Did modern Hindi originate in South India?

by Guest Wed Aug 02, 2017 5:33 am

I was born in Gujarat in a Maharashtrian family. The two languages I imbibed almost with my mother’s milk were Marathi, my mother-tongue, and Gujarati. The latter I learned outside my house. The neighbours and everyone else in the street spoke it. Learning it was no effort, but I still remember my Chitra and Meena, the daughters of our upstairs neighbours, teaching me the numbers, from one to 100 very painstakingly. My Gujarati, at all events, was so authentic that no one could tell I was a Maharashtrian. The surprise, even alarm, expressed by some of the natives when they heard that I was not a Gujarati was always both amusing and annoying. Later, when we moved out of Gujarat, I lost that native-like fluency and local accent. My Gujarati is still pretty good, but it’s bookish and artificial, not the living language in which I frolicked as a child.

The point is that I never learned [Hindi] for the first five and a half years of my life, which were spent in Baroda. Ironically, I learned a language akin to Hindi when we moved to Bangalore, in the heart of South India. I learned the language, moreover, from drivers and watchmen. They all thought of us as North Indians and assumed that we knew Hindi. The language they taught me was intimate, sociable, warm, vital, quick, and expressive. “Tum ko Hindi nai aata, saam?” I remember being asked. I said, “Na. Sirf thoda thoda aata.” I told them I knew only Marathi and Gujarati. My first Hindi teachers said, “Koi baat nahin, hum sikhata.” And so my lessons started.

“Kab aye tum?”
“Phajar ko.”
“Kay hona tumna?”
“Kuch bhi nahin. Jao ji, humna chhod dalo.”
“Tum kidhar rehte?
“Idhar-ich. Isi colony mein. Tumna malum nahin?”

This is the sort of Hindi we spoke. You may call it Dakhni or Dakhni Urdu, but it’s spoken in large parts of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and even in Tamil Nadu. Again, there a local variations. Hyderabadi is a distinct and much more powerful form than Karnataki. The large Muslim, Rajput, and other North Indian populations in Bangalore and Mysore, especially those settled there for over 200 years, speak this language.

When we grew up, we were rather ashamed of it. We thought that only the “real” North Indians, those who lived in U.P or Delhi knew proper Hindi. Our language was something we rarely used in public. It was the patios spoken with subordinates who worked in the company. For several years, while I was growing up in Bangalore, I spoke this kind of Hindi. It was a language in which “mein” and “aap” were rarely used; its was only “hum” and “tum.” Many years later, a friend from Hyderabad told me that others, especially elders and betters, needed to be addressed as “aap.”

The verbs in this language were very graphic and vivid: dhakal dalo—push it away; bhirka do—fling it; chhod dalo—leave it; ghatt pakdo—hold it tightly; daud lo—run; and so on. “Ch” as an intensifier was added to everything we said: “Uttach—that’s all; wo ayach nahin—he didn’t come at all; bolech nahin—didn’t say at all; and so on. It was also a language full of swear words, besides the usual ma-bahen ki gaaliyan, which I won’t translate: chinnal ke; laude ke baal; gaandu; chutiya; etc.

“Unhe kidhar gaya so?”
“Kya ki, maloom nahin. Bole ke gaya nahin unhe. Sala, chinnal ka.”
“Wo sab humna sunna nahin. Tumech karna padenga.”
“Kaya saab, aisa bolte tum. Usiko aata na, humna kyon tum bejaar karte?”
“Aisa kya, ulte zaban ladate kya tume. Bahut kirkire tumhari sun liya. Ab bus ho gaya. Chup chaap aate ki nahin, bolo.”
“Achha saab, aate hum. Tum kya yaad karenge.”
I typical conversation would go like this. “So” would be liberally sprinkled all over. Aate so, jaate so, ky so, bolo so, and so on.

Later, when I lived in Hyderabad, the language came back to me, but it was not what I had learned as a child in the suburbs of Bangalore, from native speakers and users of Karnataki or Bangalori. Though the latter was the mother tongue of none of us, we all spoke it, whether we were Gujaratis, Maharashtrians, Telugus, Tamils, Kannadigas, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, North Indians, South Indians, officers or watchmen.

Mr. Seshadri gave this beautiful language some semblance of legitimacy in my eyes. Later, I realized that Hindi or Hindavi or Urdu or Dakhini had a great flowering in the South much before it reached it high level of sophistication in Delhi, Agra, and Lucknow. In was in the Deccan that this language found state patronage in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. Golconda, Bijapur, Bidar, Gulbarga, the breakaway Sultanates of the Deccan and, later, Mysore under Hyder Ali and Tipu, patronized this language. The first ruler and founder of Hyderabad, Quli Qutub Shah, composed love lyrics in it. The language that I had learned from drivers, watchmen, and malis was, after all, a noble tongue.

