4 A HISTORY OF URDU LITERATURE

3. Urdu was called rekhta because it consisted of Hindi

into which Arabic and Persian words had been poured.
4. It is a musical term introduced by Amir Khusrau to
mean a harmonising of Hindi words. with Persian melodies.
5. It means a wall firmly constructed of different
materials, as Urdu is of diverse linguistic elements. This is I
the opposite of (2 ).
The l,\1ost Important Urdu .Poets. Urdu poetry is
such a maze, that a useful purpose may be served if the THE HISTORY OF URDU
leading poets are indicated. There will be diversity of M h has been written on the
opinion about. such a list, for people differ in temperament How Urdu Began. ~c, d 1' itself is Turkish. and
and in attituqe towards modern thought. No finality. is origin of Urdu. The '~or ~ t !ish 'horde' is said to be
claimed for the views here expressed, but they may be a means 'army' or 'camp ;M our I' ngarmy stationed in Delhi
guide. The names of poets from the Deccan may occasion connected wtt h I't The .us tms t!te Urdil or Urdu e M u-
surprise, for their greatness is not realised in north India. from 1193 onwards was know_n a sually believed that while
The old tagkira writers say little about them and only Vall 'allii, the Exalted ~Y t~~ ~~~bitants of the city spoke
is generally known. this army spoke Per~tal_l, is no reason however to
1. THE GREATEST POETs; The groups are in order of rank, the Braj dialec~ of Hmdt.thT~:~:uage of Delhi. The pe'?pl~
the names within each group in order of date. (a) Mir, think that Bra] was ever e . t of that f"rm of Hmdt .
Galib,Anis. (b) Vall, Sanda, Na?;ir of Agra, Iqbal. (c) Dard, of the capital spo:e "a~0~~~l~~f:~ei: employed to~ay in all
Mlr I:Iasan, Dag, I:Iali, Akbar. ,now known asK. ap FI'
1
di oetry. The idea that the
2. THE BEST Q~L WRITERS in order; Mir, Vall, Dard, Hhidi. prose and m most m P onsideration.
Ga!ib, Mu~J:tafi, Atish, Dag, Amir Minai. army spoke Persian ~lso requ~es~:c Panjab in 1027 and
. 3, THE BEST QAil!!>A WRITERS in order ; Sanda, ?;auq, Mai).miid of Gaznt anne~~ in Lahore. . The famous
Nu~ratl. . settled his arm~ qfK~~~~P( ~~l048) lived there for .some
9
4. THE BEST MARSIYA WR!TERS in order: Anis, Dabir, scholar, ~lberum of "ii- Sanskrit ansi prosecuted hts re-
Munis, Khallq, :?am'i?; and the Dakhni writers Hashim time while he studt~ M h -d's descendants held the
'Ali, Mirza. searches .m t o Hindmsm
. h . ,.a mu e defeated by t h err
heredi-
5. THE BEST MANAVI WRITERS in order: Mir J:Iasan, Panjab ti111187, when t eydwGer - ho had already sacked
Aar, Mir, Naslm, MUmin, and the Dakhni writers Gavva~i, tary foes under Muhamma Ort w
f Dlhi "'as Qutb .ud D'm A I'bak '
. Nu~ratl, '!'ab'i, Vajhi. . Gazni. The first sultan o e ' t of 'M:uhammad Gori
6. POETS WHO EXCELLED IN GENERAL POETRY in order a native of Tur~ista.n, but a se~'::'captured .Delhi in 1193
of date: King Quli Qu~b Shah, N"!!lr of Agra, I:Iali, Akbar, and after;;ards hts chtef.gen~~~;r in 1206 took the title <;>f
Kai1 of the Deccan, Iqbal. During the past 50 years ari.d on the deatthhtoft' ht! foreign troops were quartered . m
perhaps the best, apart from poets already mentioned, Sultan. From a rm . . .
have been Azad, Jaliil, Tasllm, Isma'll, Shad. - . . l of Ike Royal Aszatzc Soczety,
As I have explained m the Jo;:r~~ari' femi!'~ile of kharli, ~eans
The greatest poem of the last lOOyears is probably Bali's
Musaddas, unless we regard Anis's Elegies as one poem.
1

Octo~r, 1926,JJ: TJ~;k

standmg, and ar
::a': the stEm?ard, ~urrent ~:1t~~rh~
as first used durmg J,. }.J3 by - bas
language, The word.w La!!' La! in Prem Sagar. Kkarz
Niisiketof.;kkyiin and .!'Y u. .
nothing to do with kltarz' pure.
