The Divide of Hindi and Urdu

1
As Seen In the Essay ‘To Urdu and Hindi via Turki’ by Peggy Mohan

I have a meme page on Instagram, where I make memes on some of Hindi and Urdu literature’s
unseen and untouched topics and also the mainstream ones, blending the famous pop-culture
with them.2 This one time, a guy complimented me on one of my posts and I said ‘shukriya’,
meaning ‘thank you’ in English. And he replied, “I was hoping for a ‘dhanyawad’ since you are
a Hindi page”, implying that ‘shukriya’ is a Urdu word and ‘dhanyawad’ should be the most
subtle response in Hindi, used in lieu of ‘thank you’.

What this person was actually trying to say represents a lot of people in the Hindi belt3 of this
country. People there tend to differentiate between languages based on their scripts and
vocabularies, which makes me think about this particular sentence by Javed Akhtar, a prominent
lyricist, poet and speaker of our time, in which he used its almost every word from every
language that Hindi and Urdu take loans from and asked the audience what language he
spoke―and then he described what words were from which languages.4 His argument makes
sense when we consider that a language is not its script, nor its vocabulary, but its grammar.5 And
when we look at the respective grammars of Urdu and Hindi, they seem almost the same; which
also goes for their “defined” vocabularies : just Hindi has more Sanskritized words and Urdu,
more Persian and Arabic.6

This is exactly where Mohan’s essay points towards.

The divide of Hindi and Urdu in terms of religious languages of Hindus and Muslims
respectively : a conspiracy that finds itself in full throttle nowadays. Every now and then, there is
this endeavour lurking out of nowhere to limit these two languages to the vocabulary that they
had no relation to start with, but which have been imposed on them since British rule thrived in
India. When Mohan makes a relation with Turki and Persian to Hindi and Urdu, the former one
being related to Altaic family and the latter three to Indo-European family and the vernacular
languages of India respectively, we tend to think that how did it happen that two languages, who
had roots in the Indian soil, got related to Sanskrit and Persian, which came outside of India? In
the beginning, Turki seems closer to Hindi (or Hindavi), but that is also because Persian was
found in it. Sanskrit was nowhere close to being attached to these vernacular languages of India,
as it was always considered to be the Language of the Gods, so how did it happen, then, that
Hindi is termed as the daughter of Sanskrit, whereas it is more the sister of Urdu?
Since the late nineteenth century it has become customary to view the Hindi language and its
literary heritage as an arena of culture upon which Hindus have a special claim.7 Why is that so?
Is it because Sanksrit’s script had always been Devnagari and Hindi was being written in the
same script during the nineteenth century, when the British allowed the script to take over
Persian in the courts? It may be. And maybe since Urdu (or Khari Boli, Rekhta, Hindavi) was
always written in Persian script, it was taken as a language of Muslims because it was the
Mughal rule that reigned India before the East India Company. Even Ameer Khusro, who is
considered to be the first poet of Khari Boli in Hindi Literature history, wrote his Hindavi works
in Persian script, mixing Persian with the other dialects of Delhi at that time. If these distinctions
were so clear from the beginning, why did it take the British to declare that Hindi and Urdu were
the language of Hindus and Muslims respectively and eventually cutting India to form two
nations based on this distinction of languages?

Well, the first question raised here makes us look for an important aspect in the Indian history of
languages. Hindi, which literally means ‘of Hind’, was the name of the vernacular language that
people around Delhi spoke, as Mohan gives us the evidence of it in the poetry of Khusro. It was
not even Hindi back then, it was Hindavi, which means almost the same as Hindi. It was a
funneled down form of Persian and Arabic, which came to India in the 5th century, when there
was no Islam to speak of. Urdu was the name given to this very language as late as the eighteenth
century. It was only during the downfall of the Mughal era that some people chose the Persian
script to write it and some chose Devanagari. It was the same language! Two stems of the same
branch and a partition happened because of it! Such shame!

Anyway, our second question makes me think that if Hindi/Urdu/Rekhta/Khari Boli was the
language of people, why is it that Britishers felt that using Devanagari would make them reach a
broader audience? Was it because since the Bhakti Movement, there was circulation of literature
in Avadhi and Braj, which were written in that script? Or that too in Riti, when all the courtesan
poets used to write praises for the kings and ministers of that time and any ruling entity would
want their people to read about them. Did it make the ground level people be used to the script of
Devenagari and the language that we are speaking of? Did being limited just to courts and
government works made the Persian script succumb to these phenomena?

