Fragment from Asian Art Museum: Mughal Empoeror Aurangzeb holding darbar in camp, around 1700
Yes, 'Urdu' means 'military camp' in Turkish, but by the eighteenth century, it merely meant 'the city of Delhi'. The fascinating story of how the language whose name(s) were Hindi/ Hindvi/ Goojri/ Rekhta/ Dakhani at various times and places came to be known as Urdu.
Metonyms can be misnomers and even lead to absurd
interpretations, especially if the naming word comes from another language. A
case in point is the name 'Urdu'. While it seems to be "common knowledge" that Urdu means
'military camp' in Turkish, it is not at all
clear
who promoted the
simplistic
notion that the Urdu language, by virtue of its name, had its origin in military
camps.
Granted that the Turks who established their rule in northern India from
the eleventh century onwards must have needed to communicate with the local
populace through a mutually intelligible vernacular, but the most likely place
for such a language of communication to emerge would be bazaars not army camps.
In any case, there was no tradition of large standing armies that would be
camped in cantonments such as those of the colonial era. Armies were cobbled
together whenever needed and consisted mostly of peasants and mercenaries.
Yule
and Burnell the authors of Hobson Jobson (A
Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms,
Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, Delhi, revised
ed. 1986) cite a reference from
1560 in support of 'urdu bazaar'
or camp-market. They also claim that the word urdu
came to India with the Mughals (Babur, the first Mughal ruler was victorious at
the famous battle of Panipat in 1526). While their citation must be correct,
their claim that the Turkish word came with Babur is wrong because the Ilbari
Turks had already put down roots in North India much earlier.
That Hindi/Hindvi/Dehlvi
was a language that existed in the Delhi region is a fact that we learn from the
contemporary histories as well records of sufi discourses. The Mughals did
follow the Central Asian tradition of setting up vast encampments almost
city-like in proportions that could be shikargahs
(royal hunting camps) or simply a court away from the formal court at the
Capital. But to infer that such camps led to new language formations is to
stretch the idea of urdu=camp way too far. Certainly no new language grew out of
Mughal camps in Northern India.
The grammar and the syntactical structure of Urdu are based on the local
speech of the times in the region around Delhi (later identified as khari boli).
 |
Original MS of the Chandayan from the Bhopal codex
The chapter heading is in Persian the text is Avadhi or what Maulana Daud calls 'Hinduki' and the script is Perso Arabic |
However, this language was not the chosen vehicle for
literary production. Awadhi and Brajbhasha were the languages of poetry and
other literary pursuits to the extent they were
used for such a purpose in this early period.
For example, the earliest literary
text in Awadhi dates from 1379 (the Chandayan of Maulana Da'ud). From the fragmented evidence that we
have available to us from the literary sources of the period it seems that this
speech was described as Hindvi/Hindi/ Dehlvi and the earliest literary work in
it was a divaan by the 11th
century poet Masud Saad Salman (1046-1121) who claimed to have divaans
in three languages: Arabic, Persian and Hindvi. The Hindvi one though, is lost.
 |
Amir Khusrau and Nizamuddin Aulia
Painting, Hydrabad Deccan, circa 1725 AD, National Museum |
We learn about it from Muhammad Aufi's (composed around 1220-27) history of
intellectual essences or the
Lubab ul-
albab (Pure Essences of the Intellect). Amir Khusrau (1253-1325) the
versatile poet-genius also composed verses in Hindvi for the delectation of
friends, but neither he nor they regarded those efforts serious or literary
enough to be preserved or recorded in a formal collection or
divaan.
Clearly Hindvi had not as yet developed enough literary potential.
Though
marginalized by Persian, the language of the royal court on the one hand and
Braj and Awadhi, at the regional courts and in the creative efforts of sant and
sufi poets on the other, Hindvi lingered on as a lingua franca, traveling to
western, central and southern India through the specific instances of official
transfer of population such as the one enforced by Muhammad bin Tughluq
(1325-1351), but more generally through merchants and traveling sufi mystics who
were encouraged by their pirs to move
to distant regions and establish their own centers.
The dynamics of the interflow between capital and region, the privilege
of the north as the center of power, helped empower Hindvi and led to its
development in areas distant from the place of its origin. It absorbed
regional/local influences and morphed into Goojri in Gujarat and Dakhani in the
Deccan.
Goojri and Dakhni flourished; their literary potential grew to encompass
a wide variety of genres, subjects and attitudes. The earliest writings were
philosophical-mystical poems with either indigenous or Persian metres. The
lexical content was a mixture of Persian and indigenous vocabulary.
By the 17th
century, 'Urdu' could boast of profoundly mystical poems such as Khub
Muhammad Chishti's (d. 1638) Khub Tarang
and also long love poems of the barahmasa
type such as Muhammad Afzal's (d. 1625) Bikat
Kahani. Around the same time, and more significantly, Urdu literature was
flourishing in the Deccan, covering a wide range of subjects that ranged from
the allegorical to the romance style in traditional ghazals, and included minor
genres such as folk type poems like the chakkinamah
that were popular among women and usually sung while performing household chores
eponymous to the genre.