Later, when I came to St. Stephen’s College to do my B.A. (Hons.) in English, I thought I would at last get a native speaker of Hindi as a teacher. That is indeed what I thought was the case when I took classes with Dr. Vedagnya Arya. I enjoyed those classes, though not as much as I had the Pre-University course at Madras. The only Hindi poetry that I had read till then was at Madras. Who can forget the rousing resonance of the lines of Subhadra Kumari Chauhan’s poem on Rani Laxmibai: “Khub ladi mardani thi woh jhansi wali rani.” I also read Suryakant Tripathi “Nirala,” Jaishankar Prasad, Maithilisharan Gupt, and Mahadevi Verma for the first time. In Delhi, however, the emphasis seemed to be on prose. There was an awful essay, a sort of travel piece, by Jawaharlal Nehru which was prescribed. It was probably the only thing he ever wrote in English. I remember a word from it , khushk—dry—Nehru was saying that mausam khushk tha—or something to that effect. Another essay that I remember was called “Mere Napitacharya.” It was a humorous piece on the author’s barber. In today’s more politically correct times, the undertone of class superiority would be sure to attract criticism. I also read famous and not so famous short stories by Premchand, Upendranath Ashk, Mohan Rakesh, and so on. “Punch Parmeshwar,” “Budhi Kaki,” “Dawat ki Adawat,” are some of the titles that stick in my mind.

Dr. Arya was an eloquent and inspired teacher. He also brought in a researcher’s dimension to the classroom, which had been missing in my earlier Hindi classes. I got to know his son, Aditya, rather well. Aditya and I used to stay up nights, with flaskfuls of coffee, studying before the exam. Of course, we chatted more and studied less. It was only then, in my third year, after I had cleared the Hindi subsidiaries that I found out the Dr. Arya was actually a Telugu. He had left home at an early age, joined the Arya Samaj, studied to become a PhD and a lecturer in Hindi. So, even in Delhi, I was taught Hindi by a vibhashi like myself.

In this longish, autobiographical narrative what I’ve tried to establish is the simple fact that I am a non-native speaker of Hindi who was taught the language and its literature by other non-native speakers. I learned Hindi in the South, in Bangalore; all my teachers in school and college were non-native speakers of Hindi; that is, throughout my education, I was taught Hindi by Kannada, Tamil, Malayali, and Telugu speakers. It is they who taught me not only how to speak, read, and write in Hindi, but awakened in me a love for the language.

http://www.makarand.com/acad/HindiHainHum.htm

by Guest Wed Aug 02, 2017 6:04 am

See also:

http://www.bangalorenotes.com/dakhni.htm

by garam_kuta Wed Aug 02, 2017 11:02 am

aiYo allah! beLaghE beLaghE ithni aawAzzu....suvaR nan makkaLu!

by Seva Lamberdar Wed Aug 02, 2017 1:34 pm

Has PS read this post by Rashmun on Hindi originating in India, and thus Hindi basically as a South Indian language in terms of its roots?

by Vakavaka Pakapaka Wed Aug 02, 2017 3:42 pm

Seva Lamberdar wrote:Has PS read this post by Rashmun on Hindi originating in India, and thus Hindi basically as a South Indian language in terms of its roots?

Looks like Hindians and DKheads will both be unhappy with this. The next discovery in the chain will be that idli originated in Bihar and sambar, in Rajasthan......

Hindians might as well abandon this Tamilian Hindi and embrace their original language - Swahili......

by silvermani Wed Aug 02, 2017 4:11 pm

Vakavaka Pakapaka wrote:
Seva Lamberdar wrote:Has PS read this post by Rashmun on Hindi originating in India, and thus Hindi basically as a South Indian language in terms of its roots?
Looks like Hindians and DKheads will both be unhappy with this. The next discovery in the chain will be that idli originated in Bihar and sambar, in Rajasthan......

Hindians might as well abandon this Tamilian Hindi and embrace their original language - Swahili......

Sambar is actually a Maharashtrian import

by Guest Wed Aug 02, 2017 10:21 pm

When the Delhi armies penetrated into the Deccan which was annexed to the Sultanate early in the 14th century, contact was established between the speakers of the modified Khari Boli (which may for the sake of convenience be called spoken Hindustani) and the Southerners. The Sultans encouraged the settlement of people from the North in the towns of the Deccan, and even today one finds their descendants in Aurangabad and Daulatabad. With them migrated Hindustani speech too.

The earliest use of Hindustani as a literary language was made by the Sufi saints and religious teachers of the Deccan to propagate the faith and to expound its doctrines. Khwaja Gesu-daraz Banda-nawaz, who after Timur's invasion of the North migrated to Gulbarga, about 1412 A.D., appears to have been the first writer. He died in 1421 A.D. Once adopted as a medium of literary expression, the language made rapid progress. The Deccan Sultans patronized it, and in the course of two centuries it became enriched with an abundant literature.

The Hindustani employed by the Deccanese—and called by them Hindi—is redolent of the soil from which it sprang. It is dominated by tadbhava [="indigenous words"] vocabulary and has a sprinkling of words of Persian or Arabic origin. Even these are sometime spelt as they were pronounced, and not as they appeared in books. With the passage of time the borrowed element increased, but it was well-digested. From the end of the 14th to the end of the 17th century this Hindustani style flourished and bore ample fruit.

Then Aurangzeb began his campaigns, which ended in the breakup of the Deccan Kingdoms. With the disappearance of the Sultans and the dissolution of their courts, their protégés—artists and poets—were scattered. Some came to the North and stimulated the growth of the Hindustani literature in its native region. Wali was one of them. Delhi had till then been almost a stranger to the literature of Hindustani. Almost but not entirely, for a writer here and a writer there had appeared from time to time, but there was no serious, continuous literary effort.

