazingly modern in its approach He lists consonants and vowels and all parts of speech with their respective definitions Panini describes his various rules of grammar as modern day mathematicians give the 67 Master of the Garden of Paradise a superior god in Hindu mythology68 The god of Fire in Hindu mythology


derivation of a mathematical function Paninirsquos time is estimated to be around 400 BC

SANSKRIT AND PRAKRITThe priests considered Vedic Sanskrit as sacred This is shown by

the fact that Panini is obviously writing his grammar of the Sanskrit language in Sanskrit but he uses a different Sanskrit to describe the rules It is not Vedic Sanskrit which he uses to document Vedic Sanskrit It is a coded and abbreviated Sanskrit69

This was the beginning of the post-Vedic classical SanskritIt is not certain whether or not the Vedic Sanskrit was ever

spoken outside of the temples Since the common folk were not allowed to use Sanskrit in their every-day social communication70 yet another spoken language came into being which nevertheless was a PIE dialect It was definitely influenced by Sanskrit The Brahmans out of their pride and in extreme derision and contempt called that spoken language Prakrit meaning lsquonaturalrsquo (as opposed to Divine) lsquoless perfectrsquo or lsquocorruptedrsquo

What the Brahman of that day did not understand was that languages are not like gold and silver in that they are not reduced in value or stature by extensive use neither do they get spent like money If anything languages are enhanced and expanded as their user base expands In their protective attitude and narrow-mindedness the priests imprisoned Sanskrit inside the temple That suffocated the language Sanskrit is one of the most perfect languages of the world if not lsquothersquo perfect one But the Brahmanrsquos protective attitude killed the language of that suffocation

If Sanskrit would have been used extensively in the past then with the Vedic literature in view it would have been accepted as the first religious language of the world Arabic cannot be truly called a religious language because a large part of its literature was already in existence before Islam emerged in Arabia This short note here will work as a preamble to our theory that Urdu is the worldrsquos first religious language

With time the Prakrit kept evolving At some later time it was called apabhransh or lsquobadly corruptedrsquo and yet later it came to be known as lsquoshor seni71rsquo We do not have sufficient data to be able to 69 For example see for details Bhate Saroja and Kak Subhash Paninirsquos Grammar and Computer Science Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute Vol 72 1993 pp 79-94 also available at httpwwwecelsuedukakbhatepdf70 In fact if a person of the common class tried to speak Sanskrit the priests would subject the offender to severe punishment71 This is derived from lsquoSurasenarsquo which was the name of an ancient kingdom in north India


pinpoint the exact timing of these changes in nomenclature Linguists have identified some eight different dialects of ancient India which are collectively called Apabhransha dialects

As further time passed and people of the PIE origins continued to spread across the geographical area Prakrit developed local variations But across the belt from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea shores between the Himalayan range on the north and the Vindhyachal range on the south a common language was understood Eventhough the vocabulary developed its own peculiarities in each locality the grammar remained the same ndash even to this day On the two extremes Bangla broke off into its own script and language in the East and Gujrati and Marathi into their own dialects and scripts in the west

Four of those branches of the original Prakrit have survived to this day and those four actually form the basis of modern UrduHindi

KHARI BOLI AND BRAJ BHAASHAThose branches are as follows

(1)Braj Bhasha ndash this dialect developed around Mathura72 on the western shores of the Yamuna river The area of the influence of this dialect spread up to Agra During the period 800-1900 AD this dialect was spoken by the largest population in the western Uttar Pradesh The poetry of Sur Das that he wrote in praise of Lord Krishna has been written in this dialect

(2)Avadhi ndash This as the name suggests was the language spoken in the province of Avadh It was also spoken in the area where todayrsquos city of Kanpur is located The Ramayana73 of Tulsi Das in which he chronicles the heroic exploits of Lord Rama is written in this dialect Both Braj and Avadhi show borrowings from and a base in Sanskrit in their respective vocabulary

(3)Bundel Khandi or Bundeli ndash as the name suggests this dialect developed in the Bundel Khand area The well known folk epic Alha-Udal is written in this dialect This is an epic chronicling the heroic exploits of two brothers It is sung in gatherings in villages of Uttar Pradesh and mostly people have memorized the long poem for those recitals Bundeli seems to be influenced from both Sanskrit as well as the ancient Dravidian dialects

(4)Khari Boli ndash this dialect developed in the northern part of Delhi including some parts of Uttar Pradesh This was the language of a minority in the beginning During the 18th and the 19th

72 According to the epic Mahabharat the city of Mathura was the capital of the Surasena Kingdom of the ancient times From this we have the name Shoraseni for the second name of the Prakrit dialects that we have mentioned above73 This is a different Ramayana from the Sanskrit Ramayana that we mentioned earlier


centuries its popularity increased under the influence of Arabic and Farsi and by the end of the 19th century it had become the language of the majority in and around Delhi and some parts of Uttar Pradesh It took a long time for the Khari Boli to become an accepted language for literary compositions The first Khari Boli work which was written in Nastrsquoaleeq script is Fazl-e-Ali Fazlirsquos Karbal Katha This was written during the period 1730-175074 AD and it is the first Urdu (or in Hindi) prose text to be produced Other early Khari Boli works are Lallu Lalrsquos PremSagar75 which was written in the early 1800rsquos and Insha Allah Khanrsquos Rani Ketki ki Kahani Both those works were originally written in Dev Nagari Script

