Hindi-Urdu - History

History

Early forