Talk:Urdu/Archive 9

Urdu in South Asia in Third-party Sources
Fowler&amp;fowler «Talk»  19:27, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Please comment only in the comments subsection below the references, not here.

Introduction
The various political and religious nationalisms in South Asia during the latter half of the 19th-century and most of the 20th have created wildly varying perspectives on the status of Urdu there. In my view, authors from South Asia, even those in the west with recent a recent history of immigration ( i.e. First generation immigrants in the west in both meanings of the expression, (given in Webster's, for example, for the US as: 1. "born in the U.S. -used of an American of immigrant parentage" or 2. "foreign-born -used of a naturalized citizen," ) are not entirely immune from biases of perspective, even among those most scholarly.

I am advocating an approach that has borne results in other controversial pages in which Hindu-Muslim or India-Pakistan disputes have a bearing in evaluating a Wikipedia source for reliability. On pages such as 2020 Delhi riots (Hindu-Muslim) or 2019 India-Pakistan border skirmishes (India-Pakistan) or Subhas Chandra Bose (with wildly varying perspectives in India about the characterization of his notability), we have written the leads using only "Third-party sources," i.e. sources whose authors or organizations are not predisposed by the previous history of their milieu to advocating a particular viewpoint in the dispute.

For the 2020 Delhi riots, the sources being employed in the lead are subject to the conditions: they be newspaper articles: (a) which have correspondents based in India. (b) whose articles (which are of interest to us) have bylines (i.e. the name of the correspondents shows up below the title of their story) and (c) which are published in liberal democracies where there is no significant POV around this issue. (i.e. South Asian newspapers are ruled out for sourcing the lead.) Thus (a) and (b) ensure that the source is not written as an opinion piece or by a web manager and (c) uses only third-party newspapers in the creation of a reliable and neutral summary, which can then be used as a template to add nuances in the main body of the article to describe the significant disputes and so forth.

For Urdu, I propose the following conditions for sourcing the lead (and the lead only): (a) the source should be a published scholarly one with an unambiguous author (web pages, popular newspaper articles even when written by scholars, are to be avoided for sourcing the lead), (b) the source should be primarily about an Urdu-related topic, not about another (say in linguistics or politics in which Urdu is mentioned as a brief example (i.e. to be cherry-picked out of context) and (c) the author is not of South Asian descent as broadly interpreted above. In my view, there is no other way of writing a broad and neutral summary in the lead; the intercultural toxicity is too deep-rooted. The lead in this way of thinking is not (at least initially) a summary style precis of the main body, but an independent neutral summary to be employed as a template of neutrality for the expansion of the main body (in, for example, the discussion of significant disputes, nuances, etc.).


 * PS (Added 23:00, 24 September 2020 (UTC)) We have followed the same broad principles in lead of Indus Valley Civilisation. In some ways, the issues there are similar to Urdu. In Urdu, many speakers migrated to Pakistan (in which Urdu became a hallmark of the new nation's identity).  In IVC, the partition of India resulted in the major sites including the UNESCO World Heritage site of Mohenjo daro awarded to Pakistan.


 * PS2 Upon rethinking, I have broadened my compass of "third-party" to include articles with bearing on Urdu in Enclopaedia Britannica but only those with bylines.  These are articles written by recognized scholars in the field whose names appears below the article title, in contrast, for example, to the articles in Britannica on "Urdu language," "Hindi language," "Hindustani language," which have been edited by general-purpose editors who do this sort of editing across a wider range of articles.  For example, the Britannica article on Urdu is written by an editor who generally works on North African and Middle-East topics.   As Britannica has sufficient oversight, what emerges in its scholarly articles is effectively third-party, and I am willing to make an exception in the description of "third-party" above.  I will be adding a special Britannica section below.    Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  18:42, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

George Cardona, University of Pennsylvania

 * George Cardona is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania.
 * Indo-Aryan languages

Edward Dimock Jr, University of Chicago

 * Edward Dimock Jr. was Professor, Department of South Asian Languages, University of Chicago, and a scholar of Bengali.
 * Indo-Aryan literatures 12th–18th–century

J. T. P. de Bruijn, University of Leiden

 * J. T. P. de Bruijn is Professor Emeritus of New Persian, University of Leiden
 * Islamic literatures
 * Persian literature

C. M. Naim, University of Chicago

 * C. M. Naim is Professor Emeritus of Urdu, University of Chicago.
 * South Asia: Islamic Literatures 11th–19th-century
 * Urdu literature

Christopher Shackle, University of London

 * Christopher Shackle is Emeritus Professor of Modern Languages of South Asia, SOAS, University of London.
 * Punjabi language
 * Lahnda language
 * Siraiki language

Motilal Jadhumal Jotwani

 * Sindhi literature

Ronald Eric Emmerick, University of Hamburg

 * Professor and Director, Department of Iranian Studies, University of Hamburg
 * Iranian languages

Judith M. Brown, Modern India

 * Judith M. Brown was the Beit Professor of Commonwealth History, University of Oxford.
 * This book has been cited 548 times on Google Scholar.
 * This book has been cited 548 times on Google Scholar.

(p. 180) United Provinces Muslims were rapidly becoming aware of particular threats to their local position. Against a backdrop of Hindu revivalism which threatened the élite provincial culture, which had been moulded over centuries by the Urdu language and the presence of an urbane and powerful Muslim group with traditions of political and administrative expertise, the provincial government seemed to be undercutting the Muslim position—by its educational policy, its bureaucratic reforms and the expansion of local self-government on the elective principle. Simultaneously in the western part of UP Muslims began to lose land to Hindu commercial men. Muslim anxiety about their provincial position in relation to varied sources of power generated new province-wide defence movements; of which the most significant were the unsuccessful campaign to retain Urdu, the language of the Muslim élite, rather than Hindi written in the Nagri script as the language of provincial administration, and demands for special representation in provincial elected bodies. These spawned such new organizations as the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental Defence Association of Upper India (1893) reorganized in 1900 as the Urdu Defence Association, which attracted an unusually wide band of support from among the province’s Muslims, including landlords, lawyers, and ulema. In 1906 the Muslim League came into being, an all-India body heavily influenced by UP men and their particular problems, which connected the provincial and all-India political arenas.

Peter Robb, History of India

 * Peter Robb is Research Professor at History of India, and former Chair, South Asian Studies, SOAS, University of London.
 * This book has been cited 147 times on Google Scholar.
 * This book has been cited 147 times on Google Scholar.

(p. 161) the literate classes of north India — Hindu as well as Muslim — had become proficient in Persian during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leading also to the development of a literary Urdu and to common participation in Hindu and Muslim festivals. These and other elites had also established a hold in the countryside, through office- and landholding, kinship, patronage and armed retainers.

(pp 205–207) On the other hand, throughout the nineteenth century some Muslims retained privileged positions. In the northern Indian heartlands of the Mughal empire many were still influential and active in public life. They were initially less involved in modern politics (as described here) than their counterparts in the great presidency towns, but that applied equally to others in those regions. True also, the expansion and redirection of trade benefited Hindu trading castes and some towns grew at the expense of declining qasbahs (centres of Mughal nobility, with their markets, mosques and madrasas). But still the Muslim literate classes continued to be over-represented in government jobs and landowning. Their predominance was reflected among Hindu elites by a shared Persianized culture and the use of the Urdu language. After 1857, however, this supremacy began to be challenged, by quotas in goverment service, by Hindu revival and chauvinism, and the language and script controversies. A specifically Muslim identity came to be asserted (and stretched to include the lower classes)

(p 258) In the processes of separation and unification, the very languages diverged. Print spread orthodoxies, and invited debates about literary style and vocabulary. Bengali became either Sanskritized or ‘pure’ during the nineteenth century. Bengali Muslims wondered if they should adopt Urdu, or if a ‘Musalmani Bangla’ could be developed. Sikhs later insisted upon Punjabi in Gurmukhi script. Across north India, Hindi and Urdu drew apart. The Nagari Pracharini Sabha, formed in the 1880s, equated a script (devanagari) with a language (Hindi). Literary men debated the proper regional standards: two main Hindi forms were available, khari bholi and braj bhasha. Bharatendu Harishchandra (1850-85) pioneered the use of khari bholi in prose; Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi (1864-1938) and the journal Saraswati (1902) sponsored it also for poetry. These too were movements of categorization and communalism.