THE BHAKTI MOVEMENT OF INDIAAs we explained above the early Brahmans had monopolized

both the religion in the temples as well as the language Sanskrit Obviously this was not liked by the larger population The embargo on the language caused the creation of the Prakrit dialects The monopolization of religion caused the public to find other avenues to form the basis of their prayers and worship Two very influential leaders emerged in this midst Gawtam Buddha (Real name Prince Siddhartha) lived around 563-483 BC He was born a prince in the kingdom of Kapilvastu (in todayrsquos Tibet) but renounced his throne and left the palace living and a wife and a child He went into wanderings in search of eternal peace He taught reflection and introspection to his followers In effect he taught against the adoration of stone idols and other physical objects The second reformer was Mahavira who lived around 599-527 BC He is the progenitor of the Jain religion in India The most essential tenet of Jainism is Ahimsa or non-violence

The effect of the reforms of these two great sages was that god had been taken out of the temple and brought to a more tangible level The general public felt that they had come closer to god by way of these reforms Even though the teachings of both these religions were originally documented in classical Sanskrit their movements encouraged people to tell the divine stories which had so far been limited to the Vedas in their own popular languages Consequently the Prakrits were made popular as a side effect of those two reformersrsquo works The Prakrits were not just means of social intercourse instead they had become languages of the religion too

That helped the Bhakti movement which actually began in the 800s AD The word Bhakti means devotion The movement made sure that poets of all the dialects of the Prakrits began composing

74 Mukerji Sujit A Dictionary of Indian Literature Orient Longman 199975 This was translated into modern English in 1818 by Capt Hollings of the British Bengal regiment This is available on httpwwwsacred-textscomhinpsapsa00htm


devotional songs in their own dialects That basically made the Vedas redundant because all those stories told in the four Vedas were now being told in the popular dialects In the Vedic scriptures God was shown to be behaving much like the humans The Bhakti movement brought those Vedic concepts in a popular language that the majority of the people spoke or could speak

The beginning of the Muslim conquests is also the early 800s So we can see that the arrival and settlement of Muslims in India and beginning of the Bhakti Movement are simultaneous phenomena Eventhough they appear to be unconnected they both had profound effect on each other

We also saw that the beginning of the Prakrit dialects in northern part of India was a natural consequence of the elitist view of a privileged class about the language Sanskrit The majority of the population felt resentful because of the caste system perpetuated by the Brahmans Both the movement of Buddha as well as that of Mahavira attracted large number of followers since the followers of those two religions were all considered equal In fact the majority of Indians became Buddhists After several centuries of prosperity Buddhism began to decline in India and the old Hindu religion began rising again The Hindu priests declared Buddha as a Mahatma (great soul) and an incarnation of Lord Vishnu That facilitated a mixed set of beliefs to be popularized By the end of the 11th century Buddhism was pushed to China and Afghanistan and Hinduism was re-established in the Indian society That meant the re-establishment of the old caste system in the society once again

When the Muslim Sufis came to India they preached the message of human brotherhood As a result of that a large number of the lower class Hindus converted to Islam

During the 1400s and 1500s the Bhakti Movement flourished greatly The clearest indication of that is the literature produced during that period However the Bhakti movement bifurcated in two parallel streams One was the Nirgun and the other was the Sagun Sagun preached the bodily representation of god The leader of this movement was Sur Das He sang the songs of praise of Lord Krishna In Sur Dasrsquo poetry the child Krishna is seen eating butter by stealth in the kitchen and then telling his mother that he had not done it The youthful Krishna is seen frolicking with the Gopis (the cowgirls) of Vrindaban teasing them and then leaving them So basically Sur Das depicted the Divine figure doing everything a human being would do including amorous encounters with the opposite sex Tulsi Das on the other hand shows a chivalrous hero in the figure of Rama who is a just and benevolent ruler He is always ready to sacrifice for the good of his subjects Rama has a devoted brother in Laxman and an equally devoted wife in Seeta However much as he loves both when Seeta is abducted by the Raxus(demon) Rawana and subsequently recovered


Rama fails to protect Seeta against the onslaught of the courtiers who question her chastity She has to tread on fire to prove her purity The highpoint of both works is that woman is shown in a subservient position We will discuss this again when talking about Meera Bai Nirgun meant and preached that god had no physical body age or place And man can find god in himself This notion was much closer to the basic ideas of Islam The leader of that movement was Kabir Das Kabir had originated in Benares but had travelled the length and breadth of northern India His language therefore is a mix of all dialects

The Muslim Sufis injected the idea of mysticism in this flourishing Bhakti movement of India That notion seeped into both forms of the Bhakti movement In the Nirgun Bhakti movement Kabir Dasrsquo poetry is replete with those ideas On the Sagun side Meera Bairsquos poetry is filled with ideas of mysticism

Let us look at some of that poetryKabir lived during the time 1440-1518 Kabirrsquos poetry shows

more than once that the actual leitmotiv of the Bhakti movement was to discredit the caste system of the Indian society

Consider the following lines of Kabir

सध बराहमण सध छीतरी$ सध जोनित बनिनया सधन म छीतती$स कampम ह टढ़ी9 त र पछीनिनया- सध नओ सध ध ब$ सध जोत ह बरिरया- सधन म रदौस सत ह सपच ऋनिL सamp भनिगया- हिहNद तरक दई दौ9न बन ह कछी नहR पहचनिनया-

