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Introduction INTRODUCTION Hindi, an Indo-European language, is the official language of India, spoken by about 40% of the more than one billion citizens of India. It is also the official language in certain of the territories where a sizeable diaspora settled such as the Republic of Mauritius1. But the label ‘Hindi’ covers considerably distinct speeches, as evidenced by the number of regional varieties covered by the category Hindi in the various Censuses of India: 91 mother tongues in the 1961 Census, up to 331 languages or speeches according to Srivastava 1994, totalizing to six hundred millions speakers (Bhatia 1987: 9). On the other end, the notion that Standard Hindi, more or less corresponding to the variety used in written literature and media, does not exist as a mother tongue, has gained currency during the seventies and eighties: according to Gumperz & Naim (1960), modern standard Hindi is a second or third speech for most of its speakers, being a native language for a small section of the urban population, which until recently was itself a small minority of the global Indian population. However, due to the rapid increase in this urban population, Hindi native speakers can no longer be considered as a non-significant minority, as noticed by Ohala (1983) and Singh & Agnihotri (1997). Many scholars still consider that the modern colloquial language, used for instance in popular movies, does not differ from modern colloquial Urdu. Similarly, many consider that the higher registers of both languages are still only two styles of one and the same language. According to Abdul Haq (1961), “the language we speak and write and call by the name Urdu today is derived from Hindi and constituted of Hindi”. Kelkar’s coining of the term “Hirdu” aimed at countering both the academic polemics about the historical origin of the language and the politization of language debates hardened by the choice of Hindi as the official language in 1950. 1 Although the spoken language there, as in Fiji, Trinidad, Goyana, Surinam, is closer to Bhojpuri or Awadhi than to standard Hindi. 2 Introduction The Hindi/Urdu debate The common assumption about the origin of Hindi is the so-called Hindui or Hindavi, or Rekhta2, a mixed speech spoken between Agra, Delhi and Mathura and elaborated as a lingua franca among the natives and the Turks, Afghans, Persians, present in the area since the thirteenth century. Because this speech was used by the Mughal soldiers it later came to be known by the Turkish word Urdu, “military camp”, from the complete locution zaba¯n-e-urdu¯-e-mualla¯, “the language of the royal (exalted) camp”, that is the Red Fort area in Delhi, location of Shajahan’s court (17th c.), when the cultivate and official language of the time was Persian. As for the word “Hindavi/Hindi”, related to the North Western area, it is also a foreign designation (from Persian, Grierson 1916: 46) used by the first Turko- Afghan invaders when they entered the Subcontinent to refer to the local population (Hind, Sindh, Indus have the same origin). A third designation of this mixed speech, also foreign, Hindusta¯ni¯ (Hindostanee), was used currently by the British during the nineteenth century, who are frequently made responsible for the (political) separation of the two, now institutionally distinct, languages known as Hindi and Urdu, respectively associated with Hindu and Muslim cultures. The Fort William College in 1800 headed by Gilchrist in Calcutta, and intended to give a practical knowkedge of the vernaculars to British employees, indeed started teaching both speeches and scripts in a separate way, elaborating the first dictionaries, grammars and text books in both languages. However, this separation has a longer and highly polemical history, still quite conflictual, best accounted for by Amrit Rai (1984) in a book significantly entitled A House Divided. Rai (1984: 11-17) gives meticulous evidence that the British had no deliberate intention to divide Hindi and Urdu, but rather alternately fostered the then dominant language, which was first “Ordoo Hindostanee”, then after 1824-25 “Hindee Hindostanee” or “Hindee Ordoo” (which here means the Hindi aspect of the common language alternately called “Ordoo” or “Hindostanee”3), in keeping with the prevailing shifting dominance outside the College. British policy, mainly “result oriented and 2 Rekhta¯ or rekhta¯goi¯ (goi¯ means “speech” in Persian) was in fact a written literary form mixing the local speech and Persian (one line, one phrase, one word) in favour during the second half of 17th c. 3 Another term Gilchrist sometimes uses to refer to this language is Braj bhakha (<bha¯sa¯), Brij language. Mirza¯ Kha¯n (cf. infra) also uses the term Braj to designate the common speech used at the end of the 17th c. Introduction 3 practical”, was then the “recognition of a fait accompli” rather than a deliberate division. This ‘fait accompli’ was already aknowledged by Shah Hatim edicts (Rai 1984: 249) in 1755 which codify the slow transformation