A Short History Of The Urdu Language 1q6w5i

A Short History of the Urdu Language Everyone seems to know how the Urdu language came into being. John T. Platss’ ‘A dictionary of Urdu, classical Hindi, and English’ defines the word Urdu as: ‘Army; camp; market of a camp; The Hindūstānī language as spoken by the Muhammadans of India, and by Hindūs who have intercourse with them or who hold appointments in the Government courts, &c. (It is composed of Hindī, Arabic, and Persian, Hindī constituting the back-bone, so to speak):— The royal camp or army (generally means the city of Dehli or Shāhjahānābād); the court language (=urdū-i-muʻallā-kī zabān); the Hindūstānī language as spoken in Dehli’. This seems to be the history generally agreed upon. Urdu (derived from the Turkish word Ordu meaning army camp) originated in the army camps of the Mughals and is a mixture of words taken from different languages such as Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Hindi. The soldiers who spoke these languages created a new lingua franca to communicate among themselves and thus Urdu was born. Unfortunately this simplistic view is the result of colonial myth making. According to Mehr Afshan Farooqi, Assistant Professor at University of Virginia and the editor of The Oxford India Anthology of Modern Urdu Literature, ‘The Mughals did follow the Central Asian tradition of setting up vast encampments almost city-like in proportions that could be shikargahs (royal hunting camps) or simply a court away from the formal court at the Capital. But to infer that such camps led to new language formations is to stretch the idea of urdu = camp way too far. Certainly no new language grew out of Mughal camps in Northern India’. If we consider that to be the truth then where did Urdu come from? There are several theories. Some claim that Urdu has its roots in the Punjabi language, others that it was born in Deccan or somewhere in Sindh but these are all based on pure speculation and do not hold up to linguistic or historical investigation. The myth that Urdu is a ‘camp’ language was first of all proposed by Mir Amman (1750-1837) who first presumed Urdu was born that way. In his preface to ‘Bagh-o-Bahar’ (1802), a translation of Amir Khusrau’s Tales of the Four Darweshes, carried out on the behest of Fort William College, he wrote that Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (who reigned between 1628 and 1658) made

Delhi his capital and named its bazaar ‘Urdu-e-moalla’. In fact his age can be quoted in full: ‘The of the Urdu tongue I have thus heard from my ancestors; --that the city of Dilli, according to the opinion of the Hindus, was founded in the earliest times, and that their Rajas and subjects lived there from the remotest antiquity, and spoke their own peculiar Bhakha. For a thousand years past, the Musalmans have been masters there. Mahmud of Ghazni came [there first]; then the Ghori and Lodi became kings; owing to this intercourse, the languages of the Hindus and Musalmans were partially blended together. At last Amir Taimur (in whose family the name and empire remain to this day), conquered Hindustan. From his coming and stay, the bazar of his camp was settled in the city; for which reason the bazar of the city was called Urdu. Then King Humayun, annoyed by the Pathans, went abroad [to Persia]; and at last, returning from thence, he punished the surviving [Pathans], and no rebel remained to raise strife or disturbance. When King Akbar ascended the throne, then all tribes of people, from all the surrounding countries, hearing of the goodness and liberality of this unequalled family, flocked to his court, but the speech and dialect of each was different. Yet, by being assembled together, they used to traffic and do business, and converse with each other, whence resulted the common Urdu language. When his majesty Shahjahan Sahib-Kiran built the auspicious fort, and the great mosque, and caused the walls of the city to be built; and inlaid the peacock throne with precious stones, and erected his tent, made of gold and silver brocade; then the king, being pleased, made great rejoicings, and constituted the city his capital. Since that time it has been called Shajahan-abad, (although the city of Dilli is distinct from it, the latter being called the old city, and the former the new,) and to the bazar of it was given the title of Urdu-e Mu'alla. From the time of Amir Taimur until the reign of Muhammad Shah, and even to the time of Ahmad Shah, and Alamgir the Second, the throne descended lineally from generation to generation. In the end, the Urdu language, receiving repeated polish, was so refined, that the language of no city is to be compared to it; but an impartial judge is necessary to examine it. Such a one God has at last, after a long period, created in the learned, acute and profound Mr. John Gilchrist, who from his own judgment, genius, labour and research, has composed books of rules [for the acquisition of it].