سادھو براہمن سادھ چھتریسادھے جاتی بنیاکپچھنیا سادھن ماں چھتیس کوم ہیں ٹیڑھی تور

سادھے نائو سادھے دھوبی سادھ جات ہے بریاںنرشی سو کپچ سادھن ماںرے داس سنت ہیںس

بھنگیاںکرک دوئی دین بنے ہیں کچھو نہیں پہچنیاں کت ہندو

Trans Brahman is a Sadhu Chhatri is a Sadhu the grocer too is a Sadhuthere are thiry-six tribes among the sadhus your question is crookedthe barber is a Sadhu the washer-man is a Sadhu and carpenter too is among them Ray Das the sage is also a Sadhu and the well known ascetic who is known as a Bhangi Hindu and Muslim have been made into two separate religions but in effect there is no difference(between them)

In these lines Kabir seems to be making naught of various different religions let alone sects and castes within one religious


system In effect he espouses the mystic view of man seeking his Lord irrespective of religion caste and creed The word lsquosadhursquo has been used as a generic term for a devotee of God The number 36 was used as an idiom to show a multitude and in todayrsquos UrduHindi this expression is still used in that meaning

Consider also the following lines also by Kabir

इस घट अनदौर बग बग$च इस$ मB सजोTन हरइस घट अनतर सत समनदौर इस$ मB नamp लाख तर इस घट अनतर परस म त$ इस$ मB पखTन हर इस घट अनदौर अनहदौ गरजो इस$ मB उत फ आरकहत कब$र सन भई सध इस$ मB सइ हमर

ہارا سرجن میں اسی بگیچے باگ انتر گھٹ استارا لکھ نو میں اسی سمندر سات انتر گھٹ اس

ہارا پرکھن میں اسی پوتی پارس انتر گھٹ اسپھوہارا کاٹھت میں اسی گرجے انحد انتر گھٹ اس

ہمارا نئیں سا میں اسی سادھو بھئی سنو کبیر کہت Translation In this body are gardens also the gardener lives hereinIn this body are the seven seas and in this very body there are nine lak starsIn this body there are pearls and jewels and so is the jewelerIn this soul is the thunder of the Almighty and from this also flow fountains Kabir says Listen O sage in this soul lives our Lord

These lines combine the message of pluralism as well as the typical mystic notion of lsquoExistence in One Unionrsquo or Wahdat-ul-Wajood76

Kabir lived in the 15th century He was a Sufi poet in the long line of many such poets who are considered to be the followers of the Bhakti movement The Bhakti movement ended around 1700 However the thinking that gave rise to the poetry in mysticism has continued to this our day

Consider the following lines by Iqbal

د تنگ نظر ن مجھ کافر جانا ےزا ے ہوں میں ہاور کافر ی سمجھتا مسلماں ہے ہ عدو مجھ کو حقارت س ن دیکھ ہدیکھ ا چشم ے ےوں میں ہجس پ فطرت کو بھی ناز و انساں ہ ہے ہ

The narrow-minded priest considers me an infidelAnd the infidel thinks I am a MuslimListen my enemy Do not look at me with derisionI am that human on whom Nature takes pride

76 The famous Muslim mystic Ibn Arabi (1165-1240 AD) is credited with this concept ndash the only reality in this universe is God Almighty everything else is temporal so when man dies he becomes one with his Lord


Also look at the following poem which says the same thing in more definite terms

من گر تو برا ن مان ےسچ ک دوں ا بر ہ ہ ے ہہو Yت ہتیر صنم کدوں ک ب ے ے

ےگئ پران ےےاپنوں س بیر رکھنا تو ن بتوں س سیکھا ے ے

جدل سکھایا واعظ و جنگ

ےکو بھی خدا نےتنگ آ ک آخر میں ن دیر و حرم کو چھوڑا ے

ےواعظ کا وعظ چھوڑا چھوڑ ےتر فسان ے

ہےپتھر کی مورتوں میں سمجھا تو خدا ہےر ذر مجھ ہخاک وطن کا ہ

ہےکو دیوتا Yٹھا دیں ےآ غیریت ک پرد اک بار پھر ا ے

بچھڑوں کو پھر مال دیں نقشی مٹا دیں دوئ

ی مد ت س دل کی بستی وئ ی پڑی ےسوئ ہے ہہآ اک نیا شوال اس دیس

میں بنا د یںو اپنا تیرتھ Yونچا ہدنیا ک تیرتھوں س ا ے ے

ےدامان آسماں س اسکا کلس مال دیں

یں منتر و میٹھ میٹھ Yٹھ ک گائ ےر صبح ا ے ہ ے ہےسار پجاریوں کو م ے

پیت کی پال دیںہےشکتی بھی شانتی بھی بھگتوں ک گیت میں ے

ےدھرتی ک باسیوں کی مکتی ہےبھی پریت میں


Meer Bai on the other hand comes in the Sagun tradition of the

Bhakti movement As we have pointed it out above Meera was born in Rajasthan at a place which was very close to the Ajmer Shrine of Khwaja Morsquoeen-ud-Deen Chishti She was born in 1498 By that time the shrine had been there for nearly three centuries It is our contention that in that time a strongly influenced linguistic-cultural tradition must have evolved around the Shrine That tradition on the one hand was instrumental in the new language being evolved and on the other hand it was deeply influenced by the Muslim tradition Our emphasis here is on the linguistic tradition For that we will present some brief examples

