commentary
The ‘Hindi’ of the ‘Urdu’
Mehr Afshan Farooqi
Urdu means “military camp” in
Turkish but it does not follow
therefore that the language had
its origins in military camps. The
journey of the language, variously
known as Hindi/Hindvi/Dehlvi/
Goojri/Rekhta or Dakhani at
different periods, to being called
Urdu is difficult to explore
because of the passionate
Hindi-Urdu divide.
Mehr Afshan Farooqi (maf5y@cms.mail.
virginia.edu) is with the department of
middle east and south Asian languages and
cultures, University of Virginia, USA.
18
I
felt compelled to write this essay after
coming across in print for the ump-
teenth time what I would call the “mil-
itary camp fiction” of Urdu’s origins.
Metonyms can be misnomers and even
lead to absurd interpretations, especially
if the naming word comes from another
language. A case in point is the name
“Urdu”. While it seems to be “common
knowledge” that Urdu means “military
camp” in Turkish, it is not at all clear how
the simplistic notion came about that the
Urdu language, by virtue of its name, had
its origin in military camps. Granted that
the Turks who established their rule in
northern India from the 11th century
onwards must have needed to communi-
cate with the local populace through a
mutually intelligible vernacular, but the
most likely place for such a language of
communication to emerge would be the
bazaars and not army camps. In any case,
there was no tradition of large standing
armies that would be camped in canton-
ments such as those of the colonial era.
Armies were cobbled together whenever
needed and consisted mostly of peasants
and mercenaries.
Yule and Burnell, the authors of Hobson
Jobson (A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-
Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred
Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geograph-
ical and Discursive, Delhi, revised ed 1986),
cite a reference from 1560 in support of
“urdu bazaar” or camp-market. They also
claim that the word “urdu” came to India
with the Mughals (Babur, the first Mughal
ruler was victorious at the famous battle of
Panipat in 1526). While their citation must
be correct, their claim that the Turkish
word came with Babur is wrong because
the Ilbari Turks had already put down
roots in north India much earlier.
That Hindi/Hindvi/Dehlvi was a lan-
guage that existed in the Delhi region we
learn from the contemporary histories as
well records of sufi discourses. The
Mughals did follow the central Asian tra-
dition of setting up vast encampments that
were almost like a city in proportions and
could be ‘shikargahs’ (royal hunting camps)
or simply a court away from the formal
court at the capital. It is certain that no
new language grew out of Mughal camps
in northern India. The creation and deve­
lopment of a new language is a complex
process that takes place over a period of
time. Then there is also the marked dif­
ference between the colloquial and the
literary form of the language. It is in this
context that the “military camp theory”
becomes even more difficult to believe.
“Urdu” as nomenclature for a language
seems to have gained currency when the
colloquial form which was generally known
as Hindi/Hindvi developed into a sophis-
ticated language with literary potential.
Metamorphosis of Hindvi
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 that they were
used for such a purpose at this early period.
For example, the earliest literary text in
Awadhi dates from 1379 (the Chandayan
of Maulana Da’ud). From the fragmented
evidence that we have available to us from
March 1, 2008  EPW   Economic & Political Weekly

the literary sources of the period it seems
that this speech was described as Hindvi/
Hindi/Dehlvi and the earliest literary
work in it was a ‘divaan’ (collection of
verse arranged alphabetically according
to rhyme) by the 11th century poet Masud
Saad Salman (1046-1121) who claimed to
have divaans in three languages: Arabic,
Persian and Hindvi. The Hindvi one
though, is lost. We learn about it from
Muhammad Aufi’s (composed around
1220-27) history of intellectual essences or
the Lubab ul-albab (Pure Essences of the
Intellect). Amir Khusrau (1253-1325) the
versatile poet-genius also composed
verses in Hindvi for the delectation of
friends, but neither he nor they rated those
efforts serious or literary enough to be
preserved or recorded in a formal collec-
tion or divaan. Clearly, Hindvi had not as
yet developed enough literary potential.
Though marginalised by Persian, the lan-
guage of the royal court on the one hand
and Braj and Awadhi, at the regional courts
and in the creative efforts of sant and sufi
poets on the other, Hindvi lingered on as a
lingua franca, travelling to western, central
and southern India through the specific
instances of official transfer of population
such as the one enforced by Muhammad
bin Tughluq (1325-1351), but more gener-
ally through merchants and travelling sufi
mystics who were encouraged by their
‘pirs’ (sufi divines) to move to distant
regions and establish their own centres.
The dynamics of the interflow between
capital and region, the privilege of the
north as the centre of power, helped
empower Hindvi and led to its develop-
ment in areas distant from the place of its
origin. It absorbed regional/local influ-
ences and morphed into Goojri in Gujarat
and Dakhani in the Deccan. Goojri and
Dakhni flourished; their literary potential
grew to encompass a wide variety of gen-
res, subjects and attitudes. The earliest
writings were philosophical-mystical
poems with either indigenous or Persian
metres. The lexical content was a mixture
of Persian and indigenous vocabulary. By
the 17th century, “Urdu” could boast of
profoundly mystical poems such as Khub
Muhammad Chishti’s (d 1638) Khub
Tarang and also long love poems of the
‘barahmasa’ (season songs referring to
each month of the year) type such as
Economic & Political Weekly  EPW   march 1, 2008
commentary
Muhammad Afzal’s (d 1625), Bikat Kahani.
