How Urdu got associated with Muslims in India

Languages are basically a means of communication, expression of emotion, attitude and mood. But they are also associated with identity in various degrees. Identity is nationalistic, sub-nationalistic (ethnic) and, in some rare cases, also religious. In India, it so happened that Urdu got associated with the Indian-Muslim identity between the late 18th and the early 20thcenturies. Despite the fact that this language is spoken by both Hindus and Muslims and Muslims themselves speak a number of languages, mainly Bengali, Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi and Gujrati. Moreover, in the villages of UP and Bihar, both Hindus and Muslims actually speak the dialects of Hindi such as Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj Bhasha, Maithili etc. And yet, modern is associated with Islam in India in both India and Pakistan. How did this happen? This is explained in two parts. The first part deals with the movement for the purification of Urdu between 1750 to the early 1900s.
The movement for linguistic purification — which I call the ‘Islamisation of Urdu’ for reasons given below — started in the middle of the 18th century. The ancestor of Urdu was an Indic-oriented language. By this I mean that it had words of the local languages (bhaka or bhasha) and Sanskrit, and its allusions were to India and the local culture. Even though the script of some writings in this language is Perso-Arabic (Urdu), as opposed to Devanagari used in the Rajput writings, the language is similar. This change from the 1750s onwards which is the theme of this article.
In this purification movement, the Indic element was purged out by Muslim poets who, it appears, wanted a class-identity marker. Among the changes which occurred were: the removal of local (bhaka) and Sanskritic words, the substitution of Iranian and Islamic cultural allusions and metaphors in place of Indian and Hindu ones, and the replacement of the Indian conventions about the expression of love (woman to man) by Persian ones (man to woman or adolescent boy). Among the more than 4,000 words purged out were nain (eye),prem (love), mohan (dear one) etc. They do exist in songs and some other forms of poetry, of course, but they were banished from the ghazal. The grounds given in the writings of the poets who did all this — such as Shah Hatim (1699-1786), Imam Baksh Nasikh (d. 1838), Insha Ullah Khan Insha (1752-1818), etc — are not communal. They said that certain words are obsolete, unfashionable and rough. However, the end result was that words of Indic origin were the ones which were purged. That is one reason why I call this movement ‘Islamisation’. To take one concrete example, Hatim made a small extract of his voluminous poetic work calling it Divan Zada (1756). In the preface of this compilation, he writes in Persian that he “had stopped using the local idiom which was called ‘bhaka’” (bhaka goend mauquf karda). In its place, he tells us, he had started the refined idiom of the gentlemen of Delhi. And what was this? For an answer we have to go to Insha who defined it precisely in his Persian bookDarya-e-Latafat (1802). For Insha, this was the language of the Muslim elite of Delhi and Lucknow. Such notions about linguistic excellence were in circulation from the 14th century at least, as Amir Khusro’s own notions illustrate. However, during the 1750s the ideas of Sirajuddin Ali Khan Arzu (1687-1756), a Persian poet and linguist, had a stronger impact on Hatim and the other reformers. Arzu corrected an existing dictionary naming it Navadir-ul- Alfaz (1751). In this he indicates at several places that the standard language he had in mind was that of the elite of Delhi. And this idiom was far more Persianised and full of Islamic cultural references than the other styles of the language spoken elsewhere. So it was this Persianised language which became a marker of the educated, mostly Muslim but also Hindu Kaesth, identity during British India.
The impact of this movement was that it changed the identity of the common language of north India to two languages: Persianised Urdu and Sanskritised Hindi. The process of Sanskritisation started from 1802 onwards and it was a consequence of political awareness, incipient nationalism and reaction to Muslim cultural dominance. But this dominance had been contributed to; by the same movement of the Islamisation of Urdu so that a Hindu poet had to use Islamic phraseology in order to be appreciated. And yet, ironically and most unjustly, Azad’s book Ab-e-Hayat ignores both Hindu poets as well as women. There is no doubt that this process of Persianisation was a class movement meant to strike out an independent path rather than to write in Persian itself as the Iranians made fun of Indian-Persian. Moreover, from the 1830s onwards, Persian was being phased out from the domains of power. Both the Muslims and Kaesth Munshis were interested in using Persianised Urdu to retain their monopoly over jobs in UP and the Punjab. But the apprenticeship (ustadi-shagirdi) tradition, the poetry recitation sessions (Mushairas) which were assemblies of rivals and the cultural capital given to language was such that the allusions, references and the atmosphere, at least in the ghazal, was Persian and Muslim. That is why the movement alienated Hindus and that is why I call it the Islamisation of Urdu. Its greatest harm was that it began the division of Urdu-Hindi into Urdu and Hindi and this was continued by the Sankritisation of Hindi later. And yet, the spoken language of ordinary people remains undivided. It is only by recognizing this history and resolving to build upon common themes and continuities of this common language of north Indian cities that we exorcise the ghosts of the past from this subcontinent.
