No Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan?

Implemented fully, BJP’s Hindutva

renaming will wipe out a lot of India
scroll.in/article/902177/no-hindi-hindu-hindustan-implemented-fully-bjps-hindutva-renaming-will-wipe-out-a-lot-of-india

Shoaib Daniyal

Language Log

Earlier attempts to erase the lexical traces of India’s syncretic culture have
been made – with little success.

As India hurtles towards the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has employed a
somewhat novel strategy to win support: renaming places.

In politically critical Uttar Pradesh, the BJP has wiped out the name of the iconic Mughal Sarai railway
station (now the catchy Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya junction), changed Allahabad to Prayagraj, and
Faizabad district will now be called Ayodhya. Other names that could go on the chopping block are
Muzaffarnagar, Agra, Sultanpur, Telangana’s capital Hyderabad and Gujarat’s largest city, Ahmedabad.
“The name is a symbol of our slavery,” explained Gujarat’s deputy chief minister, referring to the rule of
Ahmed Shah, the sultan of Gujarat, who founded Ahmedabad in the 15th century and after whom the city
is named.

Most historians might disagree, but it is the standard view within Hindutva that all of medieval India’s
Muslim sultanates and empires were colonial in nature. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has himself, on
more than one occasion, referred to 1,200 years of foreign rule, which would make India’s experience of
colonialism the longest in the world.

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The renaming, then, is an outcome of this worldview since the most frequent, everyday signs of this
supposed slavery are lexical: words borrowed from Persian, as a result of the language being patronised
by medieval India’s Muslim monarchs.

Farsi in India

In fact, given how long India’s association with Persian is, the BJP’s renaming spree, taken to its logical
conclusion, will end up wiping away substantial portions of what Indians find familiar. Persian words do
not exist only in highfalutin Urdu poetry, they are everywhere: from popular culture to the banal objects of
every day existence. This influence is especially acute in North India, the heartland of the powerful Delhi
sultanates and the Mughal Empire for seven centuries. Spoken Hindi, as a result, is rich in Persian loan
words. In fact, the very name of the language is a Persian word, literally meaning “Indian” in Farsi,
making Hindi a rare language known to its own native speakers by an exonym.

This extended Persiophile dominion also means that North India has a lot of place names taken from
Persian (and also, to a lesser extent, Arabic). Punjab is Persian for five rivers, giving rise not only to the
name of a state in the Indian Union but also a language and an ethnicity. Hindustan is Persian too, and
while it has no official status, it is commonly used in spoken Hindi and, ironically, preferred by many
Hindutva ideologues as a name for India.

A political cartoon by R Prasad which points out the irony of the BJP's renaming spree

Renaming the map

In Uttar Pradesh, 45% of the largest 20 cities currently have Persio-Arabic names. So embedded is
Persian as a naming convention that it has given rise to a number of commonly used geographical
suffixes: abad (as in Faridabad, meaning populated place), bandar (as in Porbandar, meaning port), ganj
(meaning market, as in McLeodganj), shahar (meaning city, as in Bulandshahar) and bazar (meaning
market, as in Gola Bazar).

Given the political economy of medieval India, this influence is strongest in urban areas, but in Punjab,
Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, even villages have the common Persian suffixes kalan (big) and
khurd (small). Similarly, the common Maharashtrian village suffixes budruk and khurd are from Persian as
well.

A thorough wiping out of the geographical indicators of so-called “slavery” under India’s Islamicate rulers
then would be a mammoth exercise, changing the map of India as we know it.

But simply changing the names of places, as gargantuan an exercise that would be, would only be the tip
of the iceberg. The long history of Persian means it has seeped a level further. In Hindi, administrative
terms such as sarkar (government), zila (district), tehsil/taluqa (sub-district) are borrowings, as are Army
ranks such as sepoy, subedar, and havaldar. The everyday Hindi terms for soldier – jawan – is also, if one
were to take all of this seriously, “a symbol of our slavery”.

Faith and religion

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The word “Hindu” is a Persio-Arabic loanword and therefore, ironically, so is Hindutva. As has been
frequently noted, each word of the alliterative Hindutva slogan of “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan” originates in
Farsi.

So embedded in the warp and weft of medieval Uttar Pradesh was Persian that in the 16th century
Goswami Tulsidas used the phrase “garib newaju”, an Awadhi borrowing from the Persian “garib nawaz”
to describe the Hindu god Ram in his iconic Ramcharitmanas. Usually a title applied to Sufi saints, garib
nawaz (literally, kind to the poor) gave rise to a word-for-word translation in Hindi: “deen dayal”. The ironic
modern-day result of this linguistic promiscuity is that when Mughal Sarai was renamed after Hindutva
ideologue Deendayal Upadhyaya in June, little was achieved in distancing the station from Persian itself.

There is more. The word “baba”, often used to refer to religious gurus in India, is from the Persian word
for “father” as is the word “sher” in sherawali mata (tiger mother), a common appellation for the goddess
Durga in North India. In Sikhism, common terms like the word “sahib” in the “Guru granth sahib”, “khalsa”
(or Sikh army), and “fateh” in the salutation “Waheguruji ki fateh” are all borrowed from Persian, given the
deep influence the language had in the Punjab during the birth of the faith.