While Hindustani was making rapid strides in the South, the North witnessed the rise of literatures, largely religious, in Avadhi and Braj Bhasha. Both Hindus and Muslims patronized these languages. Avadhi was brought into vogue by reformers and poets like Kabir and Malik Muhammad Jayasi, and on the foundation laid by them Tulasidas reared the magnificent structure of Ramcharitamanas. Braja speech became the voice of bhakti to Krishna. If Surdas poured out the yearnings of his heart in his immortal songs, Raskhan, a Muslim, vied with him in composing lyrics of moving beauty. And Rahim, the son of Bairam Khan, excelled in didactic poems. Here is a miracle of linguistic and cultural history. Sons born of fathers who were complete aliens to the thought and speech of India meet with the highest exponents of the native culture, on terms of equality!

The Mughal court extended its patronage to Braj, for it did not know of Hindustani and of its literature. So Sur, Gang, Bana, Keshav, Misr, Sahaj-Sanehi, Sundar, Siromani Banarsidas, Matiram, Anandghan, and many others received royal favours and princely awards. It was not till the decline of the Empire had set in that Urdu found any encouragement. But when at the end of the 18th century it was taken notice of, the high tide of Braj was on ebb, the mood of spiritual exaltation was passing, and the strident note of sensual amours and amorous rhetoric was beginning to ring.

The practitioners of Hindustani at Delhi were men whose ears were familiar with Persian sounds, and whose tongues were habituated to utter them. The phonetics of the Deccani Hindustani were a strain upon them. To utter the cerebrals, plosives, and palatal affricatives, or the alveolar flapped or rolled consonants, was a task too difficult for their tongues. They naturally started a purification of the language which robbed it of a considerable part of its inheritance. What, however, Mazhar Jan Janan had only begun at Delhi, Nasikh of Lucknow, the capital of the Persian Kings of Oudh, completed. Thus Hindustani became transformed into Urdu.

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urduhindilinks/tarachand/01problem.html

by Guest Wed Aug 02, 2017 10:51 pm

She had been waiting to go home for years now. She couldn’t wait to see again, the valleys of Punjab, the blackbucks roaming through the wheat fields, the cantonment in Dilli that she had been born in. She came back the way she had been carried away: through foot and on bullock carts, with descendants of the people who had packed their belongings in pots when they were ordered to move to Daulatabad in 1327.

The zubaan ke beej, the seeds of the language, were sown in the pahadi rastas of eleventh century Punjab, when Arabic and Persian met for the first time. She spent her infancy known as Ordu, after army camps. But she was also born in a bazaar, formed when traders simplified their languages to understand each other. She would expand and contract depending on who poured in during invasions. Though to be completely accurate, it was the Sufis of the north who were responsible for who she became. They were proficient in Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit, and adept at picking up other tongues, and as they made their way into the Deccan, it was in their mouths that the languages first mixed. Once in the Deccan, she absorbed herself into the landscape, and sprouted as Dakhini. She was shaped by Braj Bhasha, and matured in laterite blocks, basalt basins, and dry tropical forests. For her, Urdu was the base, to be topped with Kannada, Telugu and Marathi words.

In the Deccan, she resided in teachings of the Sufis, Kadam Rao Padam Rao, and Mohammed Quli Qutb’s Shah’s poems. Masnavi or, couplets of poetry was created in her honour. She was spoken in markets, in homes, and even by kings. She was alive in the songs sung by women when they spun silk and ground millet at the stone- the charkha namas, the chakki namas. They sung that as they turned the chakki, so they would find God. At the spinning wheel, they sung about how if their bodies were mere spinning wheels, their tongues were the rim of the spinning wheels, and their breath was the thread. When sung by married women, she became the suhagan nama. Accompanied by beats of the dholak, they used her to compare their mother-in-laws to hot chilli peppers.

But by the time she returned, three hundred years had passed since Alauddin Khilji’s conquest. There had been more wars, more structures erected and crushed. And as she blew around the spaces that she had once known, her euphoria began to ebb. The cantonment had been replaced by a tomb and a garden. She was no stranger to tombs in the middle of gardens, but this structure didn’t strike her as home. Oh, they were still domes and pillars and niches and lattice work. But suddenly she would encounter an arch where there shouldn’t be one. The material was smoother and polished, difficult to sink into. It frightened her because it was like meeting a doppelganger: someone physically the same, but differently nuanced. Even the elevation of the landscape was different. Instead of rising like a table, the ground was folding itself to prepare for a mountain range. And suddenly, there were white people who bore the smell of the sea, who spoke yet another tongue- a clipped speech that resided only in the mouth, instead of rolling out of the upper palate and throat.

She thought about all the things she had done to get back home. She had changed her name several times, each one a subtle shift in her identity. Because she passed through Gujarat, she was briefly known as Gujri, and as she approached Dilli, she became Dehlavi. Then they called her Hindawi - because she was like Hindi, but not exactly - courtesy of the tatsam Sanskrit that Telegu and Kannada had imparted to her. She was also referred to as Zaban Hindustani: the common man’s tongue. On the other hand, the Urdu that she had left behind had grown up to become Rekhta, a severely Persianised form, and polished beyond recognition. More suited than her by far to compose verses in. According to Rekhta, they barely shared syntax now; they had nothing else in common. Rekhta belonged to the likes of Amir Khusrau, would belong to Mirza Ghalib, while Dakhini was like a parent embarrassing her child by her coarseness.

