Daily Times

The origins of the Urdu language is a subject on which not only linguists and political historians cross swords, but even ideologues and Gramsci’s state-intellectuals, representing a supposedly ‘Pakistani’ and an ‘Indian’ point of view, clash incessantly. Considered in the light of this highly contentious and charged academic and intellectual environment, the publication of Distinguished National Professor at Quaid-e-Azam University, Dr Tariq Rehman’s major work, From Hindi to Urdu: A Social and Political History, Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011 (for the India market, Orient BlackSwan, New Delhi) is a very welcome addition. It is a shining example of dispassionate and enlightened scholarship that should go a long way in setting the record straight.

The puzzle the author seeks to solve is the following: from the 13th to the 18th century the name used for the language now called Urdu was mostly Hindi, though other names were also used. When and why did it become Urdu? He gives two explanations: pristine Hindi was not the same language as modern Hindi; languages change over time. The same pristine Hindi, however, was the ancestor of two contemporary languages: modern Urdu and modern Hindi. In this evolution, argues the author, natural change as well as human agency played their part.

With regard to natural change, he asserts that the language spoken in much of northern India at the time of Muslim incursions into the subcontinent was described as Hindi or Hindui by outsiders, especially Muslim scholars. The great poet and sufi, Amir Khusrau (1253-1324, Turkish father, Indian mother) spoke and wrote in a language he called Hindui. It was the same language that many centuries later in the colonial era came to be known as Hindustani. That name was commonly in use before the partition of India to describe the day-to-day language spoken in northern India and in many other parts of the subcontinent.

He rejects the widely held view that Urdu (a Turkish word for a camp or gathering of soldiers) emerged as a new language when men belonging to disparate linguistic nationalities were recruited into Muslim armies and needed a language to communicate. If that were true, Urdu would be a pidgin language, he argues. A pidgin is a reduced language that comes into being from extended contact between groups of people with no common language. Nor is Urdu a creole language. A creole language is an extension of an existing language, which has a core group of native speakers, but becomes considerably simplified as other groups adopt it. He rejects both such descriptions for Urdu, arguing that Urdu has a highly sophisticated structure with distinct grammar and syntax, and that it descends from the Hindu-Muslim cultural synthesis extending over 500 years. During this period, it was used in both the religious and secular literature of Hindus and Muslims. There were of course the Devanagari and Persian scripts in which this common language was written.

With regard to the name Urdu, Rehman offers an alternative explanation. Drawing on a vast body of sources he asserts that a number of other names — Hindvi, Hindi, Dihalvi, Khari Boli, Gujri, Dakhani and Rekhta were used for this common language. However, the Muslim elite of Delhi and Agra began to use a particular vocabulary toward the end of the 18th century, which became its distinctive aristocratic features. It was called ‘Zuban-e-Urdu-e-Mualla’ (the language of the Exalted City, i.e. Delhi). Over time that long name shrank simply to Urdu.

Rehman reviews a number of competing theories about the origin of Urdu. Among them the most important is the view that Urdu is a developed form of Punjabi. Hafiz Mahmud Shirani was the originator of that theory (presented in 1928). He suggested that Urdu first developed in Punjab and was then taken to Delhi by the Muslims. Proof given in support of the theory is the existence of Punjabi words and expressions in Urdu including Dhakni, spoken in southern India. Shirani made such a conclusion without examining the hypothesis that Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Seraiki, Hindko and so on descend from a common ancient language “spread over the huge area from Peshawar to Benares”. Urdu has a capacity to absorb words from other languages, so it should not be surprising to find Punjabi words in it — this is all the more possible because both stem from the same ancient root.

How did, then, Urdu come to be known as the language of Muslims and of Islam? This is the core element or the most intriguing aspect of the puzzle the author seeks to solve.

He traces the roots of such transformation to the vicissitudes attendant upon the politics and social order that evolved with the rise of British power in the subcontinent. The decline of Muslim power produced an identity crisis. It was compounded by the demand of the rising Hindu middle class that Hindi written in the Devanagari script should replace the Persian script. Hitherto government documents were written in the Persian script and the Muslim minority as well as the Kaesth caste of Hindu scribes who wrote in it enjoyed a monopoly of government jobs in the United Provinces (UP). Under the British a switchover to Hindi-Urdu or Hindustani took place. The script used was the Persian. The rising Hindu middle class of UP demanded that it should be written in the Devanagari script and they called it Hindi. Further complications followed when religious revivals among Hindus and Muslims began to be expressed in different scripts. Such divisive tendencies were aggravated further when the Congress-Muslim League contest over India’s future set the terms for intellectual and political debate.

The ‘Islamisation of Urdu’ became part of the separatist agenda of the Muslim League, and after Pakistan came into being such an agenda found spokespersons among Punjabi-origin scholars such as Fateh Mohammad Malik who advocated that Punjabi was merely a primitive type of Urdu, and therefore Urdu should be the national language of Pakistan and Punjab. In India, Hindi purists and Hindu nationalists resorted to similar arguments with a view to denying Urdu the status of an indigenous language of India.

Notwithstanding such politicisation of the origins of Urdu, the author draws attention to the fact that Hindustani (common name for both Hindi and Urdu) continues to be the language of the people on both sides of the border, and this is particularly noteworthy in Bollywood where Hindi used in the films is actually Hindustani. There is no doubt that he provides most compelling evidence in his book to establish his thesis. It is bound to become a standard reference on this subject.

The writer has a PhD from Stockholm University. He is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University. He is also Honorary Senior Fellow of the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. He can be reached at billumian@gmail.com