of the colloquial Panjabi-Harianvi-Braj-Rajasthani mixed speech spoken in the 14th c. into the persianized speech spoken by the 17-18th c. elites4 and made a symbol of their power when this power started to decline. Most historians of Hindi, as well as Urdu, language and literature, implicitly admit the common origin of both “languages” around the 11th, 12th or 13th century, in the times of the Ghaznavis (Mahmud Ghazni made Lahore his capital in the 12th c.), and Amir Khusrau, who called himself a speaker of Delhavi (and a “Turk”) is commonly considered as one of the earliest writers in both traditions. Most historians of Urdu consider Urdu born as a separate language in the times of Shajahan (17th century: Syed Ahmad Khan, Insha Allah Khan) or Akbar (16th century: Mir), and most historians of Hindi literature and language consider the modern Hindi (khari¯ boli¯, the straight language, theth Hindi, the pure Hindi) to have come into existence either at the end of the 17th century (Fort William College) or slightly before in the sultanates of South India where Dakkhini (“southern”) Hindi developped with the progression of the Muslim conquerors. What happened between the 11/13th and the 16/18th centuries is either left as a blank space in Urdu traditions or occupied in Hindi traditions by the so-called medieval Hindi and the mystical poets of the devotional (bhakti) times (from Kabir to Mira, Tulsidas, Jayasi) developping a “sant” literary language with various regional elements. The theory of the sudden birth of modern Hindi/Urdu as a cultivation of the mixed lingua franca (a pidgin) with very loose links with this medieval literary language raises of course questions but has gained currency since Grierson and Bloch. Bloch (1935) assumed that the genesis of Urdu (and Hindi) was this “polyglotic bazar language” spoken at the time of the arrival of the British, a language apart, more recent than the native language developed by the coming together of Turko-Afghan invaders and indigenous people of Northern India. Such assumptions are partly based on the absence of direct ressemblance between the then well differentiated observable regional vernaculars, and this “lingua franca”. The alternative suggested by Rai 4 Called Urdu, or “the language of Delhi”, in Aurangzeb’s times, and still in the early 18th c. not very different in its spoken form from the old Delhi dialect or Ka¯rkhanda¯ri¯ (Nespital 1994: 149). 4 Introduction (after Chatterji 1960) relies on the idea of a far weaker differenciation of regional speeches in the 11th-13th centuries and even in the 16th century: the ancient sant poets of the 15th and 16th century are in continuity with the more ancient buddhist Siddhas (Gorakhnath 11th c.), the yogis (or Na¯th, “Nathpanthis”) as well as the Sufis (Baba Farid). They all used a type of speech reflecting the fluidity of the transitional stage of the language resulting in the formation of the New Indo-Aryan speeches. Claiming some of these writers as representing the beginning of Urdu tradition, others, that of Hindi tradition, has no linguistic grounds. Similarly, “Hindostanee”, the mixed lingua franca (“Verkehrsprache” or “business speech” in Chatterji’s terms) represents not a rupture in the form of a somewhat artificial pidgin but the natural evolution of the Western speech (Panjab and Uttar Pradesh) further extended to the central plains (Madhyadesh). In the same way as it is artificial to distinguish Old Rajasthani from Old Gujarati and even Old Marathi (Tessitori 1914- 15), the distinction of Hindi / Urdu at the beginnings of British colonisation can only be artificial and retroactive, based on an over- estimation of the processes of gradual differenciation in regional vernaculars. But the over-estimation of the difference has also been efficiently used by language politics, and that increasingly during the nationalist struggle, the partition of India and Pakistan, and the present language policies implemented in both the countries. Institutional policies and politics As stated by Khubchandani (1991: 71), who claims for a fluid Hindi/Urdu/Punjabi zone (HUP), indistinct even today, in North Western India, “the semantic acrobatics over the issue or defining Hindi-Urdu-Hindustani bas been going on in the Census tabulating throughout the past eighty years, sometimes treating all claims under one language (Hindi), or under two languages (Hindi Urdu) or three (Hindi Urdu Hindustani) to suit different audiences”. For instance in 1931, for fear of riots between Muslim and Hindu communities, Hindi and Urdu were clubbed together under Hindustani on political grounds, and in 1961 the returns for Hindustani (distinct from Hindi and Urdu) presented a decline of 99% compared to 1951. The adamant refusal by Gandhi to distinguish Hindi and Urdu when planning for the would-be national language echoed his refusal to divide the Hindu and Muslim religious communities: “the three words, Hindi, Introduction 5 Hindustani and Urdu, denote the same language”5.
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