Dakhini had thought the land would remain ba-dastoor; unaltered. That it would lie in wait to receive her. But the soil did not allow her to percolate anymore. Back in Dilli, no one wanted her. She had still held on to the Old Punjabi, the remnants of what happened when Arabic and Persian combined, but to the people of Dilli, she was a strange corruption. They forgot that she had once been Ordu; a grandmother to the language they now spoke. But they did treat her as if she was obsolete. As if she was already an artefact. Like the way the Homo sapiens would have treated the Neanderthals. The bagpipes to a violin. They thought she was earthy, crude and primitive. They had already begun to call her Qadim Urdu, old Urdu. And then the country split, causing her vocabulary to divide. They called it Diglossia, although for her, it was a personality disorder. Holes were wrenched out of her and transplanted somewhere else. Today, she is barely even considered a language, and relegated to be a dialect of Urdu, when it should be the other way around. She is the older one; the one who became stable enough for extraction, at a time when Dilli was so plagued by invasions that no language was able to form entirely.

Language is the invisible conquest. It is obtained without wanting, received without asking. Today, Dakhini is a lehja, or an accent. She resides in the ‘aan’; a suffix that indicates plural, in the nasalisation of the rains, in the aspiration of consonants, in the condensation of long vowels. In the ‘naako’ instead of ‘nahi’, in the ‘bolat’ instead of bolata, in the ‘ya’ suffix to indicate past tense- the dhundhaiya instead of dhunda. In the absence of idioms and proverbs that the Urdu of the north is a treasure trove in.

Therefore, it’s difficult to grasp her. She was born out of adaptation, and she cannot help but adapt, cannot help but slip into different forms to protect herself. To do what she could not in the north. Today, there are many different kinds of Dakhini spoken, depending on the region. There is the Hyderabadi-Dakhini, which influences Bidar- Dakhini, except Bidar-Dakhini contains an influence of Kannada. She is spoken in Bijapur, and, around the peripheries of Maharasthra, she has a strong influence of Marathi. She still resides in the Deccan, since her homecoming was never completed. Today, even the people who speak her do not know that they speak her, and with each passing year she seeps through the the laterite, collecting in aquifers formed by slices of basalt. The way water collects in underground wells, waiting to be discovered. She hasn’t run dry; she just no longer spills into the landscape. But those that have deep roots can never be blown away, and so, she continues to spread over the South, adopting more and more words, broadening her reach, and enfolding more languages within.

-----

*http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZGunjArPcmYJ:www.offprint.in/article/2342+&cd=32&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in

by Guest Wed Aug 02, 2017 11:02 pm

Rashmun wrote: <snip>She was also referred to as Zaban Hindustani: the common man’s tongue. On the other hand, the Urdu that she had left behind had grown up to become Rekhta, a severely Persianised form, and polished beyond recognition. More suited than her by far to compose verses in. According to Rekhta, they barely shared syntax now; they had nothing else in common. Rekhta belonged to the likes of Amir Khusrau, would belong to Mirza Ghalib, while Dakhini was like a parent embarrassing her child by her coarseness.

<snip>

Rekhta may have been a more polished variant of Dakhini. Even so the word 'Rekhta' is worth noting: it means 'hybrid'.

by Guest Wed Aug 02, 2017 11:30 pm

Rashmun wrote: <snip>

In this longish, autobiographical narrative what I’ve tried to establish is the simple fact that I am a non-native speaker of Hindi who was taught the language and its literature by other non-native speakers. I learned Hindi in the South, in Bangalore; all my teachers in school and college were non-native speakers of Hindi; that is, throughout my education, I was taught Hindi by Kannada, Tamil, Malayali, and Telugu speakers. It is they who taught me not only how to speak, read, and write in Hindi, but awakened in me a love for the language.

http://www.makarand.com/acad/HindiHainHum.htm

The language, as I have hinted earlier, came to symbolize in my mind, not just the unity and integrity of India, as the cliché goes, but something beyond that—a certain mystique, a spirit of belonging and oneness with the inner springs of the language. That was how, one day, the door of Hindi opened in my consciousness and out poured from it cascades of beautiful words, like a long unbroken poem, internally consistent and organized according to the logic of the imagination. Hindi became my own and I could say with quiet pride, Hindi hain hum.

I wrote only one poem in Hindi. It went somewhat like this:

Mujhe pata hain us manzil ka thikana
jahan hum sub ko milega woh jis ki hai hamen talash.
Raste mein a nadi hogi, jis ko par karna aasan nahin.
Baadh me hame mahinon kinare par intezaar karna hoga.
Aage, a jangal bhi milega, jis me unmat janwaron ke karkash garjana
sun kar dil kaamp uthega. Magar hausla mut haarna, mitron,
mujeh pata hain us manzil ka thikana.

I have recapitulated just one of the paragraphs of the poem. I am sure it has lost some of its initial charge in this rewriting; I don’t have access to the original at this moment. Yet, the idea should be clear—there will obviously be other symbolic and real obstacles on the way. Perhaps, the poem will end on a note of uncertainty, even futility. In a poem, language is everything; I’m not sure I had managed to pull off the verbal coup that every half-way decent poem must.

Having settled down in Delhi, my contact with Hindi has grown. I speak in Hindi not just to most people I encounter on a day to day basis, but also to several friends and colleagues. I miss the sound of Hindi when I go South or abroad. I find that I tend quite naturally to switch to Hindi in everyday conversations, without which a sense of distance and formality remains in any social intercourse. Having English as a common language is not longer sufficient; without Hindi, the motor of conversation doesn’t hum. My intellectual contact with Hindi has also increased, though not as much as I have wanted it to. Yet, I can easily understand and even participate in current debates in the world of Hindi letters and ideas. In brief, I am no stranger to the continent of Hindi.

