Moghul Royals Spoke Medieval Hindi: Descent and Evolution of Urdu from this Language

Medieval dialects of Hindi descended from Apabhramsa that predate even the early Muslim invaders like Mahmud Gazhnavi (Shukla 1940, Dinkar 1956 and Khan 1987). Dinkar’s magnum opus Sanskriti ke Char Adhyay is a work of immense scholarship, with a foreword written by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and received Sahitya Academy Award.

Historical and literary evidence evinces that right from late ancient and early medieval days both Hindus and Muslims had been writing poetry in various dialects of northern India, such as, Khadi Boli, Braja and Avadhi. These dialects are often collectively called proto-Hindi or medieval Hindi and were written in Nagari script (ibid). The earliest written specimens of Khadi Boli poetry are found in the writings of Amir Khusrau (1253 – 1325 AD). A scholar of Persian, he wrote extensively in Braja also. An example of Sufi spiritual verse composed by Khusrau is given here.


[Khusrau spreads the night of union wakeful with beloved / The body belongs to me. The mind to my beloved, and the two merge in a monochrome.]

The earliest prose written in Braja belongs to mid-fourteenth century (Shukla 1940, p. 278). The earliest specimen of Khadi Boli prose has been dated to Moghul emperor Akbar’s reign. Ganga Kavi, a poet and courtier of Akbar wrote a prose work called Chanda Chhanda Barnana ki Mahima (ibid, p. 282).

Most of the Muslim kings used to have a Persian and Hindi Navis (secretary) in their court. It seems day to day lower administration was run in medieval Hindi, whereas important records of long term interest were maintained in Persian. The Moghul royals were originally Turkic speakers, but they lost that tongue and soon became fluent speakers of medieval Hindi and composed poetry in that language. Akbar’s friend Raja Birbal used to give away to the poor his entire year’s earnings on every birthday. On his death a grieving Akbar uttered a poem which was recorded by the Hindi Navis.

[The poor knew (him) well, he never hurt anyone. The poor tell me that Birbal did not keep anything (wealth) for himself.]

Some Moghul princes had two names. Shah Jahan gave his 3rd son two names, Aurangzeb and Navarang Bihaari. This second name appears in the works of contemporaries of Aurangzeb, like Bhushan, the court poet of Shivaji (Dinkar 1956, p. 627). Unable to bear imprisonment in the hands of Aurangzeb, Shah Jahan lamented in a verse:


[When he was born, I gave lakhs in gifts and named him Navarang Bihaari, brought him up with care and made him a satrap of a territory with a large army. This son nurtured enmity in mind and put my hands in chains. Shah Jahan submits to God (हरि) saying, “Oh, the lotus-eyed one, all that happens is your will”.]

The use of the Persian word ‘मुलुक्क’ is notable. More notable is the usage of the Sanskrit words ‘हरि’ and ‘राजीवनैन’ for God or Allah, although राजीवनैन, meaning lotus-eyed, is an epithet for Vishnu in the Hindu scriptures. The vocabulary of this language included words that were in popular usage. No words, Persian or Sanskrit, were deliberately excluded. The poem exemplifies linguistic syncretism achieved at that time between the two religions, Hinduism and Islam. We shall see that all this would later be overturned deliberately.

Famous linguist and language historian Dr. Suniti Kumar Chatterji has written that according to ‘Mayasire-Alamgiri’, while Aurangzeb was in the Deccan (a region south of the Narmada river) in 1690, a Muslim from Bengal met him and wished to be his disciple. Aurangzeb quoted a popoular couplet of that region to deride him (Dinkar 1956, p. 391):


[You want to give up long hair and wear the cap (of a Fakir). Oh shameless man! Your house is being eaten by rats and you talk of erecting a new roof.]

Aurangzeb’s sister Zibunnisa produced a literary work of merit named Naina Vilaasa. When his son Mohammad Azam Shah sent certain varieties of mangos and asked him to name them, Aurangzrb named them Sudhaarasa and Rasanaa Vilaasa (ibid, p. 391). It is clear that the lingua franca of the era was medieval Hindi, because the vast majority of the subjects, both Muslim and Hindu, knew no Persian, although the formal court language was Persian.

Birth and growth of Urdu

Aurangzeb was born and brought up in a liberal atmosphere like his brother Dara Shikoh, who translated sections of Upanishads into Persian under the title Upanikhat. However, later in his life, Aurangzeb accepted Sheikh Saifuddin Sirhindi as his spiritual guru, i.e.,Murshid (Dinkar 1956, p. 627). The latter belonged to the Naqshbandiyya order of Sufis who waged a bitter struggle against Akbar’s liberal policies. This order traditionally preached sectarian hatred, directed against the Shia as well as the Hindu. Influence of this order on Aurangzeb and his court had much to do with the later development of Urdu, although it was born not in the north but in the south and had followed a strange trajectory.

