HYDERABAD: Imagine Dakhni language as a tree, which has its roots that are ‘local’ and the stem and the branches are Urdu,” said Dr Peggy Mohan, eminent linguist, who delivered a series of lectures titled, “The Story and Prehistory of Urdu” and “Dakhni: A Hybrid Language of the Borderlands” at Maulana Azad National Urdu University (MANUU) recently.
The Vice Chancellor of MANUU, Syed Ainul Hasan, Professor Chair of MANUU, Imtiaz Hasnain, and Sajjad Shahid, a historian and co-convener of INTACH Hyderabad, presided over the event. The lectures, which were a part of her research covered in her book published in 2021— “Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India Through its Language” — delineating the evolution of a few Indian languages, highlighted that the story is not as simple as it appears.
Thanks to migrations, Indian languages did not come about through a process that could be described through an old model which said a lot of ‘chaos’ existed before we could begin to see the present languages we speak today. “In India, something else was happening,” said Dr Peggy Mohan.
She said that the Indian subcontinent has witnessed an influx of migrations from the north-west, and particularly in Deccan, the migrations that happened from the northern doab region, had a major role to play in the development of present-day Dakhni.
There are two streams of language. One is from the people who migrated, that too in a short span of time. Since they are mostly men, they get married to local women here and their children, pick up all the available strands of language and make creoles. The second stream of language comes from the local people who were involved in trade with these migrants and needed to talk to them,” explains Dr Mohan.
Using Dakhni to test and refute the old model and understand the beginning of Urdu, Dr Mohan, highlighted with examples that in Dakhni, the grammatical structure resembles that of the local languages, such as Telugu and Marathi, and the vocabulary is derived from Urdu. “Consider it the way computers function, what we call the Operating System, is local (Telugu, Marathi, etc.) and the data input is Urdu,” she explained.
“In Dakhni, a sentence goes like – apun bola-ki mere ko maloom nai – now where does this ‘ki’ come from? This is not from Urdu, but resembles the grammatical structure of Telugu,” said Dr Mohan
“The present-day Dakhni,” described Dr Mohan, “has a ‘Buniyaad’ or foundation, which is similar to that of languages spoken locally and the structure above is from Urdu.”
According to Dr Mohan, this intermixing of languages could have taken place due to a variety of reasons which still need to be researched upon in greater depth. The migrants’ language, what she calls ‘Prakrit’, to mark the language spoken by the elites, and probably later adopted by the masses, was called Dehlavi, a form of what we now know as Urdu. It moved together, yet in separate streams, with the local Dakhni of the region. Added influences were from the Sufis too, which in the end created a mixed variety.
A significant question that she highlighted in the end was that at what point did a large number of Dakhni speakers convert to Islam and did something like that even take place. “It is known in Bengal that it was the Buddhists who converted to Islam. There could be a possibility of something like this happening in Deccan too,” she said.
Following the lecture on Dakhni, Dr Mohan explained the emergence of Urdu. Presenting evidence from verses of Amir Khusrau, the 13th-century poet from Delhi and Mir Ja’far Zatalli from the 18th century, she highlighted that Hindi and Urdu were never separate from each other. She added that it is only in 1780, in a verse by Ghulam Hamdani Mus’hafi, that one finds the word ‘Urdu’ being used to describe the language.
Making significant additions to the arguments presented by Dr Mohan, Professor Sajjat Shahid said it is possible that Sufis had already exposed the language to the masses. “Dakhni literature, interestingly, was written by people who were masters of Persian and Arabic but consciously wanted to write in the language of the masses and documented each and every word as it was uttered. Even the distortions are well recorded. Haathi (Elephant) is never pronounced Haathi, it is always Hatthi” he said.
The Vice-Chancellor brought attention to the large-scale interactions made possible by globalisation. He said when Persian and Turks came to India, they accepted the local culture and grew mangoes out of banyan roots. He spotlighted the willingness of people to adapt, change and create a melange of cultures and languages.