That doesn’t seem to be the case. In his essay ‘Rekhta : Poetry in Mixed Language : The
Emergence of Khari Boli Literature in North India’, Imre Bangha writes,

“...In the eighteenth century, Rekhta appears also as the name of Khari Boli mixed with Perso-Arabic
vocabulary—the language which is today called Urdu. The greatest Urdu poet of the century, Mir, referred to his
language not as Urdu, but either as Hindi or as Rekhta….In spite of using Khari Boli and the Nagari script, this
genre was not hailed as the precursor of modern Hindi literature, even though Rekhta was produced well into the
nineteenth century and was, directly or indirectly, influential in the development and acceptance of modern Hindi. If
the history of Nagari Rekhta is taken into consideration, then modern Hindi should not be considered as a language
originating only from the artificial experiments of Fort William College but also as the continuation of a
now-forgotten literary idiom. Yet Rekhta became neglected from the 1850s onwards, the time of Bhartendu
Harishchandra. Instead of allying themselves with this literature, Bhartendu and his circle fought against ‘Urdu
Begam’ and should probably be held responsible for denying the existence of literature in Nagari Rekhta as a
possible meeting point between Hindi and Urdu.”8

So it was the purists who denied Urdu (the script mainly, as they couldn’t deny the language they
were speaking in!) as a language that could give some insight into Hindi’s literary cultures.
Principal spokes-men for Hindi like Harischandra possessed a heightened awareness that they
were staging a new mode of literariness on the world literary stage.9 But they were not. The
Hindi that they were writing was no different than what Khusro wrote centuries ago. As a matter
of fact, Harishchandra’s mukari were strikingly similar to those of Khusro in form―and we
don’t know if Harishchandra accepted him as someone who started Hindi long before he did,
obviously, in a different script.

Two things happened at the same time then. Hindi purists emerged out and British found their
way of Divide and Rule. Nationalism played a bigger role than one might think. Mohan pointed
out in the later parts of her essay that how Ghalib and several other poets started writing
“difficult” poetry because Mughals were off the map and British company started ruling the
subcontinent. Also, in the revolt of 1857, British army killed 27,000 people in Delhi alone, a lot
of them being Muslims.10 This made the Britishers support the Hindi nationalist movement as it
went along, sidelining Urdu, or the script. This time saw even a more radical change in the
discourses as a new kind of Hindi was being formulated, viz, ‘Shuddh Hindi’, meaning pure
Hindi, in which Sanskrit words were formed according to the old Khari Boli dialect and
conforming to the meanings of English vocabularies, as Mohan suggests. The term gharwaapsi
(returning back home) was coined by Hindu supremacist groups, such as Hindu Jagran Morcha.
Their theory was that every non-Hindu entity in India has its origins in the ethos of Hinduism but
has been alienated or converted by force into other faiths. The attempt should be made, therefore,
to bring them back to their original, fundamental state: in other words, “returning back home.”11
What would that tell us? That Hindu people started seeing Sanskrit as the superior form of a
language and pushing their nationalist theory into it. Aditya Behl, in his book ‘Love’s Subtle
Magic : An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379-1540’ writes,

“...Propagation of modern standard Hindi as the national language of India in the first decades of the twentieth
century was an enterprise that involved equipping Hindi with a literary history and a canon of masterpieces.
Prominent in the struggle were organizations such as the Nagari Pracarini Sabha, which promoted the use of the
Devanagari script and sponsored scholarly editions of literary texts. 24 Nationalist critics such as Ramchandra
Shukla drew on colonial models of literary history to classify the Hindi canon, placing the Hindavī Sufi romances
within a teleological scheme of the evolution of modern standard Hindi. When Shukla published his landmark Hindī
Sāhitya kā Itihās in 1929, he prefaced his account of the Hindi canon by linking language, national consciousness,
and history in an evolutionary scheme: “If every nation’s literature is a collective reflection of the consciousness of
its people, then it is necessarily true that as there are changes in the people’s consciousness, the form of their
literature changes also.” ”12
Shukla might have misjudged people’s consciousness, which was being driven by the British
policy of using Hindi as the language of Hindus. He must have thought that Sanskritized Hindi
was the way to go as we could see later, how he propagated that connecting it to the identities of
Hindus, which found its way back to Lallu Lal, who is considered the ‘Father of Modern Hindi’,
who, for the very first time, removed Arabic and Persian words from one of his works and
replaced them with a Sanskritized vocabulary.13 Although Mohan hardly suggests this, but in
dividing the local dialect of the people into two different languages with two different scripts
(and later, two countries), nationalism played an important role. Various leaders of the freedom
struggles, Gandhi being one of them, started saying that Hindi might be the language that could
bind people of this country. If that was so, how come Hindi is such a big hegemony to the places
where it is not spoken? Story for another time. The freedom struggle and the Hindi renaissance
movement made Hindustani (yes, this is the last name given to the dialcet that Hindi and Urdu
both share) just a dialect spoken by people, and not a language of creation (although some works
were done in this dialect later) just like how it was during Khusro’s time, only then, this dialcet
was just starting and now, it almost died. It came a full circle.