Copeland, India 1885–1947

 * Ian Copeland is Professor of History at the School of Historical Studies and Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies, Monash University
 * This book has been cited 34 times on Google Scholar.
 * This book has been cited 34 times on Google Scholar.

(p. 10) British rule had not done the Muslims many favours. The English East Indian Company’s conquests had snuffed out most of the Muslim ruling dynasties, and its policy of resuming tax-free lands had cut deeply into the pockets of the Muslim gentry. The Crown’s push after 1858 towards the replacement of Urdu or Persian as the language of record in government offices by English, which relatively few Muslims then knew well, had accelerated the process of economic decline.

(p. 57–58) In the past Hinduism had tended to view all other religions with a haughty indifference. However revivalist organisations such as the Arya Samaj spurned this passive approach in favour of a militantly pro-active one. The Aryas openly criticised Islam (and for that matter, Christianity). They agitated for the ‘protection’ of cows, a move that brought them into direct conflict with Muslim butchers. They pursued converts, employing the Christian technique of baptism (shuddhi) to reclaim Hindus ‘lost’ to Islam. Meanwhile, other Hindu militants, especially in the United Provinces, lobbied to have Urdu replaced by Hindi as the main language of administrative record. Unused to this aggressive, triumphalist brand of Hinduism, Muslims felt threatened. The fact that some of the loudest spokesmen for the Hindu cause and some of the biggest donors to the Arya Samaj and the cow protection movement came from the Hindu merchant and money-lending communities, the principal agents of lower-class Muslim economic dependency, reinforced this sense of insecurity. Not surprisingly, they attempted to strike back. Muslims with money and education responded in kind, setting up organisations to counter the Hindu missionary push. One such society, established in Lahore in 1885, put much effort into housing and educating orphans ‘so as to save them from falling into the hands of the followers of other religions’. Another, founded at Aligarh in 1894, campaigned for the preservation of Urdu.

Metcalf and Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India

 * Barbara D. Metcalf was Alice Freeman Professor of History, University of Michigan, and President American Historical Association. Thomas R. Metcalf is the Sara and Thomas Kailath Professor of South Asian history, University of California, Berkeley.
 * This book has been cited 719 times on Google Scholar
 * This book has been cited 719 times on Google Scholar

(p. 43) At the Delhi court as well, the vernacular language of Urdu, with its heavy use of Persian loan words, was adapted to Persian poetic genres by great poets including Mir Taqi Mir (1723-1810) and Khwaja Mir Dard (1720-85). ... In the Punjab and among the Rohillas in particular, Chishti sufis disseminated renewed attention to hadith. This was a period of Shi'a efflorescence as well. Shi‘a-led states, including Bengal for a time, and, above all, Awadh, patronized the elaborate mourning ceremonies that expressed devotion to the Shi'a imams, and supported the writing and recitation of Urdu-language elegies (marsiya). This poetic tradition was begun by men like Mirza Rafi'ud-din Sauda (1713-81), who with so many others sought refuge at the Lucknow court from the mid-century disorder in Delhi.

(p. 135) British fears of an imagined threat from worldwide Muslim conspiracy in the later nineteenth century could presumably be countered by encouraging India’s sturdy monotheists and former rulers. The Sikhs, too, in their case nowhere more than in the army, were encouraged to distinguish themselves from the larger society and see their interests best served by outspoken loyalty. Such loyalties could not be taken for granted. Muslims in the United Provinces, for example, were stunned by the decision in 1900 to make Hindi equal with Urdu as the language of the lower courts and administration, a decision explicitly understood by Sir Antony MacDonnell, the lieutenant governor, as a way to balance Hindus against Muslims. Urdu, with a larger admixture of Persian loan words and written in an Indo-Persian script, and Hindi, drawing more on Sanskrit loan words and written in the Sanskrit-based Devanagari script, were linguistically the same language. Although Urdu had been the lingua franca across north India since the eighteenth century and was known generally by the urban-educated, Bharatendu Harischandra of Banaras and others espoused the cause of Hindi as part of their cultural and nationalist activities.

(p. 248) During 1965 India staggered under a further series of crises. One arose over the issue of language. The constituent assembly had determined that Hindi in the Devanagari script should be the official language of the new India. Tainted by its association with Pakistan, Urdu fast faded from use in favour of a Sanskritized version of Hindi promoted by enthusiasts on All-India Radio and in the schools. To ease the transition from English to Hindi, the constitution provided for a fifteen-year phasing out period during which the language of the colonial master would continue to be used. Hindi, however, was the mother tongue of fewer than half the people of India, and these were concentrated in the northern portion of the country. The non-Hindi speakers in the south and east had no wish to see their languages relegated to subordinate status, and themselves disadvantaged in the competition for scarce government jobs. Many among the Indian elites wished as well to retain English as a ‘window on the world’. Hence the end of the fifteen-year transition period, in 1965, was accompanied by a massive outburst of anti-Hindi sentiment. ... In the end, a compromise retained English as an associate language, used largely for interregional communication.

Asher and Talbot, India Before Europe

 * Catherine Asher is Professor of History, University of Minnesota; Cynthia Talbot is Professor of History University of Texas-Austin
 * This book has been cited 234 times on Google Scholar.
 * This book has been cited 234 times on Google Scholar.

(p. 77) It was not in architecture but rather in the realm of language and literature that the northern Deccan developed its most composite culture. By about 1500, Sufis and others began to use a new language called Dakani. Based on many aspects of the grammar and syntax of north Indian vernacular, this Dakani language contained numerous Indic words, in addition to the many words derived from Persian and Arabic. The successors to the Bahmanis not only made frequent use of Dakani, but they also patronized the local regional languages, particularly from the late sixteenth century onward. Linguistic pluralism was hence just as much a feature of the northern Deccan culture as it was farther in the south.

(p. 169) Just as the Bijapur Sufis utilized the composite language of Dakani, so too did their Adil Shah rulers, as well as those of Golkonda, promote Dakani literature at their courts. Persian, the official language of the Mughal court, was used in the Deccan for keeping records and writing histories like the famous chronicle (tarikh) by Firishta, although some of the rulers were actually much less proficient in Persian than in Dakani, Telugu, or Marathi. The mingling of Indic and Islamicate traditions is exemplified at the courts of the two Deccan rulers most famous for their cultural patronage: Ibrahim Adil Shah II (r. 1580-1627) and Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (r. 1580-1611). Mystically inclined and a lover of music, Ibrahim Adil Shah II authored a collection of songs and poetry in Dakani known as Kitab-1 Nauras, that is, Book of the Nine Rasas. Meaning moods or emotions, rasas were essential components of aesthetics in the Indic poetic tradition, and Ibrahim II’s composition informs the audience not only about them but also about the Indian musical modes or ragas by which the rasas are also expressed.

(p. 247) A major change also took place in Delhi’s literary culture during the first half of the eighteenth century. Unlike other Muslim courts, such as those in the former sultanates of Jaunpur, Bijapur, and Golkonda, the Mughal court had never encouraged literary production in Indian languages, preferring to patronize Persian instead. Shortly after 1700, however, Delhi witnessed an efflorescence of writing in Urdu, an Indian language that incorporates many words from Persian and Arabic. The growing patronage of Urdu, based on the vernacular speech of the Delhi region, may in part reflect the shrinking geographical horizons of Mughal power, which now extended over no more than part of north India. But more significant in the rise of Urdu literature at Delhi was the emergence of a new class of non-noble poets and patrons. These upwardly mobile men, from a variety of backgrounds including commerce and administrative service, were not as conversant in Persian as Mughal nobles had once been, and so supported the growth of a rich literature in the more familiar language of Urdu, which gradually displaced Persian as a poetic medium in much of north India.

Burton Stein, History of India

 * Burton Stein was Professor of History at the University of Hawaii, and Professorial Fellow, SOAS, University of London
 * This book has been cited 399 times on Google Scholar.
 * This book has been cited 399 times on Google Scholar.

By the later nineteenth century, after the Great Mutiny of 1857, British policy was set to undermine the territorial basis of communities. This was accomplished partly by converting erstwhile locality chieftains into dependent landlords, breaking any that resisted the change; partly by atomizing previous territorial unities; partly by legal changes to individuate what had previously been group entitlements; and partly by favouring some groups and individuals over others. The scribal castes, especially the brahmans, flourished; Muslims, long held to be responsible for the Mutiny, suffered; most landlords benefited, while most tenants and landless labourers lost out.

