How Urdu Got associated with Muslims in India

Tariq Rehman
PART I
Languages are basically a means of communication, expression of emotion, attitude and mood.
But they are also associated with identity in various degrees. Identity is nationalistic, subnationalistic (ethnic) and, in some rare cases, also religious. In India, it so happened that Urdu
got associated with the Indian-Muslim identity between the late 18th and the early 20th centuries.
Despite the fact that this language is spoken by both Hindus and Muslims and Muslims
themselves speak a number of languages, mainly Bengali, Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi and Gujarati.
Moreover, in the villages of UP and Bihar, both Hindus and Muslims actually speak the dialects
of Hindi such as Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj Bhasha, Maithili etc. And yet, modern Urdu is
associated with Islam in India in both India and Pakistan. How did this happen? This is explained
in two parts. The first part deals with the movement for the purification of Urdu between 1750 to
the early 1900s.
The movement for linguistic purification which I call the Islamisation of Urdu for reasons
given below started in the middle of the 18th century. The ancestor of Urdu was an Indicoriented language. By this I mean that it had words of the local languages (bhaka or bhasha) and
Sanskrit, and its allusions were to India and the local culture. Even though the script of some
writings in this language is Perso-Arabic (Urdu), as opposed to Devanagari used in the Rajput
writings, the language is similar. This common language underwent a great change from the
1750s onwards which is the theme of this article.
In this purification movement, the Indic element was purged out by Muslim poets who, it
appears, wanted a class-identity marker. Among the changes which occurred were: the removal
of local (bhaka) and Sanskritic words, the substitution of Iranian and Islamic cultural allusions
and metaphors in place of Indian and Hindu ones, and the replacement of the Indian conventions
about the expression of love (woman to man) by Persian ones (man to woman or adolescent
boy). Among the more than 4,000 words purged out were nain (eye), prem (love), mohan (dear
one) etc. They do exist in songs and some other forms of poetry, of course, but they were
banished from the ghazal. The grounds given in the writings of the poets who did all this such
as Shah Hatim (1699-1786), Imam Baksh Nasikh (d. 1838), Insha Ullah Khan Insha (17521818), etc are not communal. They said that certain words are obsolete, unfashionable and
rough. However, the end result was that words of Indic origin were the ones which were purged.
That is one reason why I call this movement Islamisation. To take one concrete example,
Hatim made a small extract of his voluminous poetic work calling it Divan Zada (1756). In the
preface of this compilation, he writes in Persian that he had stopped using the local idiom which
was called bhaka (bhaka goend mauquf karda). In its place, he tells us, he had started the
refined idiom of the gentlemen of Delhi. And what was this? For an answer we have to go to
Insha who defined it precisely in his Persian book Darya-e-Latafat (1802). For Insha, this was
the language of the Muslim elite of Delhi and Lucknow. Such notions about linguistic excellence
were in circulation from the 14th century at least, as Amir Khusros own notions illustrate.
However, during the 1750s the ideas of Sirajuddin Ali Khan Arzu (1687-1756), a Persian poet

and linguist, had a stronger impact on Hatim and the other reformers. Arzu corrected an existing
dictionary naming it Navadir-ul-Alfaz (1751). In this he indicates at several places that the
standard language he had in mind was that of the elite of Delhi. And this idiom was far more
Persianised and full of Islamic cultural references than the other styles of the language spoken
elsewhere. So it was this Persianised language which became a marker of the educated, mostly
Muslim but also Hindu Kaesth identity during British India.
The impact of this movement was that it changed the identity of the common language of north
India to two languages: Persianised Urdu and Sanskritised Hindi. The process of Sanskritisation
started from 1802 onwards and it was a consequence of political awareness, incipient nationalism
and reaction to Muslim cultural dominance. But this dominance had been contributed to by the
same movement of the Islamisation of Urdu so that a Hindu poet had to use Islamic phraseology
in order to be appreciated. And yet, ironically and most unjustly, Azads book Ab-e-Hayat
ignores both Hindu poets as well as women. There is no doubt that this process of Persianisation
was a class movement meant to strike out an independent path rather than to write in Persian
itself as the Iranians made fun of Indian-Persian. Moreover, from the 1830s onwards, Persian
was being phased out from the domains of power. Both the Muslims and Kaesth Munshis were
interested in using Persianised Urdu to retain their monopoly over jobs in UP and the Punjab.
But the apprenticeship (ustadi-shagirdi) tradition, the poetry recitation sessions (mushairas)
which were assemblies of rivals and the cultural capital given to language was such that the
allusions, references and the atmosphere, at least in the ghazal, was Persian and Muslim. That is
why the movement alienated Hindus and that is why I call it the Islamisation of Urdu. Its greatest
harm was that it began the division of Urdu-Hindi into Urdu and Hindi and this was continued by
the Sankritisation of Hindi later. And yet, the spoken language of ordinary people remains
undivided. It is only by recognising this history and resolving to build upon common themes and
continuities of this common language of north Indian cities that we exorcise the ghosts of the
past from this subcontinent.
Part II
The first part of this article dwelt on the 18th century movement of linguistic reform (which I
called Islamisation of Urdu) which Persianised Urdu and changed its Indic-orientation to
Islamic culture. This part will take up another aspect of the same issue the use of Urdu in
education, printing and religious debate in British India. These factors also associated Urdu,
which has an Indic base and was not associated with any specific religious community till the
late 18th century, with Islam and Muslim identity in India.
Urdu-Hindi (the ancestor of both modern Urdu and Hindi) was not originally associated either
with formal religious institutions or bureaucracy of the state in Mughal India. The language of
the Islamic texts and liturgical practices was, of course, Arabic. However, religious texts were
explained in Persian. Persian was also used for formal discourse on Islamic issues by the ulema.
Yet, probably to communicate to the common people, some of the sufis used the local languages.
Thus there are references to conversation, poetry recited during musical (samaa) sessions and
wise sayings in Urdu-Hindi from the 15th century onwards.