That is why it saddens me sometimes that Hindi speakers themselves have not done enough to raise the status and reach of the language. The pundits in charge of the propagation of Hindi have sought to impose an alienating, Brahmannical language on a recalcitrant populace. Hindi cinema, as we all know, has done more for Hindi than all the official language planners. And yet a high level of intellectualization is inevitable for any language if it is to resist being boxed into a subaltern position such as all our Indian languages do vis a vis English.

I think the future of Hindi, in spite of what the Government is doing or not doing, is bright. In my travels across India, I find that it is Hindi which is used as a link language, whether it is in Shillong or Port Blair. Even in Tamil Nadu, strangers have come up to me to speak in Hindi even though I normally would avoid using the language on my own. This has happened to me so often that I am convinced that the image of the Hindi-hating Tamilian is grossly untrue. Yes, there is a politicization of the language issue, but the common people of Tamil Nadu, I feel reasonably sure, love Hindi. Not just that, whether in Chennai or Madurai, in Trichy or Coimbatore, Hindi is spoken by surprisingly large numbers of people. Hindi is also heard in Colombo, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, not to speak of London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, New York, and Toronto. In Pakistan and in Bangladesh large sections of the population understand Hindi. After all, Hindi and Urdu are sister languages. In Nepal, Hindi is widely understood because it is so similar to Nepali. Calcutta has a huge Hindi speaking population. Hindi is also the lingua franca of Mumbai and Hyderabad. So, Hindi is widely spoken and used in all our metros, from Amritsar to Thiruvananthapuram.

Though this essay has been mainly a narrative, it does have an implicit argument. The argument is that Hindi belongs to the vibhashis as much as it does to the Hindi-wallah. In the last hundred years, it has been promoted by a whole host of protagonists, from Dayanand Saraswati, Mahatama Gandhi, and Vinoba to Pandurang Shastri Athavale, Satya Sai Baba, and Asaram Bapu. Hindi is not just the language of film songs, but also of bhajans all over India. Non-native speakers have written nearly half of the best literature of Hindi. Not just Ajneya, Ashak, Muktibodh, Sahani,Vaid, Sobti, and so on, but a whole nation of Punjabis, Gujaratis, Maharashtrians, Bengalis, Oriyas, and, indeed people from every corner of the land, have enriched and contributed to the language.

My romance with Hindi has not yet reached either its climax or its culmination. Hindi has become a part of the collective psyche of millions of people like me. What makes us proud is the we may be vibhashis, but we are still desi, as desi in fact as the cycle-rickshaw puller of Kanpur, the sugar farmer of Meerut, the brass worker of Moradabad, or the pan-walla of Benaras. All of us togther make both Hindi and India what they are.

by silvermani Wed Aug 02, 2017 11:31 pm

Interesting how language evolves over time. If you watch a black and white movie, the way the characters speak is quite different from how people speak today. And even in the same generation, there are different accents and words - like American and British English. The Hindi/Hindustani spoken by ethnic Indians of Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana etc is so different from that spoken in India - maybe that is how it is still spoken in their places of origin in India, who knows?

by Guest Thu Aug 03, 2017 1:00 am

What the north failed to achieve, strangely enough, the Deccan accomplished. Alauddin Khilji's conquests had opened the country, and numerous Sufi saints and Dervishes visited the south in order to spread their message. In the south Persian was an almost unknown tongue, and they were compelled to use the dialect of Delhi, which they knew, in order to carry on their work. Among these saints the one who created the greatest impression was Khwaja Gesu-daraz Banda-nawaz. He left the north when Timur invaded the Punjab in 1398, and settled down in the Deccan. He probably is the first writer of the Khari Boli who made it a literary language. His Risala, Mi’raj-ul Ashiquin, edited from a manuscript of 1500 AD, gives an example of his language....

Next to him is Shams-ul-Ushshaq Shah Miranji, who died in 1496. Many of his works have been preserved, and they illustrate the language of the 15th century.

The 15th century produced quite a number of writers of this language...

From this period—that is, the end of the 14th century—this language, which may be called Hindustani, continues to progress rapidly. When Aurangzeb began the conquest of Bijapur and Golkonda in the 17th century, the poets of the Deccan began to visit the North, and the consequence was that Hindustani poetry became known to the writers of Delhi and other places. The return of the prodigal to the paternal home led to a new development. The courtiers of the Emperors of Delhi were mainly speakers and writers of Persian, but the Hindustani which came to them from the Deccan was the true representative of the mixture of Hindu-Muslim culture which prevailed among the peoples of India.

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urduhindilinks/tarachand/02medieval.html

by Guest Thu Aug 03, 2017 1:37 am

What the Irani café was to Mumbaiites, the humble Iyengar’s bakery was to Bangaloreans. After a hard day at school, and a long bus ride back home, there could be no greater treat awaiting me than some warm vegetable puffs and fresh pastries from the local bakery (Maggi 2-minute noodles be damned!).

These little bakeries were omnipresent, dotting every large street in just about any Bangalore suburb, especially the older residential suburbs like Jayanagar, Malleswaram, Basavanagudi or Rajajinagar. My own haunts in Jayanagar had some of the best bakeries anywhere. The delightful aroma of fresh baking would greet the weary walker who passed one of these. Most of these bakeries were just called “Iyengar’s bakery”, or “Bangalore Iyengar’s bakery”, but some of them would make a strong statement of individuality by imaginatively calling themselves “LB Iyengar’s bakery”, “YB Iyengar’s bakery” or something on those lines.

