1. Chaos and Culture

Eighteenth century India was a pulsating cauldron of chaos, conflict, confusion and contradictions. As the mighty Mughal Empire began sinking into oblivion, from its ashes emerged a tiny spark which was to light up into a bright flame in the days to come. As a once mighty empire crumbled, a language was born.

Urdu is a language which has had a rather late christening. It was baptised nearly 700 years after it was born. Like most languages its origin is misty. It passed through various stages in its evolution and was called by different names like Hindvi, Hindi, Dehlvi, Gujri, Dakani and Rekhta[1]—roughly in that order. It borrowed from different cultures, absorbed many traditions, acquired grace and elegance and became ‘the language par excellence of Islamic thought and culture in India’.[2] A number of theories have been advanced to unravel its origin but none of these have been found to be either comprehensive or conclusive. In what follows, an attempt has been made to outline the development of the language from its earliest stages to the time it was finally christened as ‘Urdu’.

Linguists have divided the various stages of diffusion of Indo-Aryan Languages into three distinct phases—Old, Middle and New (or Modern) Indo-Aryan.[3] The classification is not strictly chronological or discrete due to a certain amount of overlapping. For instance, when the Rig Veda was compiled during the Old Indo-Aryan phase there were already dialects with some Middle Indo-Aryan features instead of Old Indo-Aryan. In other words, at the time when Sanskrit was in use, Prakrits were also being used in particular contexts and situations.[4] In Sanskrit plays, for example, the king spoke in Sanskrit whereas Middle Indo-Aryan speech forms were used by queens, maid-servants and so on. The king’s wives were expected to be bilingual, speaking in Sanskrit to the king and in Prakrit to the maids.[5] Linguists have not recorded the language the royal couple spoke in bed.  

However, in spite of the difficulty in determining the precise historical boundaries between one phase and another, there are distinct features which make Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA), from its very earliest stages, fundamentally different from Old Indo-Aryan (OIA). Apart from differences with respect to phonology and grammar, the history of MIA is essentially one of the slow erosions of OIA forms. Middle Indo-Aryan also differs from Old Indo-Aryan with respect to the weight of syllables. Old Indo-Aryan allowed not only light and heavy syllables but also super-heavy syllables whereas Middle Indo-Aryan generally disallows super-heavy syllables.[6]

Middle Indo-Aryan, in turn, is also divisible into three stages, extending to 15 centuries from the 4th century BC to the 12th century CE. Each stage, though individually distinct, share features of phonology and morphology which characterize them as parallel descendants of OIA.[7] The earliest and the most archaic of the MIA language, which coincided with the foundation of Buddhism and Jainism during 500–400 BC, are represented by Asoka’s inscriptions and Pāli. This was followed by Prakrit proper which covers the period from the 3rdcentury BC to 5thcentury CE. The last stage of MIA, covering the 5th to 12thcenturies CE, is represented by writings in Apabhramsa. Among ancient Indian grammarians and rhetoricians, the term ‘Apabhramsa’ was used contemptuously to denote all deviations from the Sanskrit of Panini which was supposed to have descended from the divine language of the Vedic texts.[8] The grammarian Bharata assigns to Apabhramsa “the position of a barbarous dialect spoken by nomadic people who rear cattle, sheep, horses and camels”.’[9] From its beginnings Apabhramsa was located in Gujarat, western Madhya Pradesh and south-eastern Rajasthan and thence it spread through the whole of north India and ultimately became north India’s literary koine.[10]

The Apabhramsa stage of the Middle Indo-Aryan marks the end of the Middle Indo-Aryan period and the beginning of the New or Modern Indo-Aryan and its vernacular constituents.  Apabhramsas were essentially local versions of Prakrit and they varied from one region to another. Prakrit, meaning natural or inartificial, is a generic term that refers to the vernaculars spoken in India since Vedic times. Grierson has distinguished three types of prakrits corresponding to the age they were spoken in. Thus, primary prakrits refers to the vernacular of the Vedic times. “The vernaculars which developed from them and which continued developing…. until they became the modern Sanskritic Indo-Aryan vernaculars, may be called the Secondary Prakrits; while the final development, these modern vernaculars themselves, as they have existed in the past nine hundred years, may be called Tertiary Prakrits.”[11] The various Apabhramsa dialects form the last phase of the secondary prakrits and the vernaculars that evolved from them form the tertiary prakrits. Each prakrit had a corresponding Apabhramsa. For instance, there was a Saurasena Apabhramsa corresponding to Sauraseni Prakrit, a Magadha Apabhramsa corresponding to Magadhi Prakrit, and so on.The Indo-Aryan vernaculars that developed from the secondary prakrits emerged under the atmosphere of Sanskrit and hence around 50% of their vocabulary was borrowed from that language.[12] “An ever increasing influx of Sanskrit tatsamas (Sanskrit words used without any alteration) is one of the most salient characteristics of NIA and one which distinguishes it from MIA.”[13] The reason for Sanskritisation normally advanced is the lexical poverty of the New Indo Aryan languages as they were never used as the language of high culture and ‘serious’ composition was restricted to Sanskrit. The vernaculars were further enriched by a steady infiltration of Persian and Arabic words from the 11th century CE onwards. The language that we refer to as ‘Urdu’ has its origin in these vernacular languages of the New Indo-Aryan phase.

Thus, from a linguistic point of view, Urdu is a dialect of Western Hindi which is derived from the Apabhramsa dialect corresponding to Sauraseni Prakrits which was spoken in Madhyadesh or middle country. Its geographical boundary extended from the Himalayas on the north to the Vindhya hills on the south, and from Sirhind on the west to the confluence of the Ganges and the Jamuna on the east.[14] Western Hindi has five dialects—Bangaru or Haryanvi, Braj Bhasha, Bundeli, Kanauji and Hindustani. It is spoken in Delhi and the National Capital Region, western-central Madhya Pradesh, western Uttar Pradesh and the adjoining districts of Haryana and Rajasthan.[15]

The term ‘Hindustani’ mentioned above needs some explanation. It was coined under western influence and has been used in a variety of ways—as a synonym for Urdu and Hindi as well as the Hindi-Urdu speech bereft of Persian or Sanskrit words. It is rarely used today in any official document either in India or in Pakistan. In fact, it finds no mention in the Eight Schedule of the Indian Constitution which lists out the languages of India. Thus, Hindi and Urdu not only share a common ancestry but also a common structure and morphology though they are written in different scripts—Devanagari and Perso-Arabic. The grammatical differences between Urdu and Hindi are minimal. In other words, if we ignore the issue of script as being of little importance, we cannot escape the conclusion, however politically incorrect, that they are the best embodiment of the composite Hindu-Muslim or Ganga-Jamuna cultural tradition.

Having discussed the linguistic heritage of Urdu, we may now proceed to give a brief description about its historical evolution. From a historic point of view, Hafiz Mahmud Sherani in his book Punjab Mein Urdu (Urdu in Punjab), published in 1928, traces the origin of Urdu to the arrival and garrisoning of Mahmud of Ghazni troops in Lahore in 1027 CE. The languages of the troops were Persian, Pushto or Turkish. The need to communicate with the local populace naturally led them to adopt the language current in the Punjab, which was Eastern Punjabi. During the nearly two centuries, between 1027 CE and 1206 CE, when Qutubuddin Aibek became the Sultan of Delhi, a mixed dialect thus began to take shape which was derived by interspersing the language spoken in Punjab with Persian and Turkish words. It was at this stage, says Sherani, that Urdu was born. The British orientalist, T. Graham Bailey, in his book, A History of Urdu Literature, published in 1932, has proposed a similar theory of the origin of Urdu.