Before the Divide Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture

Before the Divide Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture Edited by FRANCESCAORSINI @. Orient BlackSwan Contents BEFORE THE DMDE ORIENT BLACKSWAN PRIVATE LIMITED Registered Office 3-6-752 Himayatnagar, Hyderabad 500 029 (A.P.), INDIA E-mail: [email protected] Other Offices Banealore." Bhonal. Bhubaneshwar. Chennai. Ernakulam. Guwahati. Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, New Delhi, Patna 0 Francesca Orsini, 2010 First published 2010 ISBN 978-81-250-3829-0 Lasertypeset in Giouanni Book 10/13 by Eleven Arts, Delhi Printed in India at Aegean Offset Printers Greater Noida Published by Orient Blackswan Private Limited 1/24 Asaf Ali Road New Delhi 110 002 E-mail: [email protected] Riti and Register 85 the other hand, from virtually the moment of its inception the Braj Bhasha courtly style attracted both Mughal patrons and poets-to the extent that the stunning transregonal success of riti lrterary culture from the seventeenth centurywould be unthinkable without factoring in Indo-Muslim communities. Whereas Sanskrit literature remained largely inaccessible except through sporadic Perslan translations, riti literaturqwas a cultural repertory in which Riti and Register ~ndo-Muslimscould and did participate firsthand. Situated at a Lexical Variation in Courtly Braj Bhasha Texts kind of intersection, then, between Sanskrit and Persianate courtly traditions, what might the writings of riti poets reveal to us modems Allison Busch about the 'Hindi'' of its day-both as a linguistic phenomenon but also as an index of the larger social and conceptual worlds its users inhabited? Broadly speaking, by the seventeenth century the Hindi favoured at regional courts throughout north India, and as far away as Raigarh its literary spaces shared across Hindu and Muslim and Golconda (in modern Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, courtly communities in Mughal-period India, the Braj respectively) was Braj Bhasha. But the precise parameters of this ~h~sh~riti tradition is an instructive site for exploring 'Braj Bhasha' or 'Braj', as it is often affectionately called, are far from the connections between language practices and other cultural, fued. Indeed, considerable disagreement exists among scholars political, and religious affiliations. On the one hand, the riti about such basic matters as the place and time of origin, and even corpus is literally defined by its adherence to Sanskrit literary norms, the name, of early modern north India's most popular literary and the largely brahmanical episteme they represent The word ih language. For instance, is Braj Bhasha to be considered the same as means 'method', referring specifically to Sanskrit method, and the Gvaliyari (language of Gwalior) used as early as the fifteenth one of the most prevalent genres of riti literature, the Rihgranth (Book century by Vishnudas (fl. 1435) of the Tomar court12 Or was Braj of method), was designed at least in pan to be a vehicle for literary culture a much later development-a specific byproduct of disseminating classical literary ideas in a vernacular medium. On the Vaishnava fewour that overtook the nearby Mathura region only An International and Area Studies Fellowship awarded by the ACLS/SSRC/ 'Putting quotation words around the word 'Hindi' at every usage, or I NEH supported a research leave that enabled this and other projects. I am awkwardly appending it to 'Urdu'in a hyphenated compound, quickly becomes grateful to Francesca Orsini and lmre Bangha for thoughtful comments on tedious. Acknowledging here the problematic nature of the word Hindi- earlier drafts.Thanks are due to F. Naiini Delvoye for sharing her rare colledon particularly as a designation for the language(s) of pre-modem north Indian of H.N. Dvivedi hooks; to MuzaffarAlam for help interpreting Literary cultures-I will henceforth dispense with exua punctuation. couplets; to Richard Eaton for sharing his expertise on lang :-'RS. McGregor's studies of Vishnudas make it dear that he considers the Dakkani courts; to Sadhana Chaturvedi and the staff at literary language of the Tomar court at Gwalior an early form of Braj Bhasha. Sammelan, Allahahad, for allowing me to photocopy See, for instance his 'A Narrative Poet's View of his Material: Visnudis's 1 of Chintamani Tripathi; to the staff at the Alwar branch of th ,jn*oduction to his Brajbhasa Pdndau-cant (AD1435): in Mariola Offredi (ed), Oriental Research Institute for making available a manusuipt of Ch anyan nee, 2000, vol. 2: 335-42. Z I 86 Befare the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Culhrre Riti and Register 87 of pre-modem Hindi authors, and how they may, or may not, differ in the sixteenth century13And who is to be the arbiter of competing from those of today. modem narratives about early