The Fault Lines of Hindi and Urdu
Sanjay Kumar
Similarly, historians of Hindi account for the absence of Khari Boli literature during this period by turning to Awadhi and Braj. Even here, the appropriation of Awadhi and Braj literary traditions is selective. Christopher King says, “Part of the process of defining ’Hindi’, then, involved affirming the earlier literary heritage of other regional dialects in the past, but rejected literary creations in the same dialects in the present.“9 Awadhi and Braj, which had evolved as full-fledged languages and had rich and flourishing literary traditions to their credit, were now reduced to being mere local dialects and were even cannibalized by Hindi. Similar is the fate which Kaithi script met at the hands of Devanagari.10 The process of canonization of Hindi literature is marked by such selective appropriations and exclusions. The fact that there are such gaps and discontinuities in literary histories of both Urdu and Hindi is quite revealing. The reason for such gaps and discontinuities is quite obvious; it is ideological and it has to do with their refusal to engage with each other’s traditions. Instead of searching for evidence of Khari Boli in Devanagari script only if the historians of Hindi literature had, as Francesca Orsini suggests, “looked for evidence of Khari Boli writing in the Urdu script and not limited their search to the categories of devotional [Bhakti] and ornate [Riti] poetry (the language of which was likely to be Braj), they would have found it.“11 Similarly, if the historians of Urdu literature had taken into consideration examples of what Imre Bangha calls “macaronic“ (mixed) Rekhata experiments in not only Persian script by Sufis but also in Nagari and even Gurumukhi and Kaithi scripts by Nirgun sant poets like Darya Das, Panjabi poets like Miharavan Sodhi and Krishna Bhaktas like Swami Haridas, they would have discovered a continuous tradition of Urdu, however slender. Bangha suggests that “in all its various forms, Rekhata literature, though neglected by modern scholarship, is more than one of the most important meeting points between Hindi and Urdu; it is the shared early life of the two gradually separated languages.“12 Another problem which plagues these literary histories is that the script is not always the basis on which these literary canons seem to have been drawn up. The equation “script-language-religion“ is not always at work. How else is one to explain positioning of Mulla Daud and Malik Muhammad Jayasi in the Hindi canon? Both Daud and Jayasi happen to be Muslims, they used Persian script in their literary compositions, they wrote their famous works Candaãyan and Padmaãvat respectively in the Persian Masnavi tradition, and yet they are not part of Urdu canon, but are positioned within the Hindi canon. The case of Rahim is more interesting. He was a Muslim noble in the court of Akbar who was conversant with many languages including Persian, Turki, Avadhi, Braj and Khari Boli and was said to have learnt even Sanskrit and Portuguese, but he chiefly wrote Braj poetry in Nagari script. While he is squarely placed in Hindi canon of writers, what has generally been overlooked is his cosmopolitanism and multilingualism−both reflected in the bold experiments that he made in his poetry by blending Persian vocabulary and motifs with those of vernaculars and Sanskrit. As Allison Busch in her analysis of Rahim’s poetry shows, “Rahim’s literary talents in Hindi ranged across many dialects (Avadhi, Braj and Khari Boli), and within these, various lexical registers ranging from sanskritised to tadbhava to pure Persian are all attested.“13 Kabir is an even more interesting case since in his case there had been no script to contend with as his verses were oral and not written, and they reveal the glorious confusion of vernaculars/dialects so much so that one cannot place Kabir in any one tradition. In his verses we find use of a wide variety of registers of different vernaculars/dialects essentially mixed. Despite being a Muslim by birth, he is not accepted into the canon of Urdu writers. Pages 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 |
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