Two things are strikingly apparent in Meerarsquos poetry (1) Use of Arabic an Farsi words and idioms and (2) A strong underpinning of womenrsquos lib We shall leave the womenrsquos lib aspect for the time since it is not germane to our discussion here

सन$ ह- म हर$ आवान क आवाजोमहला चढ़ी चढ़ी जो ऊ- मर$ सजोन$

-----------------------------------मई र$ महलिलाया- ग निबनदौ- लिलाया म ला थी कनिहयया- छीड़ मह क च डडलिलाया बजोत ढो ला थी कनिहयया- मन ह ध मह ससत लिलाया र$ तरजो त लातन वार मह जो$वान वारबर अम लाक म ला

آاواج آاون کی سنی ہوں میں ہری (محل)مھل

چڑھ چڑھ جووں مری سجنی ----------------------------

نبندا لیا مول ممھالیاں گو مائی ری

نہائنیاں چھاڑے مہاں کاں چوڈ ڈے تھے کلیا بجنتا ڈھول

تھے کہائنیاں منو ہو دھو مہاں سستالیا ری تراجا تول

تن واراں مہاں جیون واراںمامولک مول براں

Notice the Farsi word AWAAZ (sound voices) rendered as AWAAJ because there is no lsquoZrsquo sound in the Indo-Aryan languages Also notice the use of the Arabic words MAHAL (palace) and a deformed TARAJA which is basically the Arabic TARAZOO


URDU TAKES ROOTS IN THE DECCAN

Nearly a century after Khwaja Mueen-ud-Deen Chishti arrived in India another Sufi of great significance lived in India Khwaja Banda Nawaz Gesu Draz was born in Delhi in 1321 AD He grew up in Delhi By that time the period of Khusro and Nizam-ud-Deen was coming to an end However the Sufi tradition had been well established in Delhi Gesu Daraz grew up in that environment and was initiated into the Sufi Tareeqa by many of his teachers When Muhammad Tughlaq decided to move the seat of the government from Delhi to the Deccan people of all professions moved to that area Gesu Daraz also moved to Deccan in that period He finally settled down in Karnatak and passed away in 1422 AD His shrine in Gulbarga is a place of pilgrimage for the devotees

Enterance-Gulbarga Shareef Dargah


HAZRAT GESU DARAZ AND HIS WORKS IN URDUHistorians have given various reasons for the decision by

Tughlaq to move the capital 700 miles down south from Delhi to Devagiri which was renamed Daulatabad Some have said that the Tughlaq wanted greater control of the southern part of the kingdom Others have said that the Tughlaq had a very tolerant policy towards his non-Muslim subjects and the ulema disagreed with him He moved away from Delhi to avoid the ulemarsquos wrath Anyway the capital had to move back to Delhi after a two-year experiment for lack of amenities in Daulatabad As we observed earlier on that whole disastrous process caused a lot of damage to the development of the new language No work could be done in Delhi due to the upheaval and neither was any work done in the south However Khwaja Banda Nawaz Gesu Darz stayed on in the Deccan and he died there The Khwaja had produced voluminous work in Arabic Farsi as well as in the new language His most well-known work is Mrsquoeraj-ul-Ashiqeen Ram Babu Saksena thinks that Mrsquoeraj-ul-Ashiqeen has no literary value Ali Jawad Zaidi has said that it is not certain who wrote Mrsquoeraj-ul-Ashiqeen77 Unfortunately we have not been able to get hold of any works by Gesu Daraz With those doubts we cannot really rule that Mrsquoeraj-ul-Ashiqeen is the first literary work in Urdu Perhaps some new student scholar or teacher will do some more research on this topic and ill this gap in the information

Hazrath Khwaja Bandanawaz Gesudaraz(Rh)Born on the 13th of July 1321 4th

Passed away on the 1st of November 1422 16th Dhu al-Qadah 825

77 Zaidi p 37-38


However Gesu Daraz did provide the platform on which the first literary work in Urdu was produced Gesu Daraz was a Sufi of the Chishtiyya order These Sufis were always involved in Ashoora observances78 It is strongly likely that when Gesu Daraz moved to Deccan he introduced the Ashoora ritual and its accompanying rites to the Muslims of the south This was a way to introduce the Prophet of Islam and his progeny with a lot of emotionalism The general Muslim population must have got involved in the practice

As we noted earlier the Muslim presence in Kerala has been there all the same But no development on the new language took place in that area in spite of the 500 year long Muslim presence Why was that Our theory about this is simple Kerala and the rest of that area is a Malyalam speaking area Malyalam is a Dravidian language Even though when Muslims came they brought there language which was Arabic with them the new growing population of Muslims remained Malyalam-speaking All Muslim chronicles in Kerala are documented in Malyalam They accepted the holy Qurrsquoan in Arabic but documented their own affairs in their local language

As opposed to that the Muslim conquerors who came to Delhi Punjab and other northern areas were Farsi speaking whether they came from Azerbaijan Afghanistan Iran or even from Turkish regions Farsi is a language from the Indo-Iranian sub-branch of the Proto-Indo-European family of languages The northern parts of India were speaking one or another dialect of the Prakrit which we have identified as a set of dialects in the Indo-Aryan sub-branch of the Proto-Indo-European family of languages That linguistic affinity helped ameliorate a mixed local language that we now know as UrduHindi