 6 A HISTORY OF URDU LITERATURE
we must remember th!t p:; .
the city. Urdu is alwa s s "d . .
to have ansen m Delhi, but
the Panjab and began to live ~~:n-speaking soldiers entered
the first sultan sat on the th ere, ~early ~00 years before
posed. to have happened in D:~;r D~lht. What is sup-
0
t)le descendants and st1ccessors of the original invaders
place m Lahore centuries earl' . must, m fact, have. taken
Panjab; they doubtless int Ier. ~hese_ troops lived in the
within a few years of thei:r-m~rrted With the people and
language of the country m ~~~v~l ~ust have spoken the
Persian mother tongue. ' o I e o course by their own
We can picture what ha d .
met in daily intercourse ,!~ene d Ihe soldiers and people
It _had _to be either Persian orn~lde Paa _co'?mon language
bemg m an enormous rna. . . . . UJabt, and the people
itself at the expense of i'i':'ty, ~heir language established
soldiers continued to talk p e ~t er. For some time the
the local vernacular with th~r~I~n b~mong themselves and
but ultimately Persian died ou:nt: Ita~t~ of t~e country ;
the language of the court fi . ' oug It contmued to be
for hundreds of years afterr~i ~ ~ahore, and later in Delhi,
1
spoken in the army. In t;e a ~eased. to be ordinarily
used there were many Arab' Persmn which the invaders
large number of these were ~c tn~ a fe'Y' T1,rkish words; a
What happened in Lah m ro nee~ mto India.
points what was ha e _ore _and Delhi resembled in many
Conquest. The N PP mug Ill England after the Nor1nan
ormans spe k' d'
came into an Anglo-Sax~n- a ~?g a mlect of French,
French the court Jan u spea mg country and made
enced the speech of ~h:ge. Though they RTeatly influ-
three centuries they had ~~~q~~~d country, yet within
England to-day speaks English bfrr d o~n. l~nguage, and
French. '!'he changes produced' in ~ e!'' ;tb IS true, with
of the Nor1nans hav<o probabl b ng IS Y the coming
case they were greater th y t~en exaggerated, but in any
and Hindi by the M r an ose produced in Panjabi
poration of many loan~:as~~- Apart from tc1e incor-
small. These lenguages rem .e ~~11uence. was remark"bly
in their pronouns verbs nnm a'fe xrachcally unchanged
The chief chang~ was j erb s an grammatical'system
corresponds very closelyntov~:a:lary. In all this English
THE HISTORY OF URDU 7
Mul).ammad Gor! seized the Panjab in 1187 and his
troops under Qutb ud Din Aibak, after consolidating their
position, swept on to Delhi, but they cannot have left a
hostile Muslim army in the rear. We may be certain that
joined them, and that the two armies marched together to
Delhi, which was taken, as we .have seen, six years later.
When, twelve years later still, the new emperor was installed
in Delhi, a large proportion of his soldiers must have
spoken by :>reference a language very like what we think
of as early Urdu (the. remainder speaking Persian). The
basis of that language was Panjabi as it emerged from the
Prakrit stage, and it cannot have diflered from the Khari
of that time nearly as mnch as the two languages differ to-
day. The important fact is that Urdu really began not in
Delhi but in Lahore, and that its underlying language WqS
not Kbari (much less Braj, as often stated), but old Panjabi.
Later on this first form of Urdu was somewhat altered by
Khari as spoken round Delhi, but we do not know that Btaj
exercised any influence at all.
The formation of Urdu began as soon as the Gaznavi
forces settled in Lahore, i.e. in 1027. At what time they
_gave up Persian :>nd took to speaking Panjabi-Urdu alone,
we cannot tell, probably it was a ma.tter .of a very few
years. One J-.undred and sixty-six years later the joint God
and Gaznavi troops entered Delhi. In a short time Urdu
was probably their usual language of conversation. We
must .t)lerefore distinguish two stages: (1) beginning in
1027, Lahore-Urdu, consisting of old Panjabi overlaid by
Persian; (2) beginning in 1193, Lahore-Urdu, over1~id by
old Khari; not very different then from old Panjabi, and
fu::ther influenced by Persian, the whule becoming Delhi-
Urdu. . .. ..
When Mul).ammad 'fuglaq invaded the Deccan and
founded Daulatablid (1326), and twenty-one years later
when 'Ala ud Din Bahmani rebelled against him arid
became the first ruler or the Bahmani dynasty, the Mul).am-
madan troops who accompanied them spoke Urdu as their
mother tongue, and the langue.ge which grew up among the
Marathi-, Telugu- and Kanarese-speaking inhabitants who

8 A HISTORY OF URDU LITERATUR.l!:
became Muslims, was not Persian but Urdu. It is worthy
of ?ote that whereas in the north the invaders gave u
therr own tongue and adopted Urdu, their sucoessors an~
descendants managed to impose that language, now their
own, on a large part of the Deccan, where to-day it js spoken
by nearly three million people. . We must therefore revise our thoughts ~f both K a!I
Early History of Urdu. We have no accurate know-
J,~ge of spoken Urdu in the early years of its existence.