Mir Amman had written about Urdu’s origin was paraphrased by many writers over the next 100 years or so and this repetition naturally lent credence to the theory and it became ‘common knowledge’ that Urdu was a ‘camp language’, made up of words from different languages. The real story is considerably complex. The Encyclopaedia Britannica has this to say about Urdu: ‘Urdu developed in the 12th century from the regional Apabhramsha of northwestern India, serving as a linguistic modus vivendi after the Muslim conquest. This mixed speech was variously called Hindvi, Zaban-e-Hind, Hindi, Zaban-e-Delhi, Rekhta, Gujari, Dakkhani, Zaban-e-Urdu-e-Mualla, Zaban-eUrdu, or just Urdu, literally ‘the language of the camp.’ Major Urdu writers continued to refer to it as Hindi or Hindvi until the beginning of the 19th century, although there is evidence that it was called Hindustani in the late 17th century’. According to Mehr Afshan Farooqi, ‘The grammar and the syntactical structure of Urdu are based on the local speech of the times in the region around Delhi (later identified as khari boli). However, this language was not the chosen vehicle for literary production. Awadhi and Brajbhasha were the languages of poetry and other literary pursuits to the extent they were used for such a purpose in this early period. Though marginalized by Persian, the language of the royal court on the one hand and Braj and Awadhi, at the regional courts and in the creative efforts of saints and Sufi poets on the other, Hindvi lingered on as a lingua franca, travelling to western, central and southern India through merchants and travelling Sufi mystics who were encouraged by their pirs to move to distant regions and establish their own centres.’ From which of the several dialects did Urdu originate? Some linguists believe it was most probably an offshoot of Shourseni Prakrit, spoken in and around Mathura in Uttar Pradesh. According to Shamsur Rehman Farooqi it changed into Goojri in Gujarat and Dakhani in the Deccan. As its literary potential grew poetry in Hindvi became a mixture of Persian and indigenous meters. The name 'Urdu' seems to have begun its life as zaban-e urdu-e muallae shahjahanabad (the language of the exalted city/court of Shahjahanabad, that is, Delhi). The rest as they say is history.

People who through ignorance or other motivations present a simplistic view of language ignore the fact that Khusrau was writing in Urdu considerably earlier than the arrival of the Mughals. In fact traces of Urdu have also been found in Babar’s diaries. There is no doubt Urdu has been influenced by other languages but the influence has been in picking up words. Grammar was hardly affected. The English language has words from several languages does that make it a ‘camp’ language? Certainly not. Dr. Rauf Parekh writing in Dawn says, ‘A language takes centuries, even more, to evolve. It is a slow, long, constant, complex and natural process. A language ‘invented’ to serve a specific purpose, such as enabling the troops to communicate with one another, is labelled as ‘artificial’ by linguists. Though there have been hundreds of such attempts, some aimed at facilitating international communication between nations and peoples speaking different languages, none has been successful. Esperanto, a language formed with the basic roots of some European languages, died despite its early success. In other words, experiments to devise a language have failed and no artificial language could survive. Urdu, like other languages of the world, has been classified by linguists on the basis of its morphological and syntactical features. Urdu nouns and adjective can have a variety of origins, such as Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Pushtu and even Portuguese, but ninety-nine per cent of Urdu verbs have their roots in Sanskrit/Prakrit. So it is an Indo-Aryan language which is a branch of Indo-Iranian family, which in turn is a branch of Indo-European family of languages. According to Dr Gian Chand Jain, Indo-Aryan languages had three phases of evolution beginning around 1,500 BC and ing through the stages of Vedic Sanskrit, classical Sanskrit and Pali. They developed into Prakrit and Apbhransh, which served as the basis for the formation of later local dialects. Around 1,000 AD, the modern Indo-Aryan era began and with the arrival of Muslims Arabic, Persian and, to a lesser extent, Turkish vocabulary began assimilating into local dialects. One of those dialects later evolved further and became an early version of Urdu/Hindi. Now the only question remaining unanswered is which dialect or dialects developed further to become a language that was basically one and was later divided into two languages, Hindi and Urdu, on the basis of two different scripts’. I think it is high time we rid ourselves of what is essentially a faulty theory. Our national language demands it.