So how could a tradition of the new language grew and flourished in the Deccan in Hyderabad area After all that area that we know today as Hyderabad is within a Dravidian influenced area

The answer to that question lies in the fact that the early rulers of the Deccan helped create and popularize the new language

The first Bahmani kingdom was established in 1347 during the reign of Muhammad Tughlaq at Delhi by a Tajik-Persian commander Nearly a hundred years later when the Bahmani kingdom became weak more new Muslim kingdoms were established in those areas The most prominent of them all was the Qutub Shahi kingdom of Golcunda which was established in 1518 AD The rulers of the Qutub Shahi kingdom were from the Turkic tribe of Qara Quyunlu There were two common things between the Tajik-Persians and the Turkic Qara Quyunlu They were both Farsi-speaking and they were Shirsquoa 78 Rizvi Saiyid Athar Abbas A Socio-Intellectual History of the Isna Ashari Shirsquois in India Marsquorifat Publishing House Canberra 1986 p 294-295


Muslims Thus both became instrumental in establishing the Ashoora observance in their kingdoms This practice as we noted may have continued from the time of Gesu Daraz Quli Qutub Shah was one of the rulers at Golcunda His year of death is 161179 Quli Qutub Shah wrote Marsiyya for Imam Husayn in a language which was a mix of Farsi with local dialects(both from the south as well as from the north) He thus popularized a new dialect for this poetry The poetry had appeal in the masses due to its passion and it had the royal patronage The city of Hyderabad is in the same vicinity That is how a tradition of Deccani Urdu took roots in that area which we know as such today This is the beginning of literary Urdu

Marsiyya in this context includes every type of lamentation poetry The modern Urdu Marsiyya that we know today as it consist of six-line stanzas took shape after nearly two hundred years of Quli Qutub Shahrsquos time

Marsiyya moved from Deccan to Delhi and then to Lucknow where it was perfected by Meer Anees and Mirza Dabeer

GHAZAL AND OTHER GENRES IN URDUThe first poet of Urdu Ghazal is Vali Dakani or more correctly

Vali Gujrati His year of death was considered to be 1747 However modern research has shown that Vali had died at a younger age in 170780

Vali stands as the connection of Urdu that developed in the Deccan with the north specifically Delhi

In the previous sections we have explored the origins and early development of Urdu both as a vernacular as well as a literary language We have shown the religious background of the language and have noted the influence of the Sufis in India on the evolving language WE have also noted the development of Urdu Marsiyya in the Dakani dialect which forms the first documented Urdu poetry

Can all this make a case for Urdu as a religious language We will answer that and bring our discussion to a conclusion in the next section

CONCLUSIONWe began this study with the question IS URDU A RELIGIOUS

LANGUGAE In that pursuit we explored the origin and early beginnings of the languages of India and where they actually came from

Let us first say a few words as to how and why did we formulate that specific question79 Zaidi Ali Jawad A History of Urdu Literature Sahitya Akademi Delhi 1993 p3980 Sadiq M A History of Urdu Literature OUP 1964 p60


As we saw in our travels through history Urdu took shape in the Indian sub-continent after the arrival of Muslims in this part of the world The very basic conclusion from that fact is that Urdu as a language had been labeled from the day of its very inception81 as the language of Muslims (of India) People scholars and the laity both have been questioning that premise for the last two hundred years

Because of that inherent nature of that debate people on both sides have argued their case with strong feelings ndash more feelings and sentiments than rational argumentation based on historical and scientific evidence In this study we have tried to present to our readers a more rational view of that debate The language issue most of the time becomes emotional and heated debates result from any such discussion We have tried to stay above any emotionalism in this study Only our readers will decide as to how successful we have been in that effort

The basic observations that we have made in this exploratory article can be summarized as follows

(1)Urdu is a language of India-Pakistan It is a language of the Indo-Aryan family with borrowings from Farsi Arabic and some other languages Its grammar is based on KhaRi Boli a dialect which came off the Prakrit of western Uttar Pradesh in north India

(2)The basic reason that the new language came into being was a religio-cultural clash between the settler-invaders and the local population back in the 800s and 900s

(3)The influence of the early Muslim holy men the Sufis is very apparent on the language

(4)The language began as a spoken language and then over the years the literary form of the language took shape

(5)The early Urdu literature is predominantly religious in nature or it documents religious ideas practices and emotions

(6)Politics had played a very significant role in the evolution of the language both the spoken word as well as the literary form

(7) In spite of its very clear religious underpinnings the language does carry a very strong current of pluralism in it Not only that the language was adopted by a very large non-Muslim population in India That helped the pluralistic and tolerant nature of the Indian society

(8)Because of the political changes in the society the pluralistic cause of the language suffered a number of set backs One of those setbacks was that the new language was perceived as a

81 As we have discussed the idea of lsquoinceptionrsquo of a new language as if it was the result of a big bang is not appropriate But the expression here wants to give an impression of the earliest beginnings


religious language or at least a language belonging to a particular religious group in some quarters

Let us see what the causes of that perception were I am going to use the term ldquoperceptionrdquo from now on for that sentiment because it is a controversial issue

The very first indication of that perception came from a statement that Sir Syed Ahmad Khan had made in the late 19th century Sir Syed was born in Delhi(1819) when the Mughal Sultanate had already begun its slippery downfall He saw how the British were destroying each and every cultural and religious institution that had been established by the Muslim civilization of India over a period of 800 years He realized that there was no chance that the Indians would be able to get rid of the British by force of arms ndash a very direct result of 1857 disaster He appealed to his people to adopt the new language Urdu as their national identity