Amir Khusrau (c. 1255-1325) tells us in his Persian works
that he wrote a great deal in 'Hindavl,' but only a little has
.:;orne down to us ; an\'! what we now possess, perhaps 1 000
line~, has doubtless been considerably altered iti the pas~ge
of trme, so ~hat we cannot regard it as correctly showing the
speech of .hiS day. We must however emphasize the fact
tha~ he did compose literary works in Hindi or Urdu
per.~ :ps both, and that nearly 200 years ago the poet Ml;
Taqi accepted as gem;ine some of the verses which we have
to-day. We know this because Mlr refers to them in his
anthology.
The word 'Hindi' is used in both a wide and a n:rrrow
~ens~. _In the wi?e sense it includes the languages spoken
_u
m ~Ihar~ .the mted Provinces of Agra and Oudh, Central
India, ~aJpt:ttana and the S.E. Panjab as far as Ambala.
One n;tght mclu~e ~umaon and Ga<;lhval. In the narrow
sense It means Hmdt prop<:r, the chief dialects of which are
!3raj ~~d _Khar!. ~he fu:st writers. of Hindi wrote principally
m Ethan, Avadht, BraJ and RaJputanl; languages which
were used for .both composition and conversation. Muslim
authors occasw~ally emp~oyed one of "these, but more
comm~mly Pers~an. Khap, though widespread as a con-
versatiOn~! medmtn, v.:as not much used for literature.
I.ndee.d wtth the exceptiOn of Amlr Khusrau's few hundred
hnes JUSt mentioned, which are mostly in Braj and the works
of the poet S!tal (c.1723), we have no work u{ it till we come
to the verge of the nineteenth century.
':r':_e. U~d~ ?rat;ch of Kharl has a different history.
Mz ra7ul Ashzqzn, a tract by Banda Navaz which has
.recently been printed, and is probably genuine: belongs to
the end of the fourteenth century. Seeing that the author
left the Decc::n when he was fifteen and lived thereafter
THE HISTORY OF URDU
9
in Delhi not returning to the Deccan till he was an old man, .
we may 'take his prose as showing the Delhi idiom of that
time. In the fifteenth century there is Shah Mirlig Jj ef the
Deccan, who has left four extant works, and. frO?J that
time the stream of literature goes on ever widenmg and
deepening. . h -
and Urdu. Khari is contemporary with BraJ and Avadht;
its beginning may be put at A.D. 900 or 1000. The com-
mencement of Urdu may be dated any time after 10~7,
when the Muhammadan army of occupation began ~o hve
in Lahore Khari as a spoken language has a contmuous
history of' nearly. a thousand ye!\rS; as a literary languag~,
if we Qmit Amir Khusrau and QUe or twQ Qther ~ut~QrS, It
dates from the end Qf the eighteenth century. It IS difficult
to distinO'uish precisely between Khari and Urdu. For
practical purposes the distinctiQn lies . in the f~ct that
h
Khari uses very few, and Urdu very many, Perstan .and
Arabic. wo.rds. SQme peQp]e, both Europeans and Indmns,
have made the use of Hindi or Persian metres the to~c~
stone, but that distinction can be applied only to poetry.; tt.IS
inapplicable to. prose. In poetry, too, some authors, w!ID~
not varying their language, have employed now Hmdt
metres, and now Persian. Even at the present ~ay t~er~
are poets who sometimes write Urdu poetry m Hindi
metres. . . . . .
There has been a strange reversal of the decrees of fate.
The despised Kharl language, confined to conv~rsati~n, ,and
'considered {mfit for poetry, was not used for senous htel'llo/
purposes, except by Sital and perhaps Amir Khus!!\u,bll
near 1800 ; so milch so that even to-day some persons, not
realising that it haS had a vigorousex.istence among the co~-
mon people since the time when it. t~ok t~e place of J';~kl'lt,
think that it wasinvented by lnsha Allah, Sadal Mtsr!'<?d
Lallii LaJ, In the Hindi sphete.it has nowturned ~>Ut}ts
rivals and ,;,;n soon be the only survivor so far as literacy
work' is concerned,. while in its Ul'du.forrri it has beenJor
centuries the mednnn of a. prosperous and growmg .
literatt1re.
