The literary legacy of Dakhini (Southern Indian dialect of Hindi)

by Guest Mon Mar 28, 2016 7:10 am

http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reviews-and-essays/god-small-verse-dakhani-poetry-khateeb

Note: spoken hindi and spoken urdu are the same language with very minor differences (one difference could be in the selection of a particular synonym while speaking) . that is why any indian who knows hindi can easily communicate verbally with any pakistani.

by Guest Mon Mar 28, 2016 7:11 am

THE FAINT, waggish drizzle finally let up, and the monsoon air of Gulbarga, in northern Karnataka, was pleasant. At about ten in the morning, a small crowd gathered outside a general goods kiosk near a historic shrine to watch a mullah deliver an animated taqreer—discourse—on a small television screen. His beard quivering, his voice slightly tortured inside his throat, like a hacksaw working against the grain, the spiritual leader spoke. “If your Hindu neighbour next-door remains hungry, even a lifetime of prayers at the mosque will go to waste if you ignore him,” he said. “The thing about food is, once a man eats at your house a friendship is formed. If anyone speaks against you to him, he will say I am sorry bhai, I have eaten at his house.” He underscored the sentiment with a common idiom: Mai unka namak khaya hoon—I have eaten his salt. “This … is grace,” he added.

The mullah’s cantillating cadences were tinctured with the folksy lyricism typical of Dakhani. This regional, vernacular manner of speaking Urdu, heard across the Deccan, has long been an object of derision for the nation at large. But for the ten-odd people huddled around the screen, the language was comfortably familiar, as it was to me. The mullah’s voice conveyed all the nimble idiosyncrasies of Dakhani, with just a tenuous touch of jocularity.

The shop was at the entrance to the dargah of an immensely popular Sufi saint, Khwaja Banda Nawaz Gesu Daraz of the Chishti order. Banda Nawaz, who made Gulbarga his home nearly seven centuries ago, also spoke the language of the people—awam ki boli. I had made the pilgrimage to his shrine as part of a four-year project on the mizahiya shayri, or humour-satire poetry, of the Deccan. Drawing from Dakhani’s rich history, dating back to the time of the Sufi saint, the modern tradition of mizahiya shayri took root in 1930s Hyderabad, and flourished rapidly following the fall of that independent princely state in 1948. A culture of public mushairas became common, and several poets gained renown.

by Guest Mon Mar 28, 2016 7:16 am

IN 1327, Mohammed bin Tughlaq, the Turkic sultan of Delhi, shifted his imperial capital south to Deogiri, which he renamed Daulatabad, now in the Marathwada region of Maharashtra. The historian Richard Eaton describes the move as “a strategic vision for the imperial domination of the entire subcontinent.” It was an ambitious plan, fraught with numerous difficulties, and it involved a cultural shift alongside the political one. Several prominent Chishti Sufis were compelled to move to the Deccan, although the foremost spiritual leader of the time, the Chiragh i Delhi—lamp of Delhi—Nasir al’ Din, refused to relocate.

But Nasir al’ Din’s famous teacher, Nizam al’ Din Awliya, or Nizamuddin, also had a follower named Syed Yusuf al’ Husayni. His son, Syed Mohammed al’ Husayni, who would grow up to become Banda Nawaz, was a child when he travelled with his father to Daulatabad, in a caravan of migrants, in 1328. He would have seen the imposing Deogiri fort, which had been wrested from the local Yadava kings by the Delhi sultan Ala al’ Din Khilji in 1296, standing tall from a great distance. Khilji’s expansion into the Deccan, which left the local kings still ruling as vassals, enabled large-scale migration to the region, which further fuelled the nascent beginnings of Dakhani. Prior to the soldiers, and the labour force who travelled alongside them, a stream of Sufis, from Jalal al’ Din “Ganj i Ravan” to Muntajib al’ Din “Zar Zari Zar Baksh,” had already made their presence felt in the Deccan, settling mostly in and around Daulatabad.

by Guest Mon Mar 28, 2016 7:17 am

As I waited in the lobby, swatting at a cloud of fierce mosquitoes, my thoughts turned to the beloved, late Hindi comic actor Mehmood, who acted in over three hundred films and was particularly famous for his caricatures of the quintessential Hyderabadi. Through his roles in movies such as Gumnaam, Sadhu Aur Shaitan, and Shantranj, Mehmood successfully spun the “Hyderabadi” accent into a filmic trope. But to most people in Hyderabad and the Deccan, as much fun as his escapades were, he was never truly Hyderabadi. The language he spoke was but a crude, stereotypical parody, which failed to grasp the elusive humour, not to mention the beauty and colour, of this ill-regarded southern dialect. Dakhani was, and is, widely held to be, a poor, unsophisticated country cousin of the refined literary Urdu of Lucknow, Delhi and Punjab, “polluted” by its regional characteristics—its Marathi, Kannada and Telugu loanwords aside, its strange inflections and the confusion over the use of the over-guttural qaaf and the khay, have long contributed to hilarity and contempt.