The variety of products, so to speak, would largely be identical in every Iyengar bakery in town. The sweet tooth would be treated to orange, sticky honey cakes, or just plain old super-sweet cream pastries, or “butter biscuits” or novel treats like their own invention, the “Japanese cake”. And then there was the magnificent dilpasand, and the sublime dilkush. Many people were never sure which was which (since they look somewhat similar), but to the cognoscenti the dilpasand always has sweet stuffing with coconut, while the dilkush was more mundane with reddish-brown stuffing, and never had coconut.

For savories, you had the dazzling choice of fresh vegetable puffs (unlike their Hyderabadi baker counterparts, the Iyengar bakers would never serve egg puffs), salt and “khara” potato chips, khara (spicy) buns, “palya” (vegetable) buns, and a little something modestly called “toast”. This “toast” had little to do with its namesake, a slice of bread browned by a toaster. Here, bread was taken to sublime heights, by topping it with a “patented” recipe that was yellowish, had lots of onions, some tomatoes, and LOTS of spice. It often made your eyes water (while its smell made you drool), and just like Lays; you couldn’t stop with just one.

http://balancinglife.blogspot.in/2005/06/fresh-puffs-dilpasand-and-little.html

by Guest Fri Aug 04, 2017 2:48 am

Paradoxically, the fact that Bombay was not part of the Hindi heartland, made a commercial Hindi cinema based in Bombay possible. For a successful film industry, it was essential that Hindi be used instrumentally, with both eyes on the box office. This isn’t to say that Hindi cinema was scripted in some crass, commercial pidgin, it wasn’t. The stories, the songs, the dialogue that animated Bombay’s films were written for decades by some of the most gifted poets and writers in Urdu. It is merely to point out that a commercial cinema needs to be able to use what works commercially without any concern for cultural purity or linguistic propriety or ideological rectitude.

You could even argue that the Hindi film industry would not have flourished in a city of the Hindi heartland — and not only because of the economic backwardness of these cities. Even if all other things were assumed to be equal, the sense of literary and cultural ownership that characterizes Hindiwallahs, their ideologically driven sense of being Hindi’s custodians, would have ruled out the vulgarity, the eclectic idiom, the dhanda-driven dialects of Bombay’s Hindi cinema.

And this is not merely speculation. You only have to look at the venomous critique of the Parsi theatre mounted by the guardians of Hindi in the 19th century to anticipate what their 20th-century counterparts would have done to Hindi cinema. Bharatendu Harishchandra’s strictures on a Parsi theatre production of Kalidasa’s Sakuntalam in Banaras, list the performance’s disregard for the classical unities of time and place, for ‘authenticity’, for the dangers of anachronism. These Parsi theatre- wallahs had no conception of deshkaal, he wrote scornfully, their pronunciation of words derived from the Sanskrit was appalling and he wished they’d stop dabbling in Hindi theatre. The first director-general of All India Radio was appalled by the mongrel nature of Hindi film songs in exactly the same way; in a move that would have warmed the heart of Bharatendu, he banned their broadcast on Akashvani. (As always, Hindi cinema found a commercial outlet in Radio Ceylon.)

Bombay was the perfect setting for Hindi cinema because no one in Bombay was invested in Hindi high culture, or shudh Hindi or indeed in Hindi at all. The Bombay film industry used its approximations of Hindustani because they worked at the box office. It used an idiom closer to Urdu than Hindi for several reasons: Urdu’s metaphorical extravagance suited the purposes of stylized melodrama, Urdu’s history as a language of administration and official discourse gave it a plausible and credible idiom in which to render public context: the court-room scene is a case in point.

The producers of Bombay’s Hindi cinema were free to use Hindustani in whichever way they wanted because the Hindi cinema needed neither subsidy nor government patronage and also because Bombay’s distance from Hindi’s heartland protected them from the zealots who took charge of Hindi with the founding of the republic, cultural commissars who would have had dialogue writers replace dil with hriday and khoon with rakt. A Hindi film industry located in the heartland would have produced either popular dialect films (like the Bhojpuri film industry today) or solemn new-wave type films with Sanskritized titles like Aadharshila and Aakrosh and Ardh Satya. These might have gone on to win critical acclaim but they would not have created a pan-Indian audience, nor spun pan-Indian dreams.

https://www.telegraphindia.com/1100610/jsp/opinion/story_12545872.jsp

by Guest Sat Aug 05, 2017 8:52 am

Let us take the name Hindi first. As every student of Indian philology knows, the name Hindi or Hindvi has been used in a number of diverse senses. Three of the most important are listed below:

(1) Hindi or Hindvi has been used to denote generally things Indian, as distinguished from things non-Indian. This usage goes back to the earliest period of Muslim contact with India, and gave rise to the name of the Indo-Aryan dialect which the Muslims began to employ when they settled down in and around Lahore and Delhi. Here are some illustrations of this use.

In 1228, Muhammad Aufi compiled an anthology of poems in which he mentions one Khwaja Masud Saad Salman and attributes to him a Diwan composed in Hindvi. In the reign of Alauddin Khilji (1295-1315), Fakhruddin Mubarak Ghaznavi compiled a dictionary in which he gives the Hindi equivalents of Persian words. Amir Khusrau, who died in 1325, uses the terms Hindvi and Hindi. Shah Miranji Shamsul-Ushshaq, who died in 1495, calls the language of his composition Hindi. In the Deccan, the name Hindi was commonly used along with the name Dakhini. Nusrati, who was a poet of the court of Ali Adil Shah II of Bijapur (1656-1673), speaks of his Hindi verses.