Nevertheless, the idea of community as a local manifestation of some generalized morality continued, and in time new ways were devised for advancing the interests of certain groups through communalism. Community historically and at present is something into which Indians consider themselves to be born, socialized and ultimately bound to perpetuate. They are born in particular places with languages, social and caste groupings, political and cultural attachments. Territoriality and temporality, or history, have been and remain the critical dimensions of community. ‘Communalism’ is the means of mobilization, the symbols that stir people into action, often mass and violent action. There are well-known examples of this, beginning with the formation of caste associations in response to the caste categories used in censuses by the British. The goals of these associations were to contest the rankings presumed by the colonizers and to challenge the denigration of lower-ranking castes by higher castes. Later in the nineteenth century, the ‘cow protection’ and ‘script reform’ movements – the latter being the demand for the replacement of Urdu, written in Persian script, by Hindi written in Devanagari – proved to be effective means of mobilizing Hindus against Muslims, often to protest against one or another local irritant or to achieve some local advantage.

Kulke and Rothermund, History of India

 * Hermann Kulke is Professor of South Asian history at University of Kiel; Dietmar Rothermund was Professor of Economic History, University of Heidelberg
 * This book has been cited 724 times on Google Scholar
 * This book has been cited 724 times on Google Scholar

Christopher Bayly, University of Cambridge

 * Christopher Bayly was the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, University of Cambridge.
 * This book has been cited 1104 times on Google Scholar
 * This book has been cited 1104 times on Google Scholar

(pp. 454–456) Cow-protection provided a link of organisation and sentiment between the Urdu-writing Hindu service communities (particularly Kayasths and Khattris) who were strong in the Samaj and the ubiquitous communities of local Brahmins and merchants who tended to a more orthodox form of revivalism. More important still was the case of the Hindi language itself. Above all, it had been Brahmins and merchant communities who provided continuity in the face of the inroads of Persian and Urdu. In the early and mid-nineteenth century, mahajans had begun to set themselves alongside the Hindu rajas as patrons of Hindi religious poetry, ...

The literary and linguistic movements of the 1880s and 1890s such as the Hindi Literary Society (Sahitya Samelan) and the Benares Society for the Advancement of Hindi (Nagri Pracharini Sabha) developed easily out of these beginnings. ... these findings imply that some of the conditions which fractured the life of modern north India into Hindu and Muslim camps must be dated much earlier than is commonly supposed. It was not a question of ‘Two Nations’ from time immemorial, or even of inevitable conflict between members of the two religions as a result of ‘modernisation’. But the social formations which consolidated themselves between 1700 and 1830—what we have called the ‘merchant class’ and the ‘service gentry'—had tended to develop within two very different economic and cultural contexts, the Islamic qasbah or mohulla and the Hindu corporate town. ... from the 1830s the disintegration of the old magistracies and notabilities left broader spaces for contention. Qasbah gentry were in the forefront of Muslim social and political movements after 1860. ... These small service families were prominent in the associations which formed to protect the Persian script and Urdu language from the 1870s onward.


 * This book has been cited 837 times on Google Scholar.
 * This book has been cited 837 times on Google Scholar.

"(pp. 122–23) This was true also of the changes in the Indian educational system which concerned Victorian writers. The use of Persian was abolished in official correspondence (1835); the government’s weight was thrown behind English-medium education and Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Codes of Criminal and Civil Procedure (drafted 1841-2, but not completed until the 1860s) sought to impose a rational, Western legal system on the amalgam of Muslim, Hindu and English law which had been haphazardly administered in British courts. These fruits of the Bentinck era were significant. But they were only of general importance in so far as they went with the grain of social changes which were already gathering pace in India. The Bombay and Calcutta intelligentsia were taking to English education well before the Education Minute of 1836. Flowery Persian was already giving way in north India to the fluid and demotic Urdu. As for the changes in the legal system, they were only implemented after the Rebellion of 1857 when communications improved and more substantial sums of money were made available for education."


 * This book has been cited 1,541 times on Google Scholar.
 * This book has been cited 1,541 times on Google Scholar.

Christopher Shackle, University of London

 * Christopher Shackle is the Emeritus Professor of Modern Languages of South Asia, University of London.

(p. 32) Gandhi, himself a native-speaker of Gujarati educated in English, was insistent that the answer to the language problem lay in a compromise between Hindu and Muslim interests. His advocacy of a middle-of-the-road Hindustani seems at first glance to have been eminently reasonable, as it exploited the already widely current lingua franca without offering offence to either side. It certainly appealed to such influential Gandhians as the author Premchand (d. 1936), the Hindu Kayasth who was the only writer to have achieved an equally great reputation in both languages — first in Urdu and then in Hindi (15). But in fact Gandhi’s Hindustani was culturally neither fish nor fowl but a compromise whose political usefulness depended on its convenience as a rallying-cry in the fight against the imperialism of the British and their language: it offered no offence but at the same time invited no committed enthusiasm from any substantial section of the population. Most important of all, the question of script was entirely begged by the Hindustani camp: Gandhi’s bland assumption that ultimate acceptance of Nagari would present no real problem to the Muslim minority seems in retrospect to have been hopelessly naive.

By the 1940s, as the political divide between Hindus and Muslims became even deeper, Gandhi’s Hindustani was already coming to be seen as a non-starter. Hindi-promoting organizations which had previously felt constrained to give the compromise language some support under Gandhi's lead now abandoned even this lip-service (16). And even the Communists, whose expressly non-communal concern with the Indian masses provided the Marxist inspiration behind the Progressive movement that then dominated both Hindi and Urdu literature, were able to suggest only that Hindi and Urdu should be given equal recognition.

Allison Busch, Columbia University

 * Allison Busch (1969–2019) was Associate Professor of Hindi Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University
 * This work has been cited 150 times on Google scholar.
 * This work has been cited 150 times on Google scholar.

"(p. 214–215) Hindi textbooks today generally venerate Harishchandra as the “father of modern Hindi,” an adage that obscures the degree to which traditional literature was very much alive to him and not in the least incompatible with his active role in propagating new genres and media. ... Besides being an early adopter of the new Khari Boli prose, the single most important force behind the development of Hindi print culture during his lifetime, and a major literary critic, Harishchandra was also, like his father Giridhardas (1833-60) before him, a Brajbhasha poet.“ Given his stature today as Hindi’s great modernizer, the amount of his work in a traditionalist vein is surprisingly large: ... Harishchandra generally mixed Khari Boli prose and Braj verse in his dramas. Although Khari Boli prose was gaining much ground in the nineteenth century, Hindi poetry was mostly still written in Braj. By the 1870s a few poets had begun to experiment with Khari Boli, but for many, the very thought that poetry could be composed in this upstart language engendered disbelief, if not outright ridicule. Experts no less authoritative than George Abraham Grierson, founder of that modernist project par excellence, The Linguistic Survey of India, had dismissed the very idea,** while Harishchandra himself, otherwise hardly one to eschew innovation, made it amply clear in Hindibhasa (The Hindi language, 1883), an essay written late in his career, that he considered Khari Boli too harsh and unsophisticated for poetry. ... The long vowels ... which are generally characteristic of Khari Boli Hindi, would have sounded disastrously clumsy and cacophonous to a nineteenth-century ear attuned to the mellifluous cadences of Braj. This is to say nothing of the utterly pedestrian quality of the verse, a flaw that would continue to mar many an experiment with Khari Boli poetry decades into the future. For Harishcandra and the majority of his contemporaries in the last quarter of the nineteenth-century Brajbhasa unquestionably remained the literary dialect of choice."

Susan Bayly, University of Cambridge

 * Susan Bayly is Professor of Historical Anthropology, University of Cambridge.

... the personifications deployed in the battles waged by Hindu and Muslim cultural nationalists over the status of the two main languages of Gangetic Upper India, Hindi and Urdu (King 1992, 1994).

It is striking that those involved in these nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indian conflicts used provocative female imagery to denigrate each other's languages. In anti-Urdu polemics in particular, the key point about human verbal capabilities was that only some languages were to be seen as capable of embodying refined religious consciousness. For promoters of Hindi, “Semitic” languages were defective in this regard; only Sanskrit and Sanskrit-derived regional tongues written in the Nagri script were languages in the true sense. Once again, the conventional stereotype of Islam as a religion of the book and the word is reversed or inverted in Hindu supremacist thinking. The implication of the Nagri campaigners’ polemics was that Muslims only seem to have a book-based faith and, by implication, that Islam embodied a deficient and indeed illegitimate form of the doctrinal.In other words, for Hindu supremacists, imagistic practices are accidental accretions in Hinduism that can be removed by reform, but they are essential to Islam.