It would be pertinent to explore the origin of Dakkhini or Dakhni Hindavi (Dakkhini is a Sanskritic word meaning southern). It is clear that Moghul royals, within a generation of coming into India, became comfortable speakers of medieval Hindi. Hindi written in Nagari script was the language of lower administration and business transaction. Khadi Boli, the language of the capital region, had reached the Deccan even earlier through trade, Sufi-Bhakti saints and invading Muslim armies from North India.

The decision of Mohammad Bin Tughlaq to shift his capital to Daulatabad in Deccan in 1327 AD led to a substantial shift of population from the Delhi region to Deccan and brought Khadi Boli (also known as Hindavi) to the Deccan in a very big way. Ramdhari Singh Dinkar (ibid), among others, like Suniti Kumar Chatterji and R. S. McGregor, holds that it was Hindavi of the North that started being written in the Arabic (Nastaliq) script in the Deccan and at that moment Dakkhini-Urdu was born.

Earlier in the 7th century this script had been imposed on Persian when Islam conquered Persia. In the Indian Deccan this script was not imposed by force of arms, but just adopted by the Muslim Sultans of the Deccan. These liberal rulers left the other scripts of the region, Marathi and Telugu, free. Yet the inescapable question arises — why did the liberal Sultans give patronage to the Arabic script, when scripts and writing systems much more suitable for an Indian language was already at hand? The inescapable answer is that they did so because the Arabic script was the one that was used in their religious books. Khan (1987) writes:

The Hindavi of the North … became the language of administration and transaction of the Bahamani kingdom. From this evolved the Dakhni language or Urdu of the Deccan.

Then it is not surprising that all the works that are considered as early specimen of Urdu were written in the Deccan. Dinkar notes that the writers of Dakkhini-Urdu used Persian meters. However, Persian or Arabic words were sparingly used and the themes were rooted in the local culture. He has reproduced some fine specimens of these early works (Dinkar, p. 385).

The earliest work of poetry has been attributed to Ibrahim Adil Shah of Bahamani dynasty, followed by other Deccan rulers, and Dinkar gives a long list. Ibrahim Adil Shah wrote the following invocation to his Nauras Nama which is a commentary on nine Rasas or moods of the Natya Shastra, a treatise on dramatics written in Sanskrit:

Saaradaa Ganesh maataa pitaa/ Tum mano nirmal beeb sphatik.
[Saaradaa and Ganesh are (like) mother and father/you are like transparent crystals.]

Here the title Nauras Nama is a mixture of Sanskrit and Persian, and the poetry is rich in Sanskritic words. The language reflects the syncretic Hindu-Muslim culture of the Adil Shahi times. To start with poet Wali Dakhni wrote in Dakkhini-Urdu [ibid, p. 385].

But another event as significant as Tughlaq’s decision to shift capital southwards happened during Wali’s life time. In 1686 Aurangzeb decided to establish in Aurangabad (in present Maharashtra) his centre for long drawn Deccan wars with Shivaji. Now the medieval-Hindi-speaking northern establishment came in prolonged contact with Dakkhini-Urdu. Wali himself visited Delhi twice in 1690 and 1724 AD, where he impressed the Moghul court with his poetry. It should be recalled that the ruler was Aurangzeb and the atmosphere very sectarian and hateful, with Jazia tax imposed on Hindu pilgrims, dictated by his guru Sheikh Saifuddin Sirhindi of the Naqshabandiyya order.

The orthodoxy looked down upon the Indian vernacular as the language of the Kaafir (infidel) and was pro-Persian in language policy. At the same time they realized that Persian can never become a popular language in India. They took interest in Wali Dakhni’s works because they saw in it the successful adaptation of a local language that would lend itself to Persianization and can be a vehicle of orthodox thoughts (ibid, p.386). There Shah Gulshan, an elderly and respectable poet of Persian, advised Wali to use Persian words in lieu of vernacular ones. Wali followed the advice but was not very successful as shown by Dinkar (ibid) who quoted a verse written by Wali after his transformation. A similar attempt by another poet Faiz was also not successful. Hence, the pronouns, verbs, the syntax and grammar of the vernacular had to be retained. The nouns, particularly the abstract nouns, adjectives, idioms and metaphors of Indian origin were sought to be expelled as far as possible. Dinkar calls this policy “Matrukaat or Bahishkaar ki niti” (ibid, p. 385).

It should be noted that the Persian of the Moghul era had already been thoroughly Arabized in the previous six centuries of its post-Islamic phase. So in effect the process of Persianization resulted in the Persio-Arabization of Urdu. Dakkhini-Urdu had acquired some Telugu, Marathi, and Gujarati influences. All these were systematically purged along with the Sanskritic ones. Thus emerged northern Urdu, which is the present form of Urdu, from the womb of Dakkhini-Urdu.