When the Mughal court became the patron of the poetry which the Deccan had developed, the poets of Delhi also used the name Hindi for the language they used. Numerous illustrations of this use can be found in the works of poets commencing from Shah Hatim and coming down to Ghalib, and of prose writers from the earliest times to Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. Hindi in this usage is thus identical with what came to be known as Urdu.

(2) The second use of the term Hindi is to denote a group of dialects which belong to what Grierson calls the Tertiary Prakrits, or Dr. S. K. Chatterji calls 'new Indo-Aryan languages.' The region in which they have prevailed extends roughly from the meridian of Sirhind in the West to that of Benares in the East, and from the Himalayan Terai in the North to the watershed of the Narbada in the South. They are the dialects of the ancient Madhyadesha or Midlands, and of the ancient northern and southern Kosala. They comprise the two linguistic families known as Western Hindi and Eastern Hindi.

The name Hindi thus includes the following well-recognized dialects: i.) Bundeli; ii.) Kanauji; iii.) Braj Bhasha; iv.) Bangru; v.) Hindustani (Grierson), or Khari Boli (tradition and Bharatendu Harishchandra), or Dehlavi (Sheikh Bajan and Amir Khusrau); vi.)Avadhi; vii.) Bagheli; and viii.) Chhattisgarhi. Some scholars add to these eight, Rajasthani (Pts. Surya Karan Pareek and Narottam Das Swami) and Magahi (Rahula Sankrityayana). In this sense Hindi tends to stand for all the spoken dialects of Northern India.

(3) In the third place the name Hindi is specifically used for the modern language which is the literary form of the speech known by the names Hindustani, Khari Boli, or Dehlavi. Phonetically and morphologically, modern Hindi is distinct from the other sister speeches included in the groups of Western Hindi and Eastern Hindi, and identical with Urdu.

The name Zaban-i-Hindustan occurs in the writings of Wajahi (1635), in the history compiled by Ferishta (b. 1590), and in the Badshah Nama of Abdul Hamid Lahori (d.1654). This name for the language was thus quite well known in the 16th and 17th centuries, and was adopted by the Europeans who travelled in India at this time. Thus Terry (1616) and Fryer (1673) called it 'Indostan.' Amaduzzi refers to the manuscript of a lexicon Linguae Indostanicae (1704), and Ketelaer wrote the first grammar and vocabulary of Lingua Hindostanica about 1715.

The term Hindustani obtained currency in the 18th century. When Mir Amman composed the Bagh-o-Bahar in 1801, he deliberately set himself to use theth Hindustani. Gilchrist used the name Hindustani in the title of his books, e g., Angrezi Hindustani Dictionary, and Garcin de Tassy lectured in Paris on the history of 'Hindouie' and 'Hindoustanie' (Hindvi and Hindustani). The name Hindustani has been used for Khari Boli. It has also been used as a synonym for Urdu by many writers, and for Modern Hindi by some.

Grierson's definitions may be reproduced here to clarify the position :

Hindostani is primarily the language of the Upper Gangetic Doab, and is also the lingua franca of India, capable of being written in both Persian and Deva-Nagari characters, and without purism, avoiding alike the excessive use of either Persian or Sanskrit'words when employed for literature. The name Urdu can then be confined to that special variety of Hindostani in which Persian words are of frequent occurrence. . . . and similarly, Hindi can be confined to the form of Hindostani in which Sanskrit words abound.

Hindustani is thus no new-fangled name, invented to replace Hindi and Urdu, but a well-recognized and old established term for the speech which is the common basis of its two divergent forms, Hindi and Urdu.

Misconception about the name has created curious misunderstandings about the language itself. Even professed historians of language and literature have fallen into mistakes concerning the origin and development of Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani. These mistakes are due either to ignorance of the literature in its different forms, or to the mixing up of the three meanings of the term Hindi given above, especially the second and third. When some people speak about the development of Hindi they fail to take note of the fact that the history of Hindi is distinct from the history of languages like Rajasthani, Braj Bhasha, and Avadhi; and they equally ignore the fact that a great deal is common to the history of Hindi and Urdu.

Hindustani or Khari Boli, which developed from one of the branches of the new Indo-Aryan dialects, has a continuous history from the time (somewhere about the 12th century) that it separated itself from the other midland dialects. As everyone knows, this basic dialect was and continues to be the spoken language of the people inhabiting the Upper Gangetic Doab and the neighboring region. This spoken language was adopted by the Muslims when they settled down in and about Delhi at the end of the 12th century. From the tongues of the new speakers a number of new sounds passed into the sound system of Khari Boli, which was a purely Indo-Aryan speech. The morphology of Khari Boli also underwent slight and rather unimportant changes, and it began to absorb loan words from the languages of the Muslim conquerors.

This modified speech became the vehicle of literary expression. Amir Khusrau is said to have employed it in the 14th century, but in the absence of any documents of his time, the matter is not free from doubt. In the Deccan, however, the speech became the medium of both prose and poetry, and here a rich literature grew up between the 14th and 18th centuries. The language used in the literature is replete with tadbhavas (indigenous words), and the literature is not encumbered with exclusively foreign elements. The authors of the Deccan very justifiably considered themselves writers of Hindi, the name which they adopted for the language which they used in their composition in prose and verse.