Such polemicists thus represented “Semitic” language forms as invasive and corrupting to Hindus. What they had in mind were the dangerously attractive uses to which Muslims put language. The concerns here were with Urdu and Persian poetry, music, and dance, especially in the forms to be encountered at Sufi saint cult shrines (dargahs). It was in these spaces that inferior religiosities were known to find expression in such practices as hypnotic drumming, ecstatic performance of qawwali (devotional song}, erotic versification, and the use of both chanting (dhikr) and intoxicants to induce states of mystical self-annihilation.

In polemical writings as well as visual iconography, Hindi campaigners often represented the two languages as contrasting female personifications: Hindi as a pure but vulnerable maiden, Urdu as a whorish temptress. The goals of the religious purist and the language campaigner were thus closely allied. Hindu polemicists regularly pointed to the “syncretistic” space of the dargah as a menace to their own pure but vulnerable spirituality. These of course were places where Hindus and Muslims—especially women—crowded dangerously together to receive amulets and other sanctified items from the hands of male shrine guardians.

This experience of the flash of miraculous curative energy or barakat transmitted to the female body through a scrap of written text, and the practices of ecstasy and spirit possession that often accompany these practices. are clearly imagistic deployments of language. It should therefore be noted that Muslims too often point to the dargah as a dangerous and corrupting space.

David Page, University of Sussex/British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)

 * David Page is Senior Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London and Co-director (with William Crawley) of the Media South Asia Project. After taking his doctorate in South Asian History at Oxford University, he joined the BBC in 1972 and worked for more than 20 years as a journalist, editor and manager in the BBC Eastern Service.


 * David Page: "Of the many language services of the BBC, the Urdu Service has been through more transformations than most because of the extraordinary political history of its target area. Before 1947 the language was very widely spoken in India — and not just by Muslims. It was the lingua franca of undivided Punjab, which provided the military bedrock of British rule, and the court language of princely India, with a history of cultural, particularly poetic, achievement stretching back to Mughal times. It ranged in complexity from the simplified form promoted by the British for administrative and military communication, which was called Hindustani, to the elaborate, nuanced, language of the Urdu poets, which drew extensively on Arabic and Persian. After the creation of Pakistan in 1947, Urdu mother-tongue speakers found themselves separated by a new international border and facing very different futures. Pakistan took Urdu as its national language and provided a home to millions of Muslims who left India to start a new life in the urban centres of Sind and Punjab. In India, on the other hand, Hindi emerged as the dominant national language in the north, while Urdu, now associated with the breakaway state of Pakistan, went into an officially encouraged decline. The role of Urdu, which had been a bridge between elites of the two communities, was gradually eroded, though the language has survived magnificently in the Indian cinema, where its simplicity, directness and charm have given it enormous popular appeal throughout the South Asian diaspora."
 * David Page: "Broadcasting has also been supplemented by online services, serving the diaspora worldwide in a more comprehensive way (Gillespie et al. 2009). Urdu Online quickly became one of the most popular World Service websites, with some 800,000 hits per day from Pakistanis and Indians in the US and Europe as well as in the traditional target areas.8 Footnote 8 In 2009, approximately 30 per cent of the BBC Urdu Online traffic was from Pakistan, 21 per cent from North America, 10–11 per cent from the Middle East and 4–10 per cent from the UK. Indian traffic remained small at 2 per cent, probably reflecting the decline of the Urdu script in that country. (Waheed Mirza, Editor of the BBC Urdu website, pers. comm., 21 July 2009)."
 * David Page: "Hindustani origins and influences: The Hindustani Service was in many ways a colonial project, which grew out of the experience of the founders of All India Radio (AIR), which was set up in 1936 by Lionel Fielden, its first Controller of Broadcasting, with the support of the famous Bokhari brothers. Ahmed Shah Bokhari later became AIR’s first Director-General and his brother, Zulfiqar Ali Bokhari, was the Station Director in Bombay before being appointed Indian Programme Organiser at the BBC in London in 1939. In setting up the Hindustani Service, Zulfiqar Bokhari followed the same language policy which he and his brother had pursued at AIR. The aim was to put intelligibility first and to use a commonly understood language, shorn of the extremes of sanskritised Hindi or persianised Urdu. In undivided India, where the Hindi-Urdu controversy had simmered for the previous 50 years, the policy had been criticised by Indian nationalists for favouring Urdu. At independence in 1947, Hindustani was swept away to be replaced by Hindi and the Bokhari brothers began new careers in Pakistan."
 * David Page: "The team that Zulfiqar Bokhari assembled hastily in London for the first BBC Hindustani broadcasts was made up mainly of Indian Muslims, who had either Punjabi or Urdu as their mother tongue, and these were reinforced later by professionals from AIR (BBC WAC 1940). Bokhari himself was a larger-than-life figure, a broadcaster, actor and poet, who had originally been poached by Fielden from the army training school in Simla. Both a servant of the Raj and a forthright critic of its shortcomings, he helped to set some broad parameters for BBC broadcasts to India, which were to have an enduring effect. At that time, radio in Britain and in India was a government monopoly and during the war years worked more strictly to a government brief. Bokhari was clear, however, that his fellow Indians would not be won over by propaganda and that the broadcasts should aim to engage India intellectually. In the English language broadcasts to India, he worked with Eric Blair (alias George Orwell), encouraging the participation of poets and writers such as E. M. Forster and J. B. Priestley, Louis MacNeice and T. S. Eliot, as well as leading journalists and economists. In the Hindustani Service, he also established a distinctive tradition that the service should act as a cultural bridge between Britain and India, with a strong emphasis on drama, poetry and literature, which was to be its dominant ethos for many years."

Alisdair Pinkerton, Royal Holloway College, London



 * Alisdair Pinkerton: "Chronology of BBC foreign language services to South Asia May 1940            Hindustani (service begins)  Subdivided into Hindi and Urdu in 1949 May 1941               Tamil service begins (and has continued) November 1941    Bengali service begins (and has continued) March 1942          Gujarati service begins (and has continued) April 1949            Urdu begins to be covered by the newly created Pakistan section.  1965                       BBC Pakistan section is renamed BBC Urdu (and has continued). February 2011       UK Government announced closure of BBC Hindi programming."
 * Alisdair Pinkerton: "In the aftermath of independence in 1947, the BBC struggled to come to terms with the geopolitical settlement in South Asia. The use of Hindustani — the language of imperial command in British India — continued in the BBC’s Eastern Service broadcasts for more than a year after the Partition of India and Pakistan. Prompted by a memo from Z. A. Bokhari, the first Director-General of Radio Pakistan (and wartime employee of the BBC in London), the Director of the BBC’s Eastern Services conceded: It is perfectly true that at the moment basic Hindustani, whilst still possibly the best medium for broadcasting to the unbiased Indian listener in India, is becoming something of an anomaly. Pakistan is speaking Urdu and India Hindi and Bokhari’s point, though possibly overstated, may well become, even if it is not at present the case, substantially true. Unless Pakistan and India rapidly and amicably reunite, which seems improbable, Urdu and Hindi are likely more and more to develop away from a common habit and goal. [...] I think, therefore, we must think seriously whether there might not be advantages in forming Hindi and Urdu Sections which would broadcast autonomously in the same way as our sectional Marathi and Bengali Service. (BBC WAC 1948)."

Ayet Harel-Shalev, Ben Gurion University

 * Ayet Harel-Shalev is Associate Professor of Politics and Government, Ben Gurion University of the Negev


 * Aylet Harel-Shalev: "(p 38)Indian government policy thus brought the sixth most prevalent language in India to the brink of extinction as a secular language, with Urdu being used almost exclusively in the madrases, religious Muslim schools, and hardly being taught in secular modern education institutions. Although Article 29(a) of the Indian Constitution guarantees every sector of society the right to preserve and nurture a separate language, script, and/or culture, this guarantee has provided little concrete assurance of Urdu’s preservation as a valued national Indian language."


 * Aylet Harel-Shalev: "(p 45) Regarding language, however, the Indian government and founding fathers were unwilling to make the necessary formal concessions to the Muslim population. With the establishment of Hindi (together with English) as the only Indian transnational language, supplanting the Hindi-Urdu dual language system, Urdu speakers were demoted to marginality. The government's treatment of Urdu thus demonstrates an attempt to eliminate remnants of Muslim culture from the Indian mainstream."