This statement was read in two major groups of the population of India totally differently while Sir Syed himself had meant it somewhat differently than the two groups had perceived it and the ruling British used it to their own advantage

Sir Syedrsquos initial intent in that statement was to show inclusiveness of the Indian Muslims as Indian nationals For the past 800 years Muslimrsquos language of the royal court as well as their national language had been Farsi Sir Syed was trying to persuade his community to forsake that foreign language in favour of a local Indian language which incidentally had been accepted as the vernacular of the educated middle class irrespective of their religion At the same time he was trying to create some kind of solidarity within the larger Muslim community of India via a common language ndash this was the same sentiment under which the Quaid-e-Azam would choose Urdu as the national language of Pakistan nearly fifty years later In addition to that Sir Syed had made yet another statement which though in his mind was a reasonable statement was taken negatively by the non-Muslim majority of India He had said that while Urdu was the language of the Shurafa Hindi was the language of the lowers classes the farmers and labourers It was very true The educated class of Indians (irrespective of their religious preferences) spoke strictly Urdu while the lower classes spoke the various dialects of Braj Avadhi Maithli Poorbi and many other such like The anti-Urdu quarters rose up against that statement and labeled it sectarian

The Muslims of India felt gratified by their language being rated so highly and honourably The non-Muslim majority felt resentful at that development and derided the statements made by Sir Syed They perceived the Muslim leadership as separatists on the language issue


The British saw this as a golden opportunity to execute their divide-and-rule policy in India They initiated the project of Fort William College at Calcutta82 which would publish books on Indian subjects printed in both Devnagri as well as Nastrsquoaleeq ndash thus giving rise to two separate languages out of the common Indian vernacular and putting a stamp of the governmentrsquos approval on it83

These and other related forces worked together to create the perception at the popular level that Urdu was a language exclusively of the Muslims When Pakistan was created in 1947 and Urdu was declared as the national language of Pakistan that perception hardened on both sides of the border After all Pakistan was created as an Islamic country

All those things hurt the cause of Urdu in multiple ways(A) Since Pakistan was created as an Islamic country and the

language of Islam is supposed to be Arabic the Pakistani authorities teachers and scholars worked overtime to intensify the relationship of Urdu with Arabic Many scholars mainly from Punjab seriously argued that Urdu had no relationship with other Indian languages and that it was derived from Arabic (they present the Nastarsquoaleeq84 script as the evidence to that) That effort is still active in some quarters of Pakistan and more and more Arabic words and terms are being pushed down into Pakistani Urdu At the same time local Indian words are being dropped from use That is the main reason that no substantial work has been done in Pakistan in the field of linguistics Urdu is being driven away from its roots Teachers students and researchers in Pakistan have to realize that much as learning of Farsi and Arabic is necessary to know good Urdu without a basic knowledge of Sanskrit and the Indian Prakrits no substantial work can be done on Urdu There is no effort at college level in Pakistan to learn and teach Sanskrit or even the Prakrits

(B) On the other side of the border right after the partition the perception hardened that Urdu was a foreign language a language of the Muslims who had already separated in a new country called Pakistan and therefore they had taken their

82 Actually the Fort William College was established in Calcutta in 1800 The purpose of the college was to train the East India Company officers in Indian languages and Indian affairs in general Sir Syed is reported to have made those statements in the late 1800s The college seems to have intensified its activities in the twin languages after that83 This topic has been thoroughly treated by Dr Abdul Jamil Khan UrduHindi An Artificial Divide(Politics of Languge) Algora Publishing 2006 Dr Jamil is actually a medical doctor He was involved in childrenrsquos speech therapy His professional work and studies led him into working on Indian languages and their evolution84 We have written elsewhere under a different context on this topic and have shown that the actual script for the Indo-Aryan languages is the Devnagari not Nastarsquoqleeq which is a borrowed script


language with them to the new country A new effort took shape to do away with Urdu completely The main targets for that process were the provinces of UP Bihar and Delhi Urdu was banished overnight from schools Teaching of the Devnagri script was made compulsory The irony of the situation was that the education minister of the central government was Mawlana Abul Kalam Azad a great proponent of the Urdu language He remained in that position until his death in 1958 Obviously the policy was aggressively executed by other people such as Vallabh Bhai Patel and Pandit Vallabh Pant Of course Gandhi jirsquos protective hand patronized that policy In spite of the fact that Azad himself had declared Gandhi as his mentor he could not do a thing to protect Urdu in India The language was completely obliterated at the high school level in those three states during the same eleven years that Azad held the ministry of education My own schooling up to higher secondary level was done at Jubilee College Lucknow Older teachers at the institution used to tell me that there were two professorships in the college one for Urdu that was held by the famous Urdu poet Hamidullah Afsar and the other for Hindi that was held by Shri Dhar Singh They were both seen like brothers and would arrive together every morning riding the same Tonga When I joined Jubilee Collge in 1954 in 9th grade Hamidullah Afsar had already retired the Urdu chair had been abolished and Shri Dhar Singh had become the Principal of the college where he remained until I graduated