The first part of this article dwelt on the 18th century movement of linguistic reform (which I called ‘Islamisation of Urdu’) which Persianised Urdu and changed its Indic-orientation to Islamic culture. This part will take up another aspect of the same issue — the use of Urdu in education, printing and religious debate in British India. These factors also associated Urdu, which has an Indic base and was not associated with any specific religious community till the late 18th century, with Islam and Muslim identity in India.
Urdu-Hindi (the ancestor of both modern Urdu and Hindi) was not originally associated either with formal religious institutions or bureaucracy of the state in Mughal India. The language of the Islamic texts and liturgical practices was, of course, Arabic. However, religious texts were explained in Persian. Persian was also used for formal discourse on Islamic issues by the ulema. Yet, probably to communicate to the common people, some of the sufis used the local languages. Thus there are references to conversation, poetry recited during musical (sama’a) sessions and wise sayings in Urdu-Hindi from the 15th century onwards.
Remarkably enough, a religious reformer called Bayazid Ansari (1526-1572) wrote lines in what he called ‘Hindi’ in the Perso-Arabic script in his book entitled Khairul Bayan (1560-1570). The book was written in South Waziristan, in a Pashto-speaking area, but he thought this language useful for the propagation of his religious ideas. Anyway, despite this and other early writings, this ancestor of Urdu was not associated with Muslims. This association grew during the British period and, apart from the reasons given in Part-I of this article, it grew mainly because of the use of Urdu in printing, education and religious debate.
As Muslim political power shrank and anxiety spread about why this had happened, theulema began a movement of education and purification. This they did by writing small books (chapbooks) in the local languages. Thus there are nur namas, wafat namas, jang namas,lahad namas etc. in almost all languages used by Muslims in South Asia and, as it happens, most of them are in Urdu. This movement started in the 18th century and accelerated in the 19th and the 20th centuries. Indeed, if one consults the British reports on printing, one finds that two themes always predominate: religion and love. In some years, one may exceed the other but, as books on history and morals also have a religious colour, it may be true to say that religion mostly predominates printing.
This was a tremendous social change for all religious communities in India. Thus, although there was a secularizing trend introduced by the British also, there were more religious texts available in print than ever before. Hence, the consciousness of religious identity grew among all religious communities in India. And within Islam, the consciousness of sectarian identity grew also. Thus, on the one hand the modernist secular classes grew alienated from the religious masses. But on the other, the religious classes also grew alienated from each other and from other religious communities.
As for education, the madrassas started explaining the Arabic texts of the Dars-i-Nizami in Urdu though the classical exegeses were still in Persian. Meanwhile, Shah Abdul Qadir (1753-1827) and Shah Rafiuddin (1749-1817) translated the Holy Quran into Urdu. Exegeses of the Holy Quran, such as Murad Ullah Sanbhli’s Tafsir-e-Muradi (1771) came to be printed.
Indeed, by the 20th century, Urdu came to possess an impressive amount of Islamic literature. From the popular elegies for the martyrs of Karbala (marsiya) to devotional poetry; from stories read out among illiterate women (for example, Bibi Fatima ki Kahani) to scholarly works on Islamic philosophy; from the hagiographies of saints to the strictly monotheistic sermons of the Wahabis — all this varied literature was predominantly in Urdu.
Moreover, the sub-sects of Islam — not just the Sunnis and the Shias but the Ahle Hadith, Deobandis, Barelvis and others — wrote their polemical literature in Urdu. They indulged in debate (Munazara) in Urdu and refuted each others’ claims in the same language. Even those who are considered heretics — as Bayazid Ansari was in the 16th century — published their works, attacked their opponents and defended themselves in Urdu.
Whether one is looking at the fundamentalists, revivalists, modernists or heretics — one notices that their favorite medium of expression is Urdu. This incessant debate went on in face-to-face Munazaras and through constant pamphleteering throughout the 20th century and still continues. Even the works of the al Qaeda philosophy and the literature of the militants which is on sale outside mosques and Madrassas in Pakistan today is in Urdu though hardly any of them are mother-tongue speakers of the language. Moreover, Urdu is still the preferred language of instruction and examination in Pakistan and India. Even some Madrassas in Bangladesh give it some space though, of course, others use Bengali.
All these factors associate Urdu with Islam and the Islamic identity in the public mind in South Asia. While it is true that Urdu has also been associated with socialism (Taraqqi Pasand Adab), modernity and enlightenment (the Delhi Renaissance), the association with Islam predominates. The official discourse in Pakistan celebrates this in order to emphasize difference from India. The Indian Muslims, on the other hand, emphasize the composite character of Urdu and call it a joint product of the Hindu and Muslim civilizations. Yet, in India, too, Urdu is part of Muslim politics and efforts to preserve it necessarily dwell on the Perso-Arabic script and the Persian and Arabic diction of modern Urdu. Yet, a language may have more than one association. And it is always possible that Urdu can produce discourses of inclusiveness, tolerance and pluralism which can make it both a rich repository of Islamic literature and a language of enlightened, progressive and tolerant thought.