Victor Kiernan, University of Edinburgh

 * Victor Kiernan was Professor of Modern History, University of Edinburgh


 * Victor Kiernan's translation of the poems of Sir Muhammad Iqbal the greatest Urdu poet of the 20th-century:

Though Iqbal's life was uneventful, his corner of the world and of history was a very complex one, and the intricacy of the forces that made him is reflected in his linguistic equipment. For his colloquial language he had the Panjabi speech common to the whole province; it has something of the flavour and character of very broad Scots. The language of his rulers, and the medium through which he was in contact with the modern world, was English (he knew also German): in English he wrote prose, notably The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. The written language of the Panjab, and the spoken as well as written language of some other (chiefly Muslim) regions, was Urdu: a blending brought about since medieval times by contact between Hindu India and Persian-speaking invaders and settlers. In basic syntax and vocabulary it is identical with Hindi, but its script is Arabic instead of Sanscrit, and its learned vocabulary Persian and Arabic instead of Sanscrit. Iqbal’s ‘classical’ language was Persian: not the modern vernacular of Iran, but the older form brought into India in past centuries. His religious language, finally, in which he was well versed, was Arabic. Apart from a handful of Persian poems the verse chosen here for translation is taken from Iqbal’s work in Urdu, which consists of short and medium-length pieces only.(pp. xi–xii) "In Urdu, Iqbal is allowed to have been far the greatest poet of this century, and by most critics to be the only equal of Ghalib (1797-1869). He was the first prominent Urdu poet who was a native of the Panjab, and his emergence marked a shift of Muslim Indian culture away from the Deccan and the United Provinces towards the north. In Persian, in which he published six volumes of mainly long poems between 1915 and 1936, his rank is less easy to determine. He was very exceptional among Urdu writers of this century in reviving the older habit of writing in Persian; he did so partly, it is said, because he found Persian better suited to the philosophical subjects he wanted to write on, and partly in order to reach a wider audience, Persian being the literary lingua franca of a large part of the Muslim world. One may wonder whether he gained more readers outside India by this means than he lost at home. At any rate, his Persian volumes are more or less complete works on philosophical themes, with the exception of Pyam-i-Mashriq (1923) and Zabir-i-‘Ajam (1927): much of these two consists of short lyrical pieces, considered by the judicious to represent, poetically, the best of his work in Persian. By comparison the Urdu poems, addressed to a real and familiar audience close at hand, have the merit of being direct, spontaneous utterances on tangible subjects; and it is probably the case that nearly all the leading ideas of the ‘serious’ Persian works are expressed more briefly, sometimes more effectively, in the Urdu. (p. xiii)"



Ralph Russell (see subsection below) states the following on Kiernan's translation of Poems by Faiz: "Poems by Faiz, a good selection of poems with parallel verse translations by V.G. Kiernan, was published under the auspices of UNESCO in 1971. Almost all the poems, Kiernan says, ‘were chosen by Faiz himself, and all the translations have been discussed with him,' and Kiernan has added an introduction and notes. The selection covers the first four collections, and a few poems from (at that time) uncollected verses. Although these four collections comprise only about half of Faiz’s total output, most of the poems I discuss in this chapter are taken from them. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that Faiz’s best-known poems (and in my view almost all his best ones) are included in these first four collections, while the last four have relatively few. And a second, rather more mundane one, is that Poems by Faiz (which was recently republished>) provides the maximum help both to those who are able to study his verse only through the medium of English and to those whose study of Urdu is still in its relatively early stages. Kiernan’s translations are appreciably better, and certainly closer to Faiz’s originals, than any of those by subsequent translators, and for students of Urdu, there is the help afforded by the Roman transliterations and the literal translations which the book provides." From Kiernan's Introduction to Poems by Faiz: "(From the original 1971 edition, completed 1970) Urdu itself as a language might be called a bundle of anomalies, beginning with the fact that this language of many virtues has no true homeland. It originated, from the early stages of the ‘Muslim’, or rather Central-Asian, conquest of India, as the lingua franca of the ‘camp’ (its name derives from the same Turki root as the English word horde). It was a mixture of the Arabicized Persian used by the invaders, themselves a miscellany of Turks and others, with some of the still unformed Hindi dialects of the upper Gangetic valley, or ‘Hindostan’. In verb structure it was native Indian, a fact which entitles it to be classed as an Indian language; in vocabulary largely foreign, much as a simplified Anglo-Saxon base was overlaid after the Norman conquest with French or low-Latin words. Urdu and English both began, therefore, about the same time, as pidgin dialects, or hybrids, and gradually evolved into self-sufficient languages, with special qualities derived from their mixed antecedents, qualities of contrast and modulation of great significance for poetry. Some of Shakespeare’s effects could only have been achieved in such a medium, and Urdu can combine the harmony of Persian with the energy of Arabic and the simplicity of rustic Hindi."

(From the original 1971 edition, completed 1970) During its centuries of growth, Persian served as the administrative and literary language of the Muslim ruling circles, Sanskrit continued to be the learned language of Hindus. But Indian vernaculars, including Hindi, hitherto a group of dialects rather than a language, were also taking shape; and when with the crumbling of Muslim political ascendancy in the 18th century Urdu emerged as successor to Persian, it was bound to have to compete, sooner or later, with some of these others, Hindi in particular. Its original function as a lingua franca now belonged to the colloquial mixture often called ‘Hindostani’, on the level at which modern Urdu and Hindi are virtually identical. Muslims and Hindus had lived side by side for ages (and most Muslims were descendants of Hindu converts), and in humdrum practical matters understood one another well enough. For more complex ideas—-which neither had in fact been cultivating with much freshness for a long time—they had acquired little of a shared vocabulary. Hence when modern conditions brought the necessity of thinking on new lines, an élite culture suffused on each side with religious influences drew them in opposite directions. Learned Urdu has a diction heavily Persian and Arabic, learned Hindi heavily Sanskritic; and their scripts, the Persianized form of Arabic on the one hand, the Nagari or Sanskrit on the other, complete their mutual unintelligibility. It would be like this in English if half its users formed their. technical and philosophical terms from Hebrew instead of Greek, and used Hebrew letters instead of Roman. Thus Urdu, originally a channel between older and newer inhabitants of India, in the past century has come to be one of the stumbling-blocks to fellow-feeling. (From the original 1971 edition, completed 1970) Urdu had grown not where there were most Muslims, in modern West and East Pakistan, but where Muslim political and cultural ascendency was firmest, which was always in and round the capital cities—Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Hyderabad. Muslim civilization everywhere in history has been an urban civilization. This means that today Urdu as a mother-tongue finds itself marooned in the heart of Hindu India, chiefly in the U.P., the old Hindostan, where some nationalists are disposed to question its title to exist, and some of its-lovers—not all of them Muslims—regretfully feel it to be doomed to a slow decline; though on the other hand some new opportunities have come its way, notably in the cinema. In Pakistan it is being brought forward as a national language, as Hindi is in India. But East Pakistan has proved faithful to the Bengali that it shares with West Bengal in India. In the western Panjab, nucleus of West Pakistan, Urdu is the vehicle of literature, of the newspaper press, and of formal or ceremonial speech: it is employed for everyday purposes of writing, and is challenging English as the medium of higher education. But all familiar converse is carried on in Panjabi, a vernacular shared like Bengali with a province of India; a language, or as some would say a group of dialects, standing to Urdu in something like the relationship of the broadest of rural Scots to the most refined of Oxford English. (From the original 1971 edition, completed 1970) When the Mogul empire faded, and with it the old cultural links with Persia, it was chiefly the poetical part of the legacy of Persian that Urdu fell heir to. For public business, legal or administrative, and higher education, English was the successor. The Muslim community, socially an unbalanced one of feudal cast, with only an embryonic middle class, had few professional or commercial men with reason to write prose; and fallen from power, unable for long to adapt itself to new times, it had stronger feelings than thoughts, an impulsion towards emotional verse more than towards rational prose. In Ghalib the language found the poet still regarded as its greatest. He belonged, until the Mutiny swept it away, to the shadowy Mogul court at Delhi, with its poignant contrast between present and past to kindle his imagination. Urdu prose on the contrary was virtually making its first start with Sir Sayyed Ahmad,’ who likewise began in Delhi but shook its ancient dust off his feet and entered English service before the Mutiny; his mental life was one of wrestling with the problem, for Muslim India, of its present and its future. Subsequent progress has been uneven, and since the birth of Pakistan it has been a disputed issue there whether, or how rapidly, Urdu can be made the medium of higher education, scientific included. Faiz is one of those most firmly convinced that it is capable of meeting every modern requirement. (From the original 1971 edition, completed 1970) As a poetical medium, Urdu might almost be a language made up by poets for their own benefit; a one-sided benefit no doubt by comparison with Western languages like English whose foremost poets, from Shakespeare down, have so often been first-rate prose writers as well. But this double faculty may be a thing of the past. Modern English may be too far secularized, overloaded with utilitarian burdens, to be capable any longer of poetry. A language like Urdu, with a smaller prose content, has so to speak a lower boiling-point, and boils up into poetry—or vaporizes into verse—more readily. As one consequence of this freedom from dull workaday business, Urdu may have gone on being tied more closely than need be to the apron-strings of classical Persian. This continued to be studied and read after its fall from power in India, and in West Pakistan still is so quite widely. Almost any Persian noun or adjective might be brought into an Urdu verse, just as any Greek word can nowadays be incorporated into English prose. Persian syntax too, notably the use of the izafaé (-e-) to join a noun either with its adjective or with its possessive, is retained to a much greater extent than in prose. Until a generation ago a whole Persian line or couplet might be inserted in an Urdu poem. Between Mutiny and Great War two shifts, not unrelated, were taking place in Urdu poetry. It was coming to be less a lament for a lost past, and more an expression of the sensations of a Muslim community struggling to find its place in a changed world. Secondly, its main inspiration was migrating, with the coming of Iqbal, from the old centres, Delhi and Lucknow, northward to the Panjab; from early in this century to the partition, the two regions disputed the palm warmly between themselves, the older one priding itself at least on higher polish and technical proficiency. Some analogy may be drawn between them and their counterparts in Ireland. In Hindostan the leading Muslims were gentry of old family, descendants of conquerors from abroad, but becoming in course of time more ‘Indian’ than the solid mass of Muslims in the north-west; as the Anglo-Irish gentry in southern lreland were in most ways except religion more Irish than the solid mass of Protestant settlers in Ulster. In Ireland’s literary renaissance early in this century Anglo-Irish southern Protestants played a large part. Urdu poets in Hindostan had been playing some such ‘part. The shift northward to the Panjab (which scarcely had a parallel in Ireland) meant in the long run a turning away from India, and presaged the birth of Pakistan—or so we may see it in retrospect-—decades before anyone dreamed of such a thing.

