Ignorance is what drives the immature politics of indignant mobs in contemporary India, who demanded that jashn be removed from an advertisement because it is an Urdu word. They don’t know that there are myriad prose and verse Urdu translations of the Ramayana. The performances of Ram Lila in Punjab were once based on play-texts written in Urdu and this tradition continues in Faridabad. The Kannada language has more than 4,000 words of Persian origin. The names of many cities in Karnataka are in Urdu and Persian, such as Gulbarga, Belgaum and Bagalkot. Krishna Kolhar Kulkarni, a researcher of the language, has written about Rabban-e-Mohalla Urdu, a language spoken in Karnataka during the Adil Shahi era, that was a mix of Kannada and Persian.
Languages have their own way of development, which can’t be changed forcefully. The names of three major Indian languages come from “foreign” languages — Hindi is an Arabic word, Punjabi and Urdu are Persian and Turkish words respectively. The names of at least 300 Hindu castes (for example, Khazanchi, Fotedar, Nehru, Naddaf, Lohar, Bara Balutey dar, Kumhar, Kulal, Mahigeer, Peshwa) come from Urdu or Persian. The influence of Urdu /Persian is found in music as well as folk cultures. A contemporary poet says, “Qatl Urdu ka bhi hota hai isi nisbat sey/Log Urdu ko Mussalman samajh letey hain (“Urdu is also tormented/ as it is considered to be the language of the Muslim community”).
Language needs no religion but every religion needs a language. The first Indian translations of the Quran were said to be in Sindhi (by Makhdoom Muhammad Hashim Thattvi in 1749) and Malayalam, and then in English. In contrast, Hindu texts were being translated into Persian/Urdu from many centuries before. There are more than 700 translations of the Vedas, Puranas, Gita, Mahabharata and Ramayana in Urdu. Urdu scholar Sheen Kaaf Nizam recently translated parts of the Matsya Purana and Purana Parisheelan in his book, Lafz Key Dar Par. Al-Biruni (973-1050 AD), the great literary figure of Islamic era and an erudite Sanskrit scholar, translated some part of the Vedas and the Gita in his encyclopedic work on India, Kitab al-Biruni fi Tahqiq ma li-al-Hind. The fables of Panchatantra were translated into Arabic in 8th century as Kalilah wa Damnah by Abdullah Ibn e Muqaffa. When the original Sanskrit text of the Panchatantra perished, the fables were translated into Indian languages from the Arabic translation. Amir Khusro (1253-1325) had a great knowledge of Vedas and Puranas. Unfortunately, none of his Sanskrit books has survived, unlike his Hindawi (Hindi/Urdu) books.
Mohammad Tughlaq (1290-1351), referred to as a wise fool in history due to his failed expeditions, was “a man of knowledge and a keen student of Sanskrit”, according to the historian Stanley Lane-Poole. Among the later sultans of Delhi Sultanate, Firoz Tughlaq (1309-1388) was the first to commission translations of Vedas and Puranas into Persian. Zain ul Abidin, a 15th century ruler of Kashmir, appointed scribes to translate the Mahabharata and Kalhana’s Rajatarangini into Persian with the aim that these translations would give an insight into Hindu philosophy and culture to the rest of the world.
Indian culture and languages are so inextricably linked that disentangling them is impossible for a political system. More than 10,000 cities and villages have Urdu names. Several Hindu and Sikh community names are derived from Urdu. Even the most respected and revered poet Tulsidas used several Urdu words — miskeen, mujra, ghareeb nawaz, mansabdar, razai, saheb, sartaj, ghulam, etc — in his poetry.
It’s not only Tulsidas. Jaysi’s Padmavat and the first-ever Hindi short story, Rani Ketki ki kahani, were also written in Urdu script. Even when Prime Minister Narendra Modi found himself short of words, he resorted to Urdu verse and recited a ghazal by Nida Fazli in Parliament.
This column first appeared in the print edition on November 4, 2021 under the title ‘The Urdu in us’. The writer is an Urdu critic, poet and literary historian.