Remarkably enough, a religious reformer called Bayazid Ansari (1526-1572) wrote lines in what
he called Hindi in the Perso-Arabic script in his book entitled Khairul Bayan (1560-1570). The
book was written in South Waziristan, in a Pashto-speaking area, but he thought this language
useful for the propagation of his religious ideas. Anyway, despite this and other early writings,
this ancestor of Urdu was not associated with Muslims. This association grew during the British
period and, apart from the reasons given in Part-I of this article, it grew mainly because of the
use of Urdu in printing, education and religious debate.
As Muslim political power shrank and anxiety spread about why this had happened, the ulema
began a movement of education and purification. This they did by writing small books in the
local languages. Thus there are nur namas, wafat namas, jang namas, lahad namas etc. in almost
all languages used by Muslims in South Asia and, as it happens, most of them are in Urdu. This
movement started in the 18th century and accelerated in the 19th and the 20th centuries. Indeed, if
one consults the British reports on printing, one finds that two themes always predominate:
religion and love. In some years, one may exceed the other but, as books on history and morals
also have a religious colour, it may be true to say that religion mostly predominates printing.
This was a tremendous social change for all religious communities in India. Thus, although there
was a secularising trend introduced by the British also, there were more religious texts available
in print than ever before. Hence, the consciousness of religious identity grew among all religious
communities in India. And within Islam, the consciousness of sectarian identity grew also. Thus,
on the one hand the modernist secular classes grew alienated from the religious masses. But on
the other, the religious classes also grew alienated from each other and from other religious
communities.
As for education, the madrassas started explaining the Arabic texts of the Dars-i-Nizami in Urdu
though the classical exegeses were still in Persian. Meanwhile, Shah Abdul Qadir (1753-1827)
and Shah Rafiuddin (1749-1817) translated the Holy Quran into Urdu. Exegeses of the Holy
Quran, such as Murad Ullah Sanbhlis Tafsir-e-Muradi (1771) came to be printed.
Indeed, by the 20th century, Urdu came to possess an impressive amount of Islamic literature.
From the popular elegies for the martyrs of Karbala (marsiya) to devotional poetry; from stories
read out among illiterate women (for example, Bibi Fatima ki Kahani) to scholarly works on
Islamic philosophy; from the hagiographies of saints to the strictly monotheistic sermons of the
Wahabis all this varied literature was predominantly in Urdu.
Moreover, the sub-sects of Islam not just the Sunnis and the Shias but the Ahle Hadith,
Deobandis, Barelvis and others wrote their polemical literature in Urdu. They indulged in
debate (munazara) in Urdu and refuted each others claims in the same language. Even those
who are considered heretics as Bayazid Ansari was in the 16th century published their
works, attacked their opponents and defended themselves in Urdu.
Whether one is looking at the fundamentalists, revivalists, modernists or heretics one notices
that their favourite medium of expression is Urdu. This incessant debate went on in face-to-face
munazaras and through constant pamphleteering throughout the 20th century and still continues.
Even the works of the al Qaeda philosophy and the literature of the militants which is on sale

outside mosques and madrassas in Pakistan today is in Urdu though hardly any of them are
mother-tongue speakers of the language. Moreover, Urdu is still the preferred language of
instruction and examination in Pakistan and India. Even some madrassas in Bangladesh give it
some space though, of course, others use Bengali.
All these factors associate Urdu with Islam and the Islamic identity in the public mind in South
Asia. While it is true that Urdu has also been associated with socialism (Taraqqi Pasand Adab),
modernity and enlightenment (the Delhi Renaissance), the association with Islam predominates.
The official discourse in Pakistan celebrates this in order to emphasise difference from India.
The Indian Muslims, on the other hand, emphasise the composite character of Urdu and call it a
joint product of the Hindu and Muslim civilisations. Yet, in India, too, Urdu is part of Muslim
politics and efforts to preserve it necessarily dwell on the Perso-Arabic script and the Persian and
Arabic diction of modern Urdu. Yet, a language may have more than one association. And it is
always possible that Urdu can produce discourses of inclusiveness, tolerance and pluralism
which can make it both a rich repository of Islamic literature and a language of enlightened,
progressive and tolerant thought. (For details see my book From Hindi to Urdu: A Social and
Political History Oxford University Press, 2011 and Orient Blackswan edition in India).
Published in The Express Tribune, August 28th, 2011.
Author: Tariq Rehman