Ralph Russell, SOAS

 * Ralph Russell was Professor of Urdu at the University of London.

David Matthews, SOAS

 * David Matthews was Senior Lecturer in Urdu, University of London


 * "Urdu in India, Annual of Urdu Studies
 * "Urdu Language and Education in India," Social Scientist Vol. 31, No. 5/6 (May - Jun., 2003), pp. 57-72 (16 pages)

Barbara D. Metcalf, University of Michigan
--- ---
 * Barbara Daly Metcalf is a Professor Emerita of History, University of California, Davis, and served as the Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of History, University of Michigan. She was the president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1994 and the president of the American Historical Association in 2010–11.

(p. 206) The use of Urdu continued to be a notable feature of the writing of the period. It served, as described above, for notes and translations of religious classics. But it was also the language of an original religious literature in Urdu ... This literature both exemplified and furthered the new use of Urdu for prose. The Urdu newspapers of the day, themselves providing examples of the enhanced range and simpler style that were gaining currency, frequently commented on the novelty of religious writing in Urdu.21 The Awadh Akhbar of 1870, for example, noted that “(religious]

Footnote 21. By the second half of the nineteenth century, newspapers had become a major form of Urdu literature. One compilation lists more than 700 Urdu newspapers, published throughout India, which began between 1875 and 1900; most were in upper India, but a surprising number were published from Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, and other distant places where there was either an emigrant elite or inhabitants who emulated the culture transmitted by Urdu. Most were not dailies, but published at weekly intervals. The papers were often ephemeral, lasting only as long as the interest or life of one editor remained; but a significant number were long-lived and had substantial influence.

(p. 207) works of fifty years standing are now all being compiled in Urdu. And the Terhwin Sadi of Agra regularly decried the style of earlier religious writings: “Educated people had been out of contact with ordinary people. If one were a maulawi, he read and wrote in Arabic; if a munshi, in Persian; a qazi rendered his decisions in Arabic; and a hakim wrote prescriptions in Persian. This was so extreme that if a person searched out the most difficult and obscure words in these languages, he was considered a particularly learned man.” From modest beginnings early in the century, Urdu had become the language of almost all Muslim religious works. In that period, moreover, the social and political implications of using Urdu were gradually shifting.

The basis of that shift was the decision made by the government in 1837 to replace Persian as court language by the various vernaculars of the country. Urdu was identified as the regional vernacular in Bihar, Oudh, the North-Western Provinces, and Punjab, and hence was made the language of government across upper India. The indigenous impulse toward the cultivation of Urdu was thus stimulated by its official position and by government patronage. It was taught in the schools and encouraged by such methods as rewards for distinguished writing. Urdu was increasingly known by the entire service elite of the area, Hindu and Muslim alike.

The language was, no doubt, understood by a broader section of the population than Persian had been. Nevertheless, only the educated knew Urdu in its most refined and subtle forms. Those Muslims and Hindus who shared the court culture of the region cherished Persianate forms of polite and formal discourse, just as they had cultivated those forms in Persian itself. A person had only to open his mouth to identify himself with that culture. Those Hindus who knew Urdu tended not to use it for their family or ritual life. Nor did the women of their families consider

(p. 208) it "ladylike" to use it. The language was, after all, written in a form of Arabic script and drew its loan words from Persian and Arabic. It was to them a Muslim language and a public language. Reservations about the Muslim character of the language grew in the late nineteenth century. As Hindus challenged both the literary and official position of Urdu it came increasingly to be the language not of regional elites but of the Muslim elite; and as the sense of Muslim identity grew, the language not only of the upper Indian Muslim elite, but of the Muslim elite throughout India and of ordinary Muslims, as well. The change was gradual, and many Hindus continued to learn and use Urdu. From the late nineteenth century on, however, the proportion of Hindus learning the language steadily declined.

The movement against Urdu began in the late 1860s, when some Hindus, of whom Babu Siva Prasad, an official of the Education Department, was the most outspoken, began to press the government to replace Urdu with Hindi as the official language of the North-Western Provinces. Hindi was a form of the same vernacular, self-consciously developed in the nineteenth century, whose script derived from Sanskrit and whose loan words came from that same indigenous language. As such it appealed to those Hindus newly conscious of their religious and cultural heritage. The debate about the merits of the two forms of the language was largely in the hands of government servants who, on the Muslim side, were often associated with Aligarh. Indeed, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan later declared with some exaggeration that it was over the language issue that his concerns shifted from the well-being of the mixed Hindu-Muslim elite to that of the Muslim community alone. Public meetings were held; newspapers published arguments on both sides; societies were formed to push one script or the other. Many arguments dealt with the presumed merit of

(p. 209) one language or script over the other. The real issue, however, was the power of the spokesmen of each side. The supporters of Hindi had the advantage that if they could convince the government that each script was associated with a religious community, theirs could be argued to represent the majority. In that case, they felt, a government committed to vernacular education and justice would sympathize with them. Finally, first in Bihar in 1881 and then in the United Provinces in 1900, the Hindi form of the vernacular was given equal status with Urdu as the language of official business. The process of identifying Urdu with Muslims and Hindi with Hindus began in this debate. This identification gave each community an incentive to patronize and encourage its form of the language.

The ‘ulama, like other literate people, were thus, in part, reacting to a threat to their culture and political position by fostering the use of Urdu. But they not only reacted to a threat, they responded to the positive advantages of having a common language bind the Muslims scattered throughout India. Schools such as Deoband and the Mazahir-i ‘Ulum taught standard Urdu to students who spoke a dialect or another language, thus creating a basis of communication among the religious elite. Such students would teach in Urdu upon their return to their homes, and spread its use among their associates. Moreover, whole groups of Muslims made a self-conscious change to Urdu from the late nineteenth century on. The Bohras of western India shifted from Gujarati to Urdu in this period, for example, and some Tamil Muslims made the same transition shortly after. The use of Urdu continued to mark one as part of a refined and influential culture, but that culture was increasingly limited to those who saw it as exclusively Muslim.