modem Hindi? Unfortunately, for few the most part pre-colonial authors were not concerned with A words about the unavoidable limitations of this endeavour are appropriate. The scholarly reach required to execute a thorough delineating precisely the language they used-often they just called study of language usages across all riti-period genres-bhakti poetry. it bh@iSci/bhiScikhd: language. Nor do language practices themselves exhibit the kind of homogeneity that might help anchor Braj as courtly poetry,.martiaI ballads, scholarly treatises, and commentarial a fmed unit of analysis. It is a commonplace in north India that literature-is an expertise I do not pretend to possess. This article is vemacular writers-in strong contrast to their Sanskrit counterparts- intended to be suggestive rather than exhaustive. Moreover, some were generally indifferent to the delimiting mechanisms of language usages simply do not lend themselves readily to scholarly prescriptive grammar until the colonial period. All this means that analysis. Contemporary ethnographic studies abound that establish we find considerable internal variation within the loosely-defined linkages between language and other kinds of social or political larger rubric of Braj Bhasha. identities; interrogating past practices is not so easy We cannot ask Of concern to me in this article is one particular aspect of the Keshavdas, or Bhushan, or Rahim, what informed their choice to write fluidity of early modem Braj Bhasha: variation in lexical styles. Riti in a certain way in a particular poem. And normally these poets, texts exhibit a phenomenon now widely associated with modern content just towrite their poetry, did not ease the scholarly burdens Hindi-Urdu, namely a spectrum of written registers ranging from of posterity by deigning to comment on these issues. the Sanskritised (tatsama) or semi-Sanskritised (ardhatatsama), to a In the absence of many dear and direct pointers from the past, more basic vemacular style (tadbhava), to a Persianised idiom. Some the modem interpreter of early modem language practices must writers fell predominantly into one particular camp. Others tapped tread carefully. In the very process of seeking out frameworks for into more than one of these registers depending on context. Yet reconceptualising pre-nineteenth century Hindi, the collective others used a hybrid style as a matter of course. As modem students enterprise in which contributors to this volume are engaged, we confront the risk of reading too much of the present into the past. of pre-modem noah Indian literary cultures from before the Hindi- Urdu 'divide', it seems critical to probe the earlier significations Some fully naturalised modem conceptual structures-such as the and logic(s) of such divergent usages. In what follows I present case notion that a singularlanguageis a meaningful marker of a particular studies of different Braj Bhasha styles, examining texts by Keshavdas ethnic group or religious community-would perhaps not have made sense to early modem Indians. Or it may be that the Hindi-Urdu (fl. 1GOO), Chintamani Tripathi (fl. 1GGO), Bhushan Tripathi divide of the modem period is, improbable as the notion may initially (fl.lG73), Rahim (fl. c.1600), and Raslin (fl.1740). My aim is to see appear, related to a range of pre-colonial phenomena. Scholarly what larger condusions can be drawn about the lexical tendencies arguments are invariably made about the colonial-period ruptures in Indian traditions, yet rarely do continuities make headlines. But 'If this is so, then it is anachronisticto speak of a Braj language or literature before the sixteenth century. In this vein, Harihamivas Dvivedi rejects the tracing continuities must also be a part of the process of understanding designation Braj Bhasha and makes a case for 'Gvaliyad or '~adhyadeship' the relationship between the Hindi-Urdu past and present. As we as more authoritative terms for early Hindi. See his Madhyaddiya BheB shall see in what follows, language practices such as Sanskritisation Gwalior 1955. Shivprasad Singh, for his part, proposes different stages in the Persianisation are found in pre-nineteenth century Hindi texts; development of Braj has ha. He posits a 'transitional Braj Bhasha' from the surely the meanings we assign to these practices that are mid-twelfthto mid-fourteenth centuries before Braj develops into a fully-fledged didates for re-evaluation, and not the practices themselves. But language from c. 1350-1550. Shivprasad Singh, Sirr-ptin, brajbhed aur at meanings are to be assigned? rdhitya, 1958: 71-237. 88 Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture Riti and Register 89 OVER-INTERPRETATION AND UNDER-INTERPRETATION such a poem at such a date is a striking indication of the penetrative power of the language

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