Around the same time, and more signifi-
cantly, Urdu literature was flourishing in
the Deccan, covering a wide range of sub-
jects that ranged from the allegorical to the
romance style in traditional ghazals, and
included the ‘chakkinamah’ (a genre of
folk poems) that were popular among
women and usually sung while perform-
ing household chores eponymous to the
genre. Literature in “Urdu” thus devel-
oped earlier in the regions away from the
capital. It was Vali Aurangabadi’s (1665-
1708) historic presentation of poetry in
the capital (Vali visited Delhi in 1700)
that showed in no uncertain measure how
complex, sophisticated, abstract, meta- Gyan - AD
phoric poetry was possible in a language
other than Persian or Indo-Persian, a lan-
guage that we can identify as early Urdu
but which was known as Hindi/Hindvi/
Rekhta/Dakhani in those times. The
poetics of this language was as indige-
nous as it was Persianate; probably
inclined more towards the former than
the latter:
Oh Vali, the tongue of the master poet
is the candle that lights up
the assembly of meanings.
(ay vali sahib-e sukhan ki zaban
bazm-e ma’ni mein sham-e roshan hai)
Like meaning in the word,
ways for new themes are not closed:
Doors of poetry are open forever.
(raah-e mazmun-e taza band nahin
ta qiyamat khula hai baab-e sukhan)
Urdu-Hindi Divide
How did the language known as Hindi/
Hindvi/Goojri/Rekhta/Dakhani at various
times and places come to be known as
Urdu? The issue would not have been so
vexed but for the role of politics in the Urdu-
Hindi divide. The emotional and passionate
discourse that is unleashed in the name of
historical research on the origins of Urdu
and Hindi has obstructed rational debate
on the subject. The nomenclature “Urdu”
with its putative connotation “military
camp” muddies the lens of historio­graphy,
making it more speculative than it would
have been without the name tag. Two
books   on the subject that are relatively
well known are: Amrit Rai, A House
Divided: The Origin and Development of
Hindi/Hindavi (Oxford University Press,
New Delhi, 1984) and Christopher King,
19
commentary
One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi
Movement in Nineteenth Century North
India (OUP, New Delhi, 1994). An impor-
tant and recent intervention in the debate
on the issues of origins and nomencla-
ture is Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s Urdu ka
Ibtidayi Zamana (Karachi, 1999). Its
expanded version is available in English:
Early Urdu Literary Culture and History
(OUP, New Delhi, 2001). Among other
thorny but noteworthy issues that his
thesis tackles, the most conclusive research/
arguments pertain to the earliest use of
the metonym Urdu as name for the lan-
guage and the “meaning” or allusion of
the word itself.
According to Faruqi, “Urdu” as a name
for the language seems to occur for the
first time in 1780 in the poet Musahafi’s
(1750-1824) first divaan:
Musahafi has most surely
claim of superiority in Rekhtah;
That is to say, he has expert knowledge
Of the language of Urdu
(albatta rekhtah mein hai musahafi ko da’va
ya’ni ke hai zabandan urdu ki voh zaban ka)
(Musahafi, Kulliyat, vol 1, p 38).
20
The name “Urdu” seems to have begun
its life as ‘zaban-e Urdu-e mualla-e Shah-
jahanabad’ (the language of the exalted
city/court of Shahjahanabad (Delhi)). It
originally seems to have signified Persian
not Urdu. The shift from Persian to Urdu
as the language of the court must have
happened when Shah Alam II (ruled 1759-
1806) who was known not only to speak
“Hindi” but also described the language of
his long prose work, the romance, Ajaib
ul-qisas (Most Wonderful Tales) as “Hindi”.
He began composing the dastaan around
1792; the unfinished text he left behind
covers 600 pages. However, though the
term zaban-e Urdu-e mualla referred to
the language that was slowly gaining
acceptance, the language itself was known
as “Hindi” and the word “Urdu” by itself
meant the “royal camp or city”.
Questions to Pursue
With the patronage and practice of Shah
Alam II, “Hindi” rather than Persian began
to be called the language of the Urdu-e
mualla. The problematic question that still
needs to be addressed is the nature, or to
put it another way, the genetics of this
“Hindi” as Hindi/Hindvi/Dehlvi or the lan-
guage of Hind specifically the region of
Delhi. A language must have existed before
the arrival of the Turks in that region. It
grew with the interaction and mixing of
populations by the arrival of the Persian
speaking Turks who began settling down in
northern India. It was natural for the new
settlers to refer to this language the “Hindi”
that was the “language of the Urdu” in the
late 18th century become the language
known as Hindi today with Arabo-Persian
vocables excised as far as possible, and
Sanskrit ‘tadbhava’ (words derived from
sanskrit but changed to fit a different
phono­logy) added as far as possible. How
did modern Hindi and Urdu develop? I
could present my viewpoint on these issues
but I leave these questions for the reader to
pursue. My purpose in this essay is to clarify
(a) the origin and meaning of the term
“Urdu”, and (b) to roughly outline the
growth and development of a language
from spoken to literary.
March 1, 2008  EPW   Economic & Political Weekly