Indian Antiquary Vol 60

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, S Krishnaswami Aiyangar, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarka
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 327

APRIL, 1931
GENERAL VIEW
6. The term Hindi' (H.) is very laxly employed by European writers. It is a Persian word, and properly means of or belonging to India,' as opposed to 'Hindū,' a person of the Hindū religion. In this sense it can be used to mean any Indian language. By Europeans the name is sometimes reserved for the High Hindi to be described below, but it is more often employed as a vague term to designate all the rural dialects of the four languages,-Bihāri, Eastern Hindi, Hindi, and Rajasthani, spoken between Bengal and the Panjab. In this work the term 'Hindi' is restricted to the modern vernacular of the ancient Madhyadēša in its narrowest sense, i.e., of the greater part of the Gangetic Döāb and of the plains country immediately to its north and south. Its centre may be taken as the city of Agrā. From this it extends, on the north, to the Himalaya, and on the south to the valley of the Narmadā. On the west it goes beyond Delhi, and on the east to about Känhpur (Cawnpore). On its west lie Panjābi and Rājasthāni, and on its east lies Eastern Hindi. As also was the case in ancient times, the language of this tract is by far the most important of any of the speeches of India. It is not only a local vernacular, but in one of its forms, Hindöstäni 3 (Hn.), it is spoken over the whole of the north and west continental India as a lingua franca employed alike in the court and in the marketplace by everyone with any claim to education. Hindo. stäni is properly the dialect of Hindi spoken in the upper part of the Gangetio DoĀb and in the neighbouring parts of the Panjab, and in the days of the early Muyul sovereignty of India it was the common speech of the polyglot military bāzār of Delhi, which is situated close to this tract on the right bank of the Jamuna. From Delhi and other military head. quarters it was carried all over India by the Muyul armies. It first received literary cultivation in the sixteenth century in southern India, and received a definite standard of form a hundred years later at the hands of Wali, of Aurangabād in the Deccan. It was then taken up in the north by both Musalmāns and Hindūs. The former enriched its vocabulary with a large stock of Persian (including Arabic) words, but this Persianization was carried to an extreme by the pliant Hindu Kāyasths and Khattris employed in the Muyul administration and acquainted with Persian, rather than by Persian and Persianized Muyuls, who for many centuries used only their own languages for literary purposes. This Persianized form of Hindõstāni is known as Urdu, a name derived from the Urdu-e mu'alā, or royal military bāzār outside Delhi palace, where it took its rise. As a literary language Urdū is also called Rēgta (scattered ' or 'crumbled ') from the manner in which Persian words are scattered through poems composed in Persian, not Indian, metres, and a further form of this is Rēyti, or the language of verse written by women, and expressing the sentiments, etc., peculiar to them. We have seen that Hindöstäni literature began in the Deccan. The language is still used by Musalmāns of that part of India, and there retains many old and provincial forms belonging to the Upper Gangetic Doab, which have fallen into disuse in the language of the north. This southern dialect is called Dakhini Hindöstäni. The present form of literary Hindi, or High Hindi (HH) is a reversion to the type of the non-Persianized vernacular of the upper Doab, brought into general use through the influence of the teachers at the College of Fort William in Calcutta in the early years of the nineteenth century. It was desir. ed to popularize a Hindöstāni for the use of Hindūs, and this was recreated in Calcutta by taking Urdū, the only form there known, as a basis, ejecting therefrom all words of Persian or Arabic origin, and substituting in their place words borrowed from, or derived from, the indigenous Sanskrit. Owing to the popularity of the Prēm Sägar? of Lallū Lal, one of the first books written in this speech, and also owing to its supplying the need for a lingua franca which could be used by the strictest Hindūs without their religious prejudices being offended. it became widely adopted, and is now the recognized vehicle for prose written by those inhabitants of Upper India who do not employ Urdū. It was not, however, a newly invented