It is important t0 remember that in the middle of the.

10 A HIS'l'ORY OF URDU LITERATURE
fourt~nth century there was no real difference between
Delhi Urdu and Dakhnl Urdu, but with .the establishment
o~ the separate Bahman1 dynasty the two dialects began to
dtverge.
Urd!lliteratur~ in its early stages wasmuch more con
versat10nal and S!~ple than it \Vas in later years. Probably
for that reason 1t resembles to a surprising degree the
spoken language of to-day. This resemblance must not be
used as an argument against the genuineness of an early
poem or prose work. It shows merely that the author
wr?~e the _la~uage as he spoke it. In later years men
wrtting a~ifictal.ly and, following foreign models produced
works which, dtvor'7'd from everyday idiom, differ widely
from the Urdu which we know now. To take two in-
stances. The Dakhn1 poen;s of Mul;tammad Qun Qutb Shah
bef_ore 1600, a?~ !he beautiful D_akhn1 poem Qutb Mushtarz,
w11t!en by VaJhl ~n 1609, are easter to read than Shah Na$1r's
wntings m the nmeteenth century. . born in Mir's old age.
Th~ Na"?'e Urdu. An important question is how the
word Urdu cam~ to ?e applied to a language. 'We haye
seen that the s'?ldters m Delhi at a very early date gave up
the ~se of Persmn among themselves and began to speak a
modified form of the vernacular. In Delhi this form of
speech, to distinguish it from the usual Khar1 BoH (and
probably also from Persian), was called Zabiin. i Urdu, the
language of the Army, or Zabiin i Urdu e Mu'allii the
language of the Exalted or Royal Army. As the soldiers
and the people in~ern;ixed and intermarried, the language
spread oyer t~e ~tty mto the suburbs and even into the
surroundJ?g .dtst:tct.. It was natural to keep up the separate
name todtstingutsh 1t not only from the unmixed.ytlrnacular
of the pe?p~e, ~ut 3;lso from the Persian of the court. This
doub~e ~1stmct10n IS not unimportant. It is possible, too,
t~at myme the name served to mark still. another distincc
tto?, VIZ: between the speech of Delhi ~nd that of Lucknow.
Itts, sup~o~ed that gradually the word , zaban' was dropJ:led,
an,d Ur<tu came to be used alone.
l11this explanation there is a difficulty. Though the
royal ca!)IP was established in Delhi. <:luring the time of
~!bud DtnAibak in1206, the earliest known examJ:lle of
' '. .- ' .' .' . ' .. ' .
THE HISTORY OF 'URDU 11
the employment of the word 'Urdu,' standing by itself and
meaning the Urdu language, is in the poems of Mu$l;taf1,
1750-1824, which are unfortunately undated, and in any case
have only .in part been printed. Gilchrist uses it in his
Grammar (1796). The earliest examples of the phras~,Zahiin
i Urdil, the language ofthe Camp or the Urdu language, are
in Tazkira e Gulziir i Ibrahim by 'AU Ibrahim Khag (1783)
and iD: Mushafi's Tazkira e Situ 'arii e Hindz (1794): In this
title we must note the word 'Hindi' (meaning 'Urdu'). The
expression Zabiin i Urdu e mu'allii (e Shiiltja!tiiniihiid Dikli),
the language of the . Royal Camp, or the Exalted Urdu
language (ofShahjahanabad, Delhi) occurs in the anthology
Nikiit usk S!tu'arii by Mir Taqi (1752). In myam ud Din
Qaim's anthology M ak!tzan i Nikiit (17 54) we find mu4avira
e ()rdu e mu'allii,.the idiom ofthe Royal Camp. 'Arsh, the-
son of Mir Taqi, speaks ot himself as Urdu e mu'allii
kii zabiir~.dii?!, one well acquainted with the Urdu e Mu'alla
language. His date is unknown, but he seems to have been
.
Now the earliest of .these is five and a half centuries.
i after the foreign army had settled in Delhi; and we natur-
ally ask why during all this long period the language never
received . the name 'Urdu,' and why. people suddenly
thought of that name after the lapse of so long a time,
when it had ceased to have any particular meaning. This
period of 550 years could perhaps be reduced;_ it has .been
claimed, but not proved, that the royal camp m Dellrl WliS
not known as the Urdu till the time of Babur, who. came.
direct from Turkistan with a Tur-ki force in 1526. It is a
doubtful point. We may admit that before his time the
foreign recruits had nearly all been Persian speakers or
descendants of Persian speakers~ But on the other band the I'
word 'Urdu' for army had been in Persian since 1150, for.
it is found more than once in the Ja!tiiukusltii of Javaini
with that meaning.