The only sane institution in India that has preserved the language to a certain extent is the Bombay film industry That is why I have included a section on that topic in this article A sort of a revival did take place in India in the 1980s for bringing back Urdu at a popular level However that anti-Urdu campaign of nearly four decades had created such a gap in Urdu education and the politics had changed so much that now Urdu graduates in India go unemployed ndash there are no jobs where the Urdu graduates can fit in India The other aspect of the situation is that my nieces come from Delhi and they know all the Urdu poetry but cannot read a word of Nastrsquoaleeq Boys and girls coming from India are seen reciting Nawha Marsiyya and Qaseeda written either in Devnagri or in Latin script

Pakistan tells a totally different story After three generations the young men and women of the country are now speaking fluent Urdu Even the Karachi Khojas and Memons are speaking Urdu without any Gujrati accent But it is a new kind of Urdu At the popular level it has been corrupted by bad grammar and inaccurate pronunciation under the influence of local dialects and the high register of the language has been overloaded with Arabic words and expressions


Everyone speaks their own language and they insist on its correctness They feel it is their right to modify the language as they wish and feel The Urdu that is being used in Pakistani newspapers and TV channels is really pathetic The main reason for that is that anchors and chat-show hosts are appointed in business interests under the influence of nepotism Most of them do not have proper education in the art and science of communication neither in language skills

The situation in India is somewhat more hopeful It appears that Urdu in India is hard to die More substantial literature is being published in India Various institutions are reprinting the great classics such as The Complete Works of Prem Chand

I was listening to an Indian TV news report This is how the report went

जोन कमयानिनट9 क अलप सखयाक कमयानिनट9 करर दौ ठिदौया गया असमबला$ न मजोर$ दौ दौ9

جین کمیونٹی کو الپ سنکھیک کمیونٹی قرار دے دیا گیا اسمبلی نے منظوری دے دی Jayn community ko alp-sankhyak community qaraar de diya gaya assembly ne manzoori de di

In this whole item the only word that can be said to be purely Hindi is the term ALP-SANKHYAK which translates as lsquoa minorityrsquo The rest of the language is all Urdu except the words ldquocommunityrdquo and ldquoassemblyrdquo which are both English but have since long been fully absorbed in Urdu In fact QARAR and MANZOOR both are Arabic words

Obviously those who wanted to Hindi-ize the Indian language had no other recourse but to fall back on Braj and Avadhi dialects (more Braj and less Avadhi) For higher register words they had to go back and search in Sanskrit (as the example above shows) That has made the language difficult and less supple And that is why we see people using KITAB instead of POTHI or PUSTAK WAQT instead of SAMAY and such words as KAGHAZ QALAM and GARM extensively In fact the Hindi speakers have forgotten certain words from the old Indian languages and use the Arabic or Farsi words more extensively Much as when I hear a younger Hindi speaker call me on the telephone I feel like my local grocer in Lucknow is calling me that gives us a lot of hope for the language Is it linguistic chauvinism May be ndash but that is not of great concern not to me


Urdu in India has been accepted as an Indian exotica Weddings and other such parties are usually rounded up with an item of Ghazal recitals Pakistanrsquos case does concern me Why

To answer that question we have to go back to our original question Is Urdu a religious language That is what a majority of Pakistanis think It is their country and their language ndash they own both They will twist and turn both every which way they want And that is how the early leaders in India had looked at the language Otherwise there was no reason for embarking on an aggressive campaign to obliterate Urdu from schools at the governmental level The Congress leaders in the 1940s and 50s felt insecure in that Urdu was a Muslim language and its cultural influence was much too strong because of its religious character It had to be replaced with a Hindu language

An episode interesting though it is I have not found any documented evidence to its authenticity is worth quoting here A central minister was traveling by train from Delhi to Calcutta The Howra Mail (the name of the train) used to stop for an hour at Lucknow Chahar Baagh Station on its way from Delhi to Calcutta The ministerrsquos daughter was a student at Lucknow University When she heard that her father was on the train she came to the Railaway Station to meet him They met And then she said ldquoAchcha Pita Ji Khuda Hafizrdquo and left The minister was incensed and turned to his aid saying ldquoThat is why I hate Urdu it has the potential to change peoplersquos faithrdquo

This story may or may not be true but it captures the sentiment carried by the political elite of India in the 1950s

A very simple fact of sociology is that languages do not have religions People do Languages can be used to document religious literature ndash some languages do it better than others A language can be influenced by a particular religion and conversely a language can influence the face of a religion We saw both those phenomena during our study of the history of evolution of Urdu In fact there are some specific elements in the evolution of Urdu which are unique to that language

(1)Urdu is the only language of the world which came into being due to a religio-cultural clash between two communities

(2)The community who felt Urdu as their language owned it(3)But the entire population of north India had wholeheartedly

accepted Urdu as their language until political forces came into play

Given those facts even if we accept beyond all reason that Urdu is a religious language and Muslims created it which is definitely not true that does not give the Muslims of India-Pakistan a monopoly right on the language Language is like a mother Anyone who loves a


language and adopts it as hisher own the language becomes his or her

I will give two examples here Look at Vladimir Nobokov He came from Russia Went to Cambridge and became an excellent English writer Just one of his works lsquoLolitarsquo is sufficient to show that It stands at par in its quality of language with any modern classic of fiction in England or in the US Look at Edward Saeed He came from Palestine Was educated at Princeton and spent all his life teaching English at Columbia in New York

Logically a language cannot belong to a single person because language is a means of communication between two parties Those who want to limit Urdu belonging to a particular community or religious ethnic political or geographical group are actually denying the universality and pluralism of the language