From paneer to Patel

More temporally, Prime Minister Modi’s items of everyday wear such as kurta-pajama and and chasma
(spectacles) are Persian terms. So are shalwar-qameez, and that Delhi wedding staple, the sherwani.
Hindi’s sabun (soap), takya (pillow), deewar (wall) and pardah (curtain) are loanwords resulting from
“1,200 years of slavery”.

Indian food would need a grassroots overhaul once every Islamicate influence is done away with. In
Hindi, paneer (cottage cheese), pyaaz (onion), namak (salt), tarbooz (watermelon), and the popular
snacks halwa, jalebi and samosa are Persio-Arabic as is tandoor and pulao. Modi’s earlier job as chai-
wallah has a Persian first half. And the common words for alcohol in North India – sharaab and daru – are
both Farsi.

While a lot has already been done, once the lexical Hindutva renaissance begins in earnest, more effort
would need to be put into rewriting history given that the words “sardar” in Sardar Patel, Gandhi’s
“charkha” and Subhas Bose’s “Azad Hind Fauj” are all of Persian origin, as are the first names of India’s
first two prime ministers: Jawaharlal and Lal Bahadur.

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 The Hindi word "samosa", the name of India's most popular snack, also has Persio-Arabic origins, tracing its roots to
when medieval India was ruled by Muslim kings.

Purifying language

Matters could get even more personal. A number of castes adopted Persian nomenclatures during the
medieval period, giving rise to modern surnames. The surname Saraf (of which Shroff is a variant), Malik
and Majumdar will need to go. As luck would have it, the BJP even has a chief minister with a Persian
surname: Devendra Fadnavis.

Maybe most private of all, in the North, even some swear words would need to be excised in the national
interest. Persian is used in the Hindi equivalent of the slur “mother f***er” as well as in the more sedate
kamina (low-born) and harami (bastard).

Given the deep connection between language and identity – in Europe, for example, countries are
organised by language – linguistic politics is inevitable. Trying to get rid of India’s Persian and Arabic
lexicon is not new. In 1955, an Official Languages Commission was appointed by the Union government
to coin modern Hindi words given that it was going to be used for the first time as an administrative
language. In his autobiography, Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan describes the amazement the
“incomprehensible” Sanskritic neologisms caused. A radio was “vidyut prasaran” (electrical broadcasting
device) and a train “lauhpath gamini” (ferrous-path voyager).

Of course, these words died without a trace and everyday Hindi continued as it had done before, taking
along words from its Persianate past and absorbing new ones from the English-laden present – a
hodgepodge that reflects the many influences on the culture of India. Whether Allahabadis will now start
to refer to themselves as Prayagrajis in the coming days will show if these new efforts to force fit India
into a linguistic monoculture will have worked.

Note: Unless otherwise hyperlinked, word etymologies have been sourced from A Dictionary of Urdu,
Classical Hindi and English by John T Platts and A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary by Francis
Joseph Steingass.

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Road Safety

Why India’s data on road crash deaths is unreliable

The country banks solely on the police force for the data, ignoring other
critical sources.

An artist dressed as Yamaraj runs behind a motorist riding without a helmet as part of a 'Road Safety Week' campaign in
Bangalore. | Manjunath Kiran/AFP

India banks solely on police data for estimating deaths in road accidents, ignoring other critical sources,
leading to a data gap that impairs its emergency response system, makes it difficult to design and
implement accident prevention strategies, and leads to an underestimation of accidental deaths, experts
say.

The World Health Organizationclassified India’s official data on road traffic fatalities as “unusable” or
“unavailable” because of “quality issues” in its 2019 Global Health Estimates released in December 2020.
This study is still the latest available source of global data on death and disability by region, country, age,

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sex and cause.

In its methods and country-level data sources handbook, the WHO pointed out that it has official figures
from India for only 2001-2003 and 2010-2013. For the remaining years, it has had to collate numbers
from the Global Burden of Diseases (2019) study produced by its partnering institute, the Institute of
Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent research centre at the University of Washington, said a
WHO statistician who did not wish to be named....

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Tribute

Vamona Navelcar (1929-2021): A canvas across three continents

The artist lived and worked in India, Portugal and Mozambique, died on
October 18.

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 Vamona Navelcar as a young man. Date unknown. | Courtesy Anne Ketteringham.

Goan artist Vamona Ananta Sinai Navelcar was born in the small coastal village of Pormburpa in North
Goa on May 5, 1929. Despite his nascence in this tiny place, his career spanned seven decades and
three continents. This legacy notwithstanding, Navelcar is little known in his homeland.

For many Goan artists who were contemporaries of Navelcar, such as the Modernists Ângela Trindade
(1909-1980), VS Gaitonde (1924-2001), and FN Souza (1924-2002), their contributions to art were only
brought to public knowledge posthumously. Even the recent demise of Laxman Pai (1926-2021) makes it
apparent that Goan artists live in Goa in obscurity, their contributions underacknowledged as living
testaments to Goa’s heritage.

What sets Navelcar apart from his esteemed contemporaries is that his canvas served as a chronicle of
key moments in Goan, Portuguese, and Mozambiquan histories. Known as an artist of three continents,
Navelcar’s works – even in the last years of his life – attest to how the time he spent in these disparate
yet colonially connected lands informed his aesthetic. Navelcar saw himself as a product of these three
lands, but his art itself is birthed of displacement. And yet this is all the more reason to recognise
Navelcar’s artistry as being uniquely Goan, for the circumstances that caused his dislocations are equally
of the history that have made Goa the place it is today....

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