by Guest Mon Mar 28, 2016 7:20 am

Syed Shah Khusro Hussaini, the sajjada,is a scholar of Sufism, and he spoke to me at length about his hallowed ancestor. He pointed out that despite the “impracticality” of Tughlaq’s move, it was in some sense “a blessing in disguise” as it “gave an impetus to the popularity of the Chishti order in south India.” Banda Nawaz may have moved to the Deccan as a young boy along with Tughlaq’s court, but he went back to Delhi at the age of fourteen, in 1335, and entered the Chishti khanqah, or monastery, then under the spiritual guidance of Shaykh Nasir al’ Din. It was over sixty years later, at nearly the age of eighty, that the saint, now called Gesu Daraz—one with the long locks—would return to the Deccan, anticipating the sack of Delhi by Timur, the Turko-Mongol conqueror. He stopped on the way to visit the grave of his father at Khuldabad, a striking and fascinating town of prominent Sufi shrines, adjacent to Daulatabad. It was Banda Nawaz’s intention to settle there, but Firuz Shah, the Bahmani sultan who ruled the Deccan at the time, beseeched him to settle in Gulbarga.

Besides providing a focal point for Indo-Muslim society in the Deccan, Banda Nawaz’s eventual settlement in Gulbarga—and the parallel influx of influential Sufis—was monumental in that it animated the coalescing of Dakhani into a literary language, albeit mostly of religious and mystical character. The Dakhani of that era is regarded as a proto-Urdu form. It began to enter written texts in the fourteenth century, although its earliest extant works in prose and poetry are dated to the mid-fifteenth century. Several works are attributed to Banda Nawaz—some scholars say he wrote 105 or more tracts. The very beginnings of Urdu prose, which emerged in Dakhani, are linked in no small measure to the saint’s prolific literary output, Hussaini told me. In fact, an early mystical tract, Miraj al’ Ashiqin, which some believe is the first prose work in Dakhani and in Urdu, is often attributed to the saint of Gulbarga—though this attribution is highly contested.

Secular works followed soon enough, and many were composed across the Deccan. Over the course of the fifteenth century, the language spoken by the Sufis, soldiers, craftsmen, traders, merchants, journeymen and other migrants who moved to the Deccan was a curious mix of the many dialects they brought with them—Saraiki, Punjabi, Khadi-boli and others—and local vernacular forms. What was called Dakhani in the Deccan was, elsewhere and at later points, called Gojri, Gurjari, Hindawi and Hindi.

Hindawi, the spoken language of north India, was being shaped by the parallel mixing of Turkic languages, Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Braj and other dialects—a process catalysed by the Sufi poet, mystic, and lover of language Amir Khusrau, in the thirteenth century.

Like Banda Nawaz’s father, the multi-faceted Khusrau was also a disciple of Nizam al’ Din. Khusrau referred to himself as an “Indian Turk,” and also called himself “the Parrot of India—question me in Hindawi that I may talk sweetly.” Widely regarded as the first poet of what would eventually come to be known as Urdu, this early mystic and musician served several masters, but was longest in the employ of Ala al’ Din Khilji.

“Khwaja sahab,” Khusro Hussaini said, referring to Banda Nawaz, who would presumably have spoken Hindawi during his time in Delhi, “also has said that there is such sweetness in Hindawi.” It was the alluring mix of tongues, which Hussaini described as bearing “a certain deep sentiment, a charm and sweetness,” that infused Banda Nawaz’s speech and writing upon his return to the Deccan in his old age. He was a man of the people; he wished to talk to them in a language that they understood, rather than in the Persian of courtly traditions. Thus began the journey of Dakhani, which flourished—as is evident from a rich repository of medieval manuscripts—until the early eighteenth century, when it went into a calamitous decline. Yet glimpses of its colourful history can be found in the thousands of folk songs and poems of those who still speak the language today, all across the Deccan.

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The literary legacy of Dakhini (Southern Indian dialect of Hindi)

The literary legacy of Dakhini (Southern Indian dialect of Hindi)

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