In Northern India the situation was very curious. Although Khari Boli or Hindustani was a northern speech, it mainly developed as a literary language in the Deccan, for there is scarcely any important independent work in the language which may be assigned to a time preceding the 17th century. The reason appears to be this. When Khari Boli emerged as a language fit for polite speech and literary expression in the 13th century, it had to face the rivalry of Rajasthani, which was the popular literary language of Northern India in that period, the language in which Jaina works were written, and Narpati Nalha and other poets wrote their heroic and other poems.

The rise of the Bhakti movement in the 15th century led to the establishment of three sects—Nirakar Bhakti, Krishna Bhakti, and Ram Bhakti. The saints of the first school, like Kabir, Nanak, Dadu, employed Khari Boli or Hindustani along with other dialects to popularize their faith; the propagators of the second sect, Surdas, Nand Das, etc., employed Braj Bhasha in their hymns and songs exclusively; the leaders of the third sect ,headed by Goswami Tulasidas, used Avadhi in their compositions.

Thus the main currents of literature in the 15th and succeeding centuries flowed in two channels, Braj Bhasha and Avadhi. Not only did Hindu writers use them; Muslim poets also made them their own. Rahim, Raskhan, Raslin are as well known in the history of Braj Bhasha poetry as any Hindu poets; and everyone recognizes that but for Malik Muhammad Jayasi's foundational work, Avadhi might never have produced the glorious structure of Ramacharitamanas...

---------------

A third set of misconceptions exists in regard to the relation between Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani. Now there should be no doubt in anybody's mind that the three names indicate one and the same language. In order to determine the relationship of languages, it is necessary to resort to a comparative examination of their (a) phonetic features, (b) morphological or syntactical features, and (c) vocabularies. But among these three elements the first two are of primary importance, and the third of secondary importance only. All writers on philology agree that the grammatical structure of a language is the most stable part of it, which remains intact from generation to generation in all its progressive transformations; that the phonetic system, while less stable than the morphological, has a certain fixity; but that the vocabulary of a language is subject to brusque and capricious innovations...

What do we find in the light of these principles? The sound system of Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani is identical. Each contains the same number of three classes of sounds: old Indo-Aryan vowels and consonants, new Indo-Aryan vowels and consonants, Semitic sounds. This fact is admitted, sometimes grudgingly, by the grammarians, e.g. Pt. Kamta Prasad Guru in his Hindi Vyakarana, Dr. Dhirendra Varma in his Hindi Bhasha ka Itihas, M. Abdul Haq in his Qawaid-i-Urdu. The phonetic system identifies Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani, but differentiates them from other Aryan and Semitic languages, e.g. Sanskrit, Braj Bhasha, Avadhi, Persian, and Arabic.

Again, the grammar of the three is more or less identical. "There is no difference of importance between the declensions and conjugations used in Urdu and Hindi respectively" (Grierson). In the opinion of J. Beames, "it betrays, therefore, a radical misunderstanding of the whole bearing of the question, and of the whole science of philology, to speak of Urdu and Hindi as two distinct languages”\" (A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages).

In regard to vocabulary the identity is not complete. The vocabulary of a language consists of original or indigenous words of the spoken dialect, loan words or words borrowed from foreign languages, and compounds and derivatives. So far as Urdu and Hindi are concerned, they have numerous words of the first class which are common, e.g. almost all the verbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. So far as nouns and adjectives are concerned, in addition to their common indigenes, both have borrowed from Sanskrit, Prakrit, Persian, and Arabic, besides other languages. The exact measure of the loan is not known, as exhaustive dictionaries drawn up on rigorously scientific lines do not exist.

M. Sayyid Ahmad Dehlavi, the author of the famous dictionary Farhang-i-Asafia, has analyzed the words collected by him. The total number of words is 54,000; the number of loan words from Arabic is 7584, from Persian 6041, from Sanskrit 554, from English 500, and from others 181. The remainder are indigenous. If we turn to the pages of the Hindi dictionary known as Hindi Shabda Sagar and compiled under the auspices of the Nagari Pracharini Sabha, we find that almost every one of these 7584 Arabic and 6041 Persian words is included in it. This is a clear recognition of the fact that even as regards loan words, the difference between Hindi and Urdu is not so great as some people imagine.

So far as compounds and derivatives are concerned, the methods of combination and the use of vocables (affixes) in forming derivatives are to a considerable extent common, as a reference to the grammars of the two languages shows....

If an agreement is reached on the question of words required for scientific and technical purposes, the sting of the quarrel between Hindi and Urdu will have been removed; the difficulties created by the existence of two languages in the same region will have been smoothed out; and Hindi and Urdu will then tend to merge into one, as the medium of both speech and literature.

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urduhindilinks/tarachand/03misconceptions.html

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Did modern Hindi originate in South India?

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Re: Did modern Hindi originate in South India?

Re: Did modern Hindi originate in South India?

Re: Did modern Hindi originate in South India?

Re: Did modern Hindi originate in South India?

Re: Did modern Hindi originate in South India?

Re: Did modern Hindi originate in South India?

Re: Did modern Hindi originate in South India?

Re: Did modern Hindi originate in South India?

Re: Did modern Hindi originate in South India?

Re: Did modern Hindi originate in South India?

Re: Did modern Hindi originate in South India?

Re: Did modern Hindi originate in South India?