Literature in 'Urdu' thus developed earlier in the
regions away from the capital. It was Vali Aurangabadi's (1665-1708) historic
presentation of poetry in the Capital (Vali visited Delhi in 1700) that showed
in no uncertain measure how complex, sophisticated, abstracted, metaphoric
poetry was possible in a language other than Persian or Indo-Persian, a language
that we can identify as early Urdu but which was known as Hindi/ Hindvi/Rekhta/Dakhani
in those times. The poetics of this language was as indigenous as it was
Persianate; probably inclined more towards the former than the latter:
Oh Vali, the tongue of the master
poet
is the candle that lights up
the assembly of meanings.
(ay vali sahib-e sukhan ki zaban
bazm-e ma'ni mein sham-e roshan hai)
Like meaning in the word,
ways for new themes are not closed:
Doors of poetry are open forever.
(raah-e mazmun-e taza band nahin
ta qiyamat khula hai baab-e sukhan)
How did the language whose name(s)
were Hindi/Hindvi/Goojri/Rekhta/Dakhani at various times and places come to be
known as Urdu? The issue would not
have been so vexed but for the role of politics in the Urdu-Hindi divide. The
emotional and passionate discourse that is unleashed or vented in the name of
historical research on the origins of Urdu and Hindi has obstructed rational
debates on the subject. The nomenclature Urdu
with its putative connotation 'military camp' muddies the lens of
historiography, making it more speculative than it would have been without the
name tag.
Two books on the subject that are relatively well known are: Amrit Rai,
A House Divided: The
Origin and Development of Hindi/Hindavi (New Delhi, Oxford University Press,
1984) and Christopher King, One Language,
Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century
North India( New Delhi, OUP 1994). An important and recent intervention in
the debate on the issues of origins and nomenclature is Shamsur Rahman Faruqi's Urdu ka Ibtidayi Zamana
(Karachi 1999). Its expanded version is available in English: Early
Urdu Literary Culture and History
(New Delhi, OUP 2001). Among other thorny but noteworthy issues that his thesis
tackles, the most conclusive research/arguments pertain to the earliest use of
the metonym Urdu as name for the language and the 'meaning' or allusion of
the word itself.
According to Faruqi, 'Urdu' as
a name for the language seems to occur for the first time in 1780 in the poet
Musahafi's (1750-1824) first divaan:
Musahafi has most surely
claim of superiority in Rekhtah;
That is to say, he has expert
knowledge
Of the language of Urdu
(albatta
rekhtah mein hai musahafi ko da'va
ya'ni
ke hai zabandan urdu ki voh zaban ka)
(Musahafi, Kulliyat, vol. 1, p.
38)
Shah Alam II (r.1759-1806) holds court, c.1780
The name 'Urdu' seems to have
begun its life as zaban-e urdu-e mualla-e
shahjahanabad (the language of the
exalted city/court of Shahjahanabad, that is, Delhi). It originally seems to
have signified Persian, and not what we today know as 'Urdu'. The shift from Persian to
'Urdu' as the language
of the Court must have happened with Shah Alam II (ruled 1759-1806) who was
known not only to speak 'Hindi' but who also described the language of his
long prose work, the romance, Ajaib ul-
qisas (Most Wonderful Tales) as 'Hindi'. He began composing this dastaan
around 1792; the unfinished text he left behind covers 600 pages. However,
though the term zaban-e urdu-e mualla
referred to the language that was slowly gaining acceptance, the language itself
was known as 'Hindi' and the word 'urdu'
by itself meant the 'royal camp or city' (therefore, Delhi). With the patronage and practice of Shah Alam II, 'Hindi' rather than Persian began to be called
'the language of the urdu-e mualla'. It soon became shortened to zaban-e urdu-e mualla, then to zaban-e urdu, and then to urdu.
The problematic question that still needs to be addressed is the nature, or to put it another way, the
'genetics' of this 'Hindi'. A language must have existed before the arrival of the Turks.
It grew with the interaction and mixing of populations by the arrival of the Persian speaking Turks who began settling down in Northern India. It was natural for the new settlers to refer to this language as 'Hindi'. Did the 'Hindi' that was the
'language of Urdu' (i.e. the 'language of the city of Delhi') in the late eighteenth century become the language known as Hindi today with Arabo-Persian vocables excised, and Sanskrit tadbhava added, as far as possible? How did modern Hindi and Urdu develop? I could present my viewpoint on these issues but I leave these questions for the reader to pursue. My purpose in this essay is to clarify a) the origin and meaning of the term 'Urdu' and b) to roughly outline the growth and development of a language from spoken to literary.
Mehr Afshan Farooqi, Assistant Professor at University of Virginia, is the
editor of The Oxford India Anthology of Modern Urdu Literature