There were exceptions. Noor Mohammad, the court poet of Mohammad Shah, who resisted this policy (Shukla 1940, pp. 73-76), used a very mature language with many words from Sanskrit. His major contributions are Indraavati and Anuraag Baansuri. He was often condemned for writing in Hindi in spite of being Muslim by birth. But his was a fight for a lost cause. It has been the misfortune of Urdu and north India that an eminent poet like Nazir Akbarabadi was ostracized because he used a lot of native words and themes (Dinkar 1956, p.388). Jameel, a popular 20th century Urdu poet, has expressed his anguish over the Persianization of Urdu, an Indian language, in the following verse:

Kije na Jameel Urdu ka singaar, Iranee talmeehon se, pehnegi bideshi gahne kyun ye beti Bhaarat Maataa ki? (Ref: Dinkar 1956, p. 624).
[Jameel does not decorate Urdu with Iranian ornaments. Why should a daughter of Mother India put on foreign ornaments?]

Jameel’s clarion call went unheeded and so did noted writer Rahi Masoom Raza’s call for the use of Nagari script for Urdu.

A Language Vivisected by the use of an imported script and vocabulary

Common people everywhere in India are those ranged from the illiterate to those who passed high-school that is Class 10. They form the overwhelming majority of the population. They use a vocabulary of about 300 to 350 words for all their needs. This I call the bazaar language.

Both Hindus and Muslims of the Hindi heartland speak the same bazaar language. They have no problem in communication or transactions with each other. The Hindus call it Hindi and write it in Nagari script, and the Muslims call it Urdu and write it in Arabic script. Anyone who lives in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh or Bihar, and speaks the language of the land knows this altruism. But as soon as one rises to a higher level of expression and needs to use abstract nouns, the trouble starts. For example, Prime Minister in Hindi is Pradhaan Mantri, but in Urdu it is Sadr-i-Riyasat. An incident in Hindi is ghatanaa, but in Urdu it is Vakeyaa. One can go on endlessly citing such divergence. Result: the present author, who belongs to Uttar Pradesh and speak fluently the language of Uttar Pradesh, cannot follow the Urdu news bulletins issued by Lucknow Doordarshan. Ironically, his Muslim friends, inhabitants of the same locality, not schooled in a Madrasah but in an English-medium school, also cannot follow the same news bulletin, it is so loaded with foreign Persio-Arabic words.

Conclusion

From the times of Mahmud Ghazanvi to Moghul Emperor Shah Jahan there was progressive syncretism between Islam and Hinduism. Adherents of both religions used the same words in their day to day communications as well as in their prayers to the almighty. All this assimilation was achieved through the medium of medieval Hindi.

Unfortunately, thereafter started a process of regressive anti-syncretism, all very innocuously, in the Bahamani kingdom of the Deccan. Arabic script and Persian meter started to be used for an Indian language that, after its arrival in north India, was named Urdu. All nouns, adjectives, adverbs and metaphors of Indian origin were expelled and supplanted by Persio-Arabic words as far as possible. Thus was born the language of the faithful from the womb of the language of the kafir (infidel). Gradually a chasm between the Hindus and Muslims opened and went on expanding. The process spanned centuries. Initially Indians were divided in to two religions — Hinduism and Islam. That division got reinforced in the sense that now Hindus and Muslims got two separate languages and writing systems. From this sprang the two-nation-theory, which posited that Hindus and Muslims were two nations. This, aided and abetted by a foreign ruler, led to the vivisection of India and creation of Pakistan.

In the east, in Bengal the Urdu-speaking elite led by the Nawab of Dacca and Shaheed Surawardy, a rich zamindaar of Midnapore district, led a movement. Eventually this led to partition of Bengal and caused the eastern Muslim-majority part of Bengal to join Pakistan. Thereafter, the Urdu speaking elite promptly migrated to the western part of Pakistan. The remaining Bengalis of East Pakistan rejected Urdu and the seed of a further partition (of Pakistan) was sown right at its inception. In 1971 the East Pakistan seceded from Pakistan and a new country called Bangladesh was born. Here too a dichotomy between two languages played a key role.

References.

Dinkar, Ramdhari Singh (1956): Sanskriti ke Char Adhyay (with a foreword by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru), Lok Bharati Prakashan , Allahabad, reprinted in 2002.

Khan, Iqbal (1987): Rise of Urdu and Partition,Viewpoint, July-Sept. Lahore, Pakistan. Reprinted in the Times of India, October 2, 3 and 5, 1987, as one of the series to mark 40 years of Independence.

Shukla, Ram Chandra (1940): Hindi Sahitya ka Itihaas, Lok Bharati Prakashan, Allahabad, reprinted in 2002.