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Taqi accepted as gem;ine some of the verses which we have Khari uses very few, and Urdu very many, Perstan .and
to-day. We know this because Mlr refers to them in his Arabic. wo.rds. SQme peQp]e, both Europeans and Indmns,
anthology. have made the use of Hindi or Persian metres the to~c~
The word 'Hindi' is used in both a wide and a n:rrrow stone, but that distinction can be applied only to poetry.; tt.IS
~ens~. _In the wi?e sense it includes the languages spoken inapplicable to. prose. In poetry, too, some authors, w!ID~
_u
m ~Ihar~ .the mted Provinces of Agra and Oudh, Central not varying their language, have employed now Hmdt
India, ~aJpt:ttana and the S.E. Panjab as far as Ambala. metres, and now Persian. Even at the present ~ay t~er~
One n;tght mclu~e ~umaon and Ga<;lhval. In the narrow are poets who sometimes write Urdu poetry m Hindi
sense It means Hmdt prop<:r, the chief dialects of which are metres. . . . . .
!3raj ~~d _Khar!. ~he fu:st writers. of Hindi wrote principally There has been a strange reversal of the decrees of fate.
m Ethan, Avadht, BraJ and RaJputanl; languages which The despised Kharl language, confined to conv~rsati~n, ,and
were used for .both composition and conversation. Muslim 'considered {mfit for poetry, was not used for senous htel'llo/
authors occasw~ally emp~oyed one of "these, but more purposes, except by Sital and perhaps Amir Khus!!\u,bll
comm~mly Pers~an. Khap, though widespread as a con- near 1800 ; so milch so that even to-day some persons, not
versatiOn~! medmtn, v.:as not much used for literature. realising that it haS had a vigorousex.istence among the co~-
I.ndee.d wtth the exceptiOn of Amlr Khusrau's few hundred mon people since the time when it. t~ok t~e place of J';~kl'lt,
hnes JUSt mentioned, which are mostly in Braj and the works think that it wasinvented by lnsha Allah, Sadal Mtsr!'<?d
of the poet S!tal (c.1723), we have no work u{ it till we come Lallii LaJ, In the Hindi sphete.it has nowturned ~>Ut}ts
to the verge of the nineteenth century. rivals and ,;,;n soon be the only survivor so far as literacy
':r':_e. U~d~ ?rat;ch of Kharl has a different history. work' is concerned,. while in its Ul'du.forrri it has beenJor
Mz ra7ul Ashzqzn, a tract by Banda Navaz which has centuries the mednnn of a. prosperous and growmg .
.recently been printed, and is probably genuine: belongs to
the end of the fourteenth century. Seeing that the author literatt1re.
It is important t0 remember that in the middle of the.
left the Decc::n when he was fifteen and lived thereafter
THE HISTORY OF 'URDU 11
10 A HIS'l'ORY OF URDU LITERATURE
the employment of the word 'Urdu,' standing by itself and
fourt~nth century there was no real difference between meaning the Urdu language, is in the poems of Mu$l;taf1,
Delhi Urdu and Dakhnl Urdu, but with .the establishment 1750-1824, which are unfortunately undated, and in any case
o~ the separate Bahman1 dynasty the two dialects began to have only .in part been printed. Gilchrist uses it in his
dtverge. Grammar (1796). The earliest examples of the phras~,Zahiin
Urd!lliteratur~ in its early stages wasmuch more con i Urdil, the language ofthe Camp or the Urdu language, are
versat10nal and S!~ple than it \Vas in later years. Probably in Tazkira e Gulziir i Ibrahim by 'AU Ibrahim Khag (1783)
for that reason 1t resembles to a surprising degree the and iD: Mushafi's Tazkira e Situ 'arii e Hindz (1794): In this
spoken language of to-day. This resemblance must not be title we must note the word 'Hindi' (meaning 'Urdu'). The
used as an argument against the genuineness of an early expression Zabiin i Urdu e mu'allii (e Shiiltja!tiiniihiid Dikli),
poem or prose work. It shows merely that the author the language of the . Royal Camp, or the Exalted Urdu
wr?~e the _la~uage as he spoke it. In later years men language (ofShahjahanabad, Delhi) occurs in the anthology
wrtting a~ifictal.ly and, following foreign models produced Nikiit usk S!tu'arii by Mir Taqi (1752). In myam ud Din
works which, dtvor'7'd from everyday idiom, differ widely Qaim's anthology M ak!tzan i Nikiit (17 54) we find mu4avira
from the Urdu which we know now. To take two in- e ()rdu e mu'allii,.the idiom ofthe Royal Camp. 'Arsh, the-
stances. The Dakhn1 poen;s of Mul;tammad Qun Qutb Shah son of Mir Taqi, speaks ot himself as Urdu e mu'allii
bef_ore 1600, a?~ !he beautiful D_akhn1 poem Qutb Mushtarz, kii zabiir~.dii?!, one well acquainted with the Urdu e Mu'alla
w11t!en by VaJhl ~n 1609, are easter to read than Shah Na$1r's language. His date is unknown, but he seems to have been
wntings m the nmeteenth century. . born in Mir's old age. .
Th~ Na"?'e Urdu. An important question is how the Now the earliest of .these is five and a half centuries.
word Urdu cam~ to ?e applied to a language. 'We haye i after the foreign army had settled in Delhi; and we natur-
seen that the s'?ldters m Delhi at a very early date gave up ally ask why during all this long period the language never
the ~se of Persmn among themselves and began to speak a received . the name 'Urdu,' and why. people suddenly
modified form of the vernacular. In Delhi this form of thought of that name after the lapse of so long a time,
speech, to distinguish it from the usual Khar1 BoH (and when it had ceased to have any particular meaning. This
probably also from Persian), was called Zabiin. i Urdu, the period of 550 years could perhaps be reduced;_ it has .been
language of the Army, or Zabiin i Urdu e Mu'allii the claimed, but not proved, that the royal camp m Dellrl WliS
language of the Exalted or Royal Army. As the soldiers not known as the Urdu till the time of Babur, who. came.
and the people in~ern;ixed and intermarried, the language direct from Turkistan with a Tur-ki force in 1526. It is a
spread oyer t~e ~tty mto the suburbs and even into the doubtful point. We may admit that before his time the
surroundJ?g .dtst:tct.. It was natural to keep up the separate foreign recruits had nearly all been Persian speakers or
name todtstingutsh 1t not only from the unmixed.ytlrnacular descendants of Persian speakers~ But on the other band the I'
of the pe?p~e, ~ut 3;lso from the Persian of the court. This word 'Urdu' for army had been in Persian since 1150, for.
doub~e ~1stmct10n IS not unimportant. It is possible, too, it is found more than once in the Ja!tiiukusltii of Javaini
t~at myme the name served to mark still. another distincc
with that meaning.
tto?, VIZ: between the speech of Delhi ~nd that of Lucknow. .-The first example of it in India is said to be in the
Itts, sup~o~ed that gradually the word , zaban' was dropJ:led, Tuzuk i Biibttrz, comp~ed by the EmperorBabur himself
an,d Ur<tu came to be used alone. in 1529. Bttt .even if we. accept these later dates for the
l11this explanation there is a difficulty. Though the first occurrence i~ India of the word' Urdu' with the mean-
royal ca!)IP was established in Delhi. <:luring the time of ing of army, we still have to account for the fact that for
~!bud DtnAibak in1206, the earliest known examJ:lle of
' '. .- ' .' .' . ' .. ' .
12 A HISTORY OF URDU. LITERATURI~
THE HISTOR.V OF URDU 13 ~
r.