The reason we wrote all this is the fact that on both sides of the border where Urdu is being used as a vernacular strong feelings exist that Urdu belongs to this community and it does not belong to that community

When we began writing this in the forum everyone (at least most of the ones who wrote) was of the opinion that it was a useless debate that it was already settled that Urdu was not a language belonging to Muslims only

Perhaps within a limited circle of intelligent and educated people that is so It is all right for a group of like minded people to come together and have dinner shake hands and part agreeing with each other But on this issue we have 170 million people on one side of the border who believe that Urdu is a Muslim language so they want to twist and turn it every which way they want and on the other side of the border there are several hundred million people who hate the language only because it is perceived as a Muslim language

Even if we all agree in this forum on this point it does not solve the problem of Urdursquos decline both as an instrument or preserving an international literary database as well as communication vehicle

We have got to work relentlessly on preserving the language by insisting on the correct grammar and accurate idiom We have to condemn on the one side the unnecessary and unnatural move to load the already developed language with the import of 800 year old Prakrit words and idioms and on the other side we must discourage the Punjabi-ization of the language in Pakistan We have to encourage the import of new terms into Urdu to enhance its ability to document technology and science At the same time we have to stop using Arabicized terms for European names and terminologies fro which correct sounds exist in Urdu For example why should we call Plato Aflatoon with a soft Arabic lsquoTrsquo and with an lsquoFrsquo instead of the lsquoPrsquo when we have the correct sound for both lsquoPrsquo and lsquoTrsquo in Urdu


Is it linguistic chauvinism May be But that kind of criticism and labelling by liberals does not bother me because I care much more about linguistic accuracy and correctness than about political correctness

There are things which please the eye such as a blossoming rose and there are things which donrsquot such as a heap of stinking dung There are no two ways about it

I will therefore conclude this with a few lines of Iqbal

اپنے بھی خفا مجھ سے ہیں بیگانے بھی ناخوشنر ہلاہل کو کبھی کہہ نہ سکا قند میں زہ

مشکل ہے کہ اک بندہ حق بین و حق اندیشنہ دماوند خاشاک کے تودے کو کہے کو

Apne bhi khafa mujh se haiN begane bhi na khushMaiN zahr-e-halahal ko kabhi kah na saka qand

Mushkil hai k eek banda-e haq been-o-haq andeshKhaashaak k etude to kahe koh-e-Damavand

Please do not hesitate to send your comment and critcism on this article to the authorE-mail address mnaquviyahoocom


back to the time of Christ we are unable to make a statement with any certainty on this Both Christian as well as Jewish scholars have ascertained that the language spoken by the prophet Moses and his people was Hebrew This is evident by the fact that there are numerous Hebrew words found in the Old Testament2 that we read today in the English language An ancient copy of the five books of the Pentateuch which includes (according to the Islamic point-of-view) parts of TAWRAAT (the Torah) Zuboor (the Psalms of David) and some other religious documents is the Vulgate The Vulgate is written in Latin An even older copy of the Bible is the Septuagint This is in the Greek language The Vulgate3 is dated to be of the 5th century AD while the Septuagint4 is considered to be of the 3rd century BC

Reuters news agency has just announced that another ancient Bible known as the Codex Sinaiticus has been completely digitized in its original Greek script after extensive work carried out in the UK Germany Egypt and Russia5

We know for certain that Latin was not the original languages of the Bible The Jewish and Christian scholarship had maintained that the books of the New Testament Bible were written in Koine Greek However there has been a minority group insisting that the New Testament was written in Aramaic This group has recently increased its presence on the Internet Friedman6 has identified five different authors and therefore five different periods during which the Old

sermons and sayings of Jesus Christ According to the Muslim belief Jesus Christ had a Book which was revealed to him and it is known as Injeel in the Qurrsquoan But no such book exists today in actuality Incidentally when The New Testament was translated into Arabic it came to be known as Injeel-e-Muqaddas I am sure this was an after thought by the Christian Arab translators under the influence of the holy Qurrsquoan

2 According to the Jewish and Christian scholars the writing of the Divine word or the Bible begins with Moses According to the Islamic belief there are five Divine books revealed to the five Great Apostles of God namely Noah Abraham Moses Jesus and Muhammad The Books of Noah and Abraham are only identified by the word suhuf this is a plural for saheefa meaning a written document The other three books are identified by names as Tawraat ndash the book of Moses Injeel- the book of Jesus and al-Qurrsquoan the Book of Muhammad The five books contained laws and were revealed to the five respective Apostles whose job it was to establish the Divine Law on earth among the human society Each new revelation superseded the previous one al-Qurrsquoan being the final one Alongwith the three named books of Laws there is also a fourth Book mentioned by name as Zuboor ndash the Book of Songs of David3 This is the oldest version of Latin Bible that contains the New Testament alongwith the Old Testament4 The word means 72 and it points to the fact that so many scholars sat down and collectively produced the work It is the Koine Greek translation of the original Hebrew Bible5 The news was announced on June 6 2009 For details visit the website httpcosmosbcstyahoocomupplayerpopuprn=3906861ampcl=14347129ampch=4226714ampsrc=news

6 Friedman RE Who Wrote The Bible Harper One New York 1997














































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77 Zaidi p 37-38
























































































URDU ARTICLE

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Transcript of URDU ARTICLE