But, as Mohan says at the end of her essay, hope never dies and we see that Hindustani is spoken
more now than it was spoken during the movements before ‘47. People are creating in it and we
see the lines between Hindi and Urdu blur nowadays, although supermacist powers are still at
work, but how could they get out the language that our tongues know of! Here I remember
another Javed Akhtar video, in which he says that ‘Urdu has a little problem. Till the point you
understand it, it is Hindi; it becomes Urdu only when it gets incomprehensible!’14 He is right.
Hindi and Urdu are the same languages that were parted in a conspiracy and they never came
back. But the very simple sentence that we speak daily, terming them Hindi and Urdu, are
actually both the languages : You write them left to right, it is Hindi; write them right to left, it is
Urdu. The divide of Hindi and Urdu never happened on the unconscious level and we would love
to keep it that way. We have to. It is impossible to make them go two different ways.

References :

1
Mohan, Peggy (2021) Wanderers, Kings, Merchants : The Story of India Through Its Languages. India : Penguin
Random House. pp. 145-186

2
प्रकाशन, मीम (2021) Meme Prakaashan. Available at :
https://instagram.com/meme_prakaashan?igshid=NmE0MzVhZDY= (Accessed 01 March 2023)

3
The Hindi Belt or Hindi Heartland is a loosely defined linguistic region in North and Central India where Hindi
language[s] is [are] widely spoken, either as primary or secondary language[s]. It is sometimes also used to refer to
states whose official language is Hindi. See : https://www.lonweb.org/links/hindi/lang/006.htm (Accessed 01 March
2023)

4
Of Liberty, The Voice (2023) Unstoppable Javed Akhtar at Faiz Festival 2023 in Lahore Pakistan. YouTube.
Available at : https://youtu.be/JdR_LBzOE5A (Accessed 01 March 2023) min. 6:39-8:03
5
Ibid. : min. 3:41-5:50

6
Encyclopaedia Britannica (2018) Hindustani Language. Available at :
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hindustani-language (Accessed 01 March 2023)

7
Busch, Allison (2014) ‘Poetry in Motion : Literary Circulation in Mughal India’ in T. Bruijn and A. Busch (ed.)
Culture and Circulation : Literature in Motion in Early Modern India. Boston : Brill. pp. 186.

8
Bangha, Imre (2010) ‘Rekhta : Poetry in Mixed Language : The Emergence of Khari Boli Literature in North India’ in
F. Orsini (ed.) Before the Divide : Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture. India : Orient Blackswan Publications.

9
Bhatnagar, Rashmi (2010) ‘What’s Braj Got To Do With the Hindi Urdu Divide?’, Critical Quarterly, 52(3), pp. 70.
Available at : https://www.academia.edu/712182/Whats_Braj_got_to_do_with_the_Hindi_Urdu_divide (Accessed
01 March, 2023)

10
“The Mutiny of 1857 (the first War of Independence), in which Muslims participated in huge numbers, angered
India’s British colonial overlords. Partly as a result, they took the side of the Hindi movement over Urdu in promoting
the Devanagari script. Ali Ahmad, author of Twilight in Delhi, mentions that many Urdu writers bore the brunt of the
failed 1857 revolt. They were sentenced to the Andaman Islands, where most died from harsh living conditions and
their treatment.” See : Haque, Shahzaman (2019) India’s War On Urdu. The Diplomat. Available at :
https://thediplomat.com/2019/07/indias-war-on-urdu/ (Accessed 01 March 2023)

11
Ibid.

12
Behl, Aditya (2012) Love’s Subtle Magic : An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379-1540. USA : Oxford
University Press.

13
“...Prem Sagar (1803) by Lallu Lal, in which Arabic and Persian words were purged. Known as “Father of Modern
Hindi,” Lallu Lal set the tone for Sanskritized Hindi. Following him, several works by Ramchandra Shukla
emphasized the importance of Sanskrit Hindi, associating it with the identity of Hindus.” See : Haque, Shahzaman
(2019) India’s War On Urdu. The Diplomat. Available at : https://thediplomat.com/2019/07/indias-war-on-urdu/
(Accessed 01 March 2023)

14
Rekhta, Jashn-e- (2017) Javed Akhtar on Urdu Shayari aur Zindagi. YouTube. Available at :
https://youtu.be/zoAh4khKSQA (Accessed 01 March 2023)