 * From:
 * This book has been cited 1,264 times on Google scholar.

--- ---

(p. 30–31) Speaking from a historical and not a literary or linguistic point of view, three key points stand out in the modern history of the Urdu language. First, in the eighteenth century, Urdu emerged as a highly developed language of poetry, above all in the cities of Delhi and Lucknow. ... Even as central authority dissipated, regional powers arose that were vital, well administered, and gave rise to new cultural and institutional forms. Part of the stimulus to the cultural vitality of the era in such realms as poetry and art came from the dispersal of those who knew cosmopolitan art and literature. Although not only a product of the north - it had flourished far earlier in the Deccan - Urdu essentially underwent the same process as other regional languages like Sindhi, Marathi, and Punjabi because Persian forms and conventions were used in such languages. Far from being “foreign”, Urdu represented the enrichment of a local language with the vocabulary and literary forms of Persian. It gradually displaced a language based outside the sub-continent (even though after half a millennium of use Persian was thoroughly part of the governing and intellectual life of the cosmopolitan classes).

A second major stage came in the nineteenth century with the decision of the British government to supersede Persian as the official governing language with English at the highest levels and the vernaculars at the provincial and lower levels. Government patronage, moreover, would be primarily directed at these languages and not at classical languages, among them Persian as well as Sanskrit and Arabic. This ushered in a long period in which for a broad swathe across Bihar, the North-Western Provinces, Oudh, and Punjab, educated elite males typically learned Urdu. In this period Urdu became a modern prose language, undergoing a transition common to regional languages across the country. Urdu was used for new genres of the new intelligentsia, like journalism and the novel, which typically communicated new values and images of the person and society, and in old genres associated with traditional learning, everything from Quranic translations to medicine. It was the language of elite, “scribal castes” of all religions. Thus the early tracts of Hindu revival movements like the Arya Samaj at the end of the nineteenth century were written in Urdu.

Finally, a third critical stage came in the movement to replace Urdu as an official language, above all in the United Provinces, with Hindi. The 1900 decision of Lt. Governor Macdonnell to give Hindi equal status with Urdu was a major landmark. ... A major stream in Hindu nationalist thought pictured Urdu as a strumpet, the handmaid of the old decadent Nawwabi culture, in contrast to the language of respectable people, Hindi. It was, in short a convenient symbol that Hindu reformers used as a foil for the values of a portion of the new, modern bourgeois. Ironically, of course, Muslim reformers had exactly the same goal. Hindi, on the other side, was dismissed as a language of country bumpkins.

In any case, the fact that Urdu then became the national language of Pakistan, a country established on the grounds of the religion of the population, made the position of Urdu in its own homeland even more difficult. ...


 * From:

- -

R. D. King, University of Texas-Austin

 * "The poisonous potency of script: Hindi and Urdu," International Journal of Sociology of Language, 150 (2001), pp. 43–59

Annemarie Schimmel, Harvard University

 * Annemarie Schimmel was Professor of Indo-Muslim Studies at Harvard University.

Colin P. Masica, University of Chicago

 * Colin P. Masica is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago.

R. S. McGregor, University of Cambridge

 * R. S. McGregor was Reader in Hindi, University of Cambridge, and compiler of the Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary

Francesca Orsini, SOAS

 * Francesca Orsini is Professor of Hindi and South Asian Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Frances Pritchett, Columbia University

 * Frances Pritchett is Professor Emerita of Urdu, Columbia University

Imgre Bangha, University of Oxford

 * Imre Bangha is an Associate Professor of Hindi, Department of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford (Teaching and Research Interests: I teach the both the core and optional language courses in Hindi, Urdu, Old Hindi and Bengali. My research interests lie primarily in Old Hindi Poetry, including the emergence of Hindi (including Khari Boli) as a literary dialect in various scripts; textual transmission and Hindi manuscript culture;)



Ruth Laila Schmidt, University of Oslo

 * Ruth Laila Schmidt is Professor Emerita of Urdu, University of Oslo

David Lelyveld, William Patterson University

 * David Lelyveld is Emeritus Professor of History at William Patterson University

Jennifer Dubrow, University of Washington, Seattle
Jennifer Dubrow is an Associate Professor of Urdu at the University of Washington:

Elena Bashir, University of Chicago

 * Elena Bashir is Senior Lecturer in Urdu and South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

Christine Everaert, University of Utah

 * Christine Everaert is Associate Professor of Hindi-Urdu, and Coordinator of South Asian Studies Program, University of Utah.

Ulrike Stark, University of Chicago

 * Ulrike Stark is Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

Arthur D. Dudney, University of Cambridge

 * Abstract: Focusing on the writings of Siraj al-Din ʿAli Khan ‘Arzu’ (d. 1756), a critic of Persian literature and early theorist of what would come to be known as Urdu, Arthur Dudney shows how the sociolinguistic concept of ‘language planning’ can be used to understand the historical process through which a literary language is delineated and defined as such. Defining a new literary idiom involves identifying what that idiom is but also specifying what it is not. In the writings of Arzu and others, Dudney finds that the concept of rozmarrah (colloquial or ‘everyday’ language) was essential to defining what Urdu was, just as the exclusion of lexical items and forms of speech from Persian and Brajbhasha established what Urdu was not.
 * Abstract: Focusing on the writings of Siraj al-Din ʿAli Khan ‘Arzu’ (d. 1756), a critic of Persian literature and early theorist of what would come to be known as Urdu, Arthur Dudney shows how the sociolinguistic concept of ‘language planning’ can be used to understand the historical process through which a literary language is delineated and defined as such. Defining a new literary idiom involves identifying what that idiom is but also specifying what it is not. In the writings of Arzu and others, Dudney finds that the concept of rozmarrah (colloquial or ‘everyday’ language) was essential to defining what Urdu was, just as the exclusion of lexical items and forms of speech from Persian and Brajbhasha established what Urdu was not.

Eve Tignol, University of Ghent

 * Eve Tignol is Junior Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Languages and Cultures, University of Ghent

Alyssa Ayres, Council Foreign Relations

 * Alyssa Ayres is Senior Fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)

Margrit Pernau, Freie Universität Berlin/Max Planck Institute for Human Development

 * Margit Pernau is Extraordinary Professor, Freie Universität Berlin, and Senior Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Tony Capstick, University of Reading

 * Tony Capstick is Lecturer in Applied Linguistics, University of Reading

Comments

 * Thanks for your comments, User:Fowler&fowler. However, we are not going to use your approach here. Disqualifying books written by academics and linguists of Indian origin about a language that originates in India is a foolish and inflammatory idea. Imagine if someone tried arguing that references by academicians from Great Britain aren't permitted in Wikipedia articles about the English language or Welsh language. I'll be taking into consideration the comments that were offered above and will work on a rewrite of the lede, which will probably be finished this December. Thanks, AnupamTalk 19:48, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
 * You are in no position to write the lead. You don't know the language in any depth. Why did it take 13 years?  Only you and Kwami have been writing this nonsense. And why am I finding all the scholarly sources and you the Indian scholars of Indian English pronouncing on Urdu?  I will challenge and revert anything you write.   Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  20:12, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Cherry-picking sources to support your POV won't work here and if you try to revert the consensus version, I will simply revert you back as I have been doing. No one, including users who are linguists, agreed with you at Talk:Hindustani language and no one agrees with you here. I will rewrite the lede based on the consensus above, supported by academic sources, that I and other users have been working on and you will have to accept it. It is very telling that you have called both the contributions of myself and User:Kwamikagami "nonsense", despite the fact that User:Kwamikagami is a well-respected linguist. You also rejected the incisive comment of User:Greenwhitedino above, who added that he was a linguist by resorting to ad hominem attacks on people of Indian descent. User:Kwamikagami, User:Kbb2, User:RaviC and myself accurately stated here at Talk:Urdu and Talk:Hindustani language that you are hidebound in your desire to interject South Asian language articles with your political prejudices and you have been warned of this before by many users on these talk pages (Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C, Exhibit D and Exhibit E). If you think that's going to fly here too, you are mistaken. It is best that you drop the WP:STICK and focus on editing elsewhere. If you want to contribute to this article, you will need to submit your suggestions here and allow neutral editors to review them as there is a broad consensus against your approach. As such, you will not edit the article directly. This article is about a language, not your political ideology. Kind regards, AnupamTalk 20:49, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
 * All hot air? Can I send a second jamaat Urdu-medium primer for you or Kwami to decipher real-time? What are the chances that anyone with second-grade knowledge of French could write an article on French language on Wikipedia? What are the chances that editors with no working knowledge of French could be voting there and having their vote count? Don't you think this is a little silly? There are major issues of cultural presumptuousness not to mention systemic bias here.  Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  03:11, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
 * , another article where no one agrees with you. Wikipedia is no place to promote your prejudicial POV. This article is about a language of South Asia, not about the politics of India and Pakistan. Zakaria1978 ښه راغلاست (talk) 05:06, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