.-The first example of it in India is said to be in the
Tuzuk i Biibttrz, comp~ed by the EmperorBabur himself
in 1529. Bttt .even if we. accept these later dates for the
first occurrence i~ India of the word' Urdu' with the mean-
ing of army, we still have to account for the fact that for
 12 A HISTORY OF URDU. LITERATURI~
THE HISTOR.V OF URDU 13 ~
r.

226 years, from 15213 to 1752 no oneseemstobave thought . " I

of calling the l~guage by that name, and that it was only from Central Asia into India. The M;1uryan Dynasty ~
was established before 320 !l.C., and Ashoka, 250 !!.C.; ruled
after 1752 that this was done, It is .almost incredible that
none of the historians of the Mugal period ever use<l the over a settled empire extending from Calcutta to beyond l
name; yet such seems to have been the case. The language
as spoken W!lS generally called Hindi; when employed for
Kabul. At that time Sanskrit was spoken over the whole of
north India ; there wete different dialects, but all were
Ir
closely connected with Vedic Sanskrit; It is remarkable that .I
literary, that is p<;>etical, purposes it was known as Rekhta
(see P. 3) or Hindi. Amir Khusrau and Shekh B~Jan there is practically nothing in the phonology of the modern
(d 1506) speak of Zabiin i Dihlam, the speech of Delhi; Aryan languages of India which GRI!not be directly derived'
while Vajhiin Sab Ras (1634) calls it Zabiin i Hindostiin from an early form of Sanskrit, essentially the same as that
the language 'of Hindustait. But n<;> one in the early day~ of the Vedas, . . . . .
spo~ <;>f 'Urdu.' Even in the end of the eighteenth There are to-day, if we exclude the Kafir group, approx-
century~'it was an uncommon word. People continued to imately 23 to 26 languages descended from Sanskrit. In the
talk of Hindi and Re)illta. As late as 1790 'Abd u!Qadir case of some, we can traee the.intermediate stages fairly well;
in the preface to his .Urdu translation of the Qur'an said in the case of others, we possess nothing between Sans)<rit
he. was translating not intoRekhta but into Hindi. and the modem language. .The following is a fairly
One interesting detail is still sub judice. It bas been assert complete list of the Indo-Aryan languages:
ed that the Persian dictionary, Mu~aJI'}Jid ul Fuzalii (1519) Sindhi Bihari
uses the phrase, ' in the language of the people of the Lahndi Upya
Urdu.' But it is claimed. on the other hand that the Panjabi Bengali (with Assamese)
words are not fouJ:[d in good MSS~ of the Dictionary; and Hindi Marathi
the MS. in the British Museum does itot appear to contain Gujrati (with Bhm) Singhalese
them. Even if it did, 'urdu' would not here be the name Rajputani (with Khandeshi) Dard languages:
of a language. It is .. a. fact worth noting tbat the word Pahari languages: Sh;ta
'Urdu' is not given in this Dictionary at all with any mean- Kumaoni Kashmir!
ing, either 'army' or any other. Possibly the explanation Ga<;lhwa!i (Central Pahari) Ko\Jistani
of the problem is that' Zabiin i Urdu, the speech' of the Western Pahari -Five allied languages :
, Camp, or some equivalent phrase, was in conversational Nepali . Chitrali, Tiriihi, Pashai,
use from the earliest times, and that gradually, centuries Avadhi or Purabi. (Eastern. Kalasha and Gavarbati
later, it was admitted to books, while the use of the word Hindi)
'Urdt!' alone, without zabiin, was still iater. But the subiect
requires furthednvestigation. .. - Of these, Hindi, which immediately. qoncems us, has two
The Place of Urdu an>ong Languages. The great important .dialects, Braj and Kha;i Boll ; Kha;i Bali again
Indo-European family of languages is divided into Italic, has three forms, (1) Urdu, which contains many Persian and
Teutonic, Keltic, Greek, Albanian, Slavonic, Armenian and Arabic words; (2) Literary Hindi, which has many Sanskrit
.Aryan st!b-families. The Aryan sub"f!lmily has two main words; and (3) Hindustani, a commonsense via media be-
branches, Iranian and Indo-Aryan or Sanskritic. (The .Kafir tween the othertwo, hardly to be distinguished from simple
languages may belong to the latter, but probably should Urdu. Finally, spoJten Urdu has two varieties: (i) Dakni
be classed by th.emselves as a third branch.) . During the or Dakhni, spoken in the Deccan, and (ii) Northern Urdu
course. of the second millennium !l.G. the Aryans came spoken in north In'dia.