, look at these prejudicial statements user:Fowler&fowler made in the past. I found them posted on User talk:Austronesier.
 * 1) If Hindu practice results in the deaths of thousands of individuals, as it does in this case, through water borne diseases, why should I "understand" why Hindus cause these deaths. Concern for human life is more important than cultural relativist kowtowing to a religion.
 * 2) We don't need papers in palaeogenomics to see that. We have only to look around to see the vast and brutal inequalities Hinduism has created in Indian society.
 * 3) During our visits to India, my family and I have very likely buried more stray dogs and cats, all either run over, or otherwise killed, by Ahimsa-loving Hindus, than the number of times editors here have uttered aloud the word Ahimsa. (Especially, cats (domesticated cats): have you wondered why their yowling is never heard in Hindu neighborhoods in India, except in the hills? That is because they are all shooed-away, or have rocks or sticks thrown at them, by superstition-loving Ahimsa-loving Hindus. You have to go to a Muslim neighborhood to see a cat.)
 * 4) Goodness knows, there were plenty European evangelists around to help them spiritually and British administrators to grant them economic and educational favors. But most Hindus chose to reassert their caste status or assert even higher caste status.
 * 5) What is all this Hindu garbage. The Hindus wore only draped clothes before the Muslim conquest of India.

I ask Sysop and Sysop, kindly inform this user:Fowler&fowler to stop their poor behaviour of being uncivil, WP:OWN and promoting prejudice all over Wikipedia. Zakaria1978 ښه راغلاست (talk) 06:05, 24 September 2020 (UTC)


 * The diffs that Zakaria1978 posted regarding Fowler&fowler's previous statements about Hindus are concerning to me. We need to make sure that these personal beliefs don't affect any rewrites being proposed here. LearnIndology (talk) 21:00, 26 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Comment I am bewildered about the proposed embargo against scholarship based on descent. If Bernard Comrie considers Yamuna Kachru worthy for contibuting to The World's Major Languages with a chapter about Hindi and Urdu, why should we bar ourselves from making use of sources by Y. Kachru? –Austronesier (talk) 09:29, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Please humor me this once. The restriction applies only to the topic: "Status of Urdu in South Asia," not to grammar, phonology, script, not even to the pre-20th-century history. Please see the list of scholars above.  No scholar of Urdu of South Asian descent will say that it does not embody scholarliness sufficient to the purpose.   Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  11:27, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Note that no such restriction exists here. Individuals are welcome to contribute to this article information and reliable sources, regardless of the ethnicity of the academic. Additions will be made to this article on the basis on consensus, as was taking place above. Kind regards, AnupamTalk 01:45, 25 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Another comment Maybe you have read my comments to Anupam's list below. I can only stress the same points here. V. G. Kiernan's excursions into the history of Urdu (and English) give me a shudder. Maybe it's the "party"'s voice, maybe even a "third-party" voice, but very obviously not a competent voice. –Austronesier (talk) 17:54, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't see anything wrong in Kiernan's remarks on the history of Urdu. It was made as a result of contact between Muslims who entered India and infused Khadiboli/Hindustani with some Persian loanwords. LearnIndology (talk) 18:11, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Urdu and English both began, therefore, about the same time, as pidgin dialects, or hybrids, and gradually evolved into self-sufficient languages. As long as the speech of a community is not used as a literary language, it is no language at all? That's a 19th-century elitists view, and ironically quite a reactionary one. This is what you get from dated, non-specialist sources. –Austronesier (talk) 20:01, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
 * When the Britishers first ruled India, the Muslims were using Persian as their literary language. Hindustani was not the literary language, but the language of the people used in the bazaars, etc. In the colonial period, Hindustani was infused with Persian loanwords and that is called Urdu. That started to be used by the elite as a literary language. LearnIndology (talk) 20:14, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Well, that's the point. "Language of the people" hits the nail on the head, but "pidgin dialects"? The whole point of Fowler&fowler's excercise is to provide us with useful sources, but what is the use of adding sources which only become useful if we "translate" their rationale into proper encyclopedic language? –Austronesier (talk) 20:23, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
 * There are some good citations in Fowler&fowler's list but I agree with most people who have commented here that excluding South Asian academics is senseless. LearnIndology (talk) 20:49, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

Kiernan was a major historian of the 20th century, the only one with a high level of knowledge of literary Urdu, whose translations in bilingual versions remain in print 50 years later, one published by Oxford University Press, Pakistan, the other by Oxford University, India. In the 50 years since, scholarship on the origins and history of Urdu has come a full circle. In the first 25 years, a number of linguists and Urdu scholars wrote on the topic, but they were not trained in the interpretation of historical manuscripts. Their work might have been good linguistics or Urdu scholarship, but was poor history. In the last 25 years, a new generation of multidisciplinarians with a high level of knowledge in Urdu, Hindi and related languages, are doing sophisticated manuscript-based research. Although they don't make old-fashioned global historical observations on Urdu, as some Urdu scholars and linguists did in the past, they are the ones who are bringing new insights to bear in the discussion. Scholars such as Ulrike Stark at Chicago, Margit Pernau at Berlin, Imgre Bangha at Oxford, the late Allison Busch are Columbia are among them. Inevitably the language changes, the linguists have pretty much used secondary historical sources, and historians can make the same objections as a linguist might of Kiernan. But as Kiernan was the first, he is appropriate. We have to change his pronouncements to contemporary encyclopedic language in the same way we need to translate the pronouncements of linguists on history. To give an example, when an inter-disciplinary scholar writes about the BBC Urdu On-line, a popular service, with 800,000 hits day, but requiring a reasonable level of literacy in Urdu, and it transpires that only 2% of the traffic is from India, it is hard for a linguist or Urdu scholar to maintain in a history that there has not been a precipitous decline of the script in the land of its birth, they simply do not have the tools for that avenue of research, unless they have balancing evidence (say hypothetically) that the Urdu-literate in India prefer to read print newspapers or somesuch. The true picture will need both interpretations. Fowler&amp;fowler «Talk»  21:59, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Although the use of Urdu script has declined in India, I think it’s overstated to some extent. At the time of independence, only 16% of India’s population was literate (in any language), with the lowest literacy in northern India (the homeland of Hindi and Urdu), and there were more people literate in Hindi than Urdu. So only a fraction of the 16% literate population was literate in Urdu. Therefore never in the history of India has there been a large percentage of people literate in Urdu. What Urdu proponents find frustrating is that the literacy rate for all other Indian languages has significantly increased since independence but for Urdu is even less than it was before. Foreverknowledge (talk) 02:41, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
 * That is a good point and exactly the point not just relative to other languages in India, but to Urdu in Pakistan. Before 1947 literacy was even lower in what became west Pakistan. It was 4% compared to 16% for India.  You can see the breakdown for Urdu speech and literacy in the 1951 Census of Pakistan here.  But today a large percentage of Pakistanis are Urdu literate at a relatively high level of functioning (even as they continue to speak another language (Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto) at home).  In contrast, for many native Urdu speakers in the former Urdu heartland in India, it is now the case that Urdu literacy after 1947 has declined with each generation to the point that even the vocabulary (and not just the script) is disappearing, a reverse of what has happened in Pakistan.    Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  05:03, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
 * , I continue to go through the edits of Fowler&fowler, and what I see is a pattern of trying to paint the country of India in a negative light, by what Fowler&fowler adds in articles along with pictures. Most encyclopedia entries about Urdu discuss its official status, not what Fowler&fowler is trying to push here. Besides, there is evidence to suggest that what Fowler&fowler says is false too. I'll be watching closely if Fowler&fowler tries to add material that is in line with this POV and will undo Fowler&fowler changes if Fowler&fowler ideologically-laden edits are made. I'm wise to it. Zakaria1978 ښه راغلاست (talk) 16:51, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Wow, those diffs are very troubling and seem to reflect a strong and clear bias. LearnIndology (talk) 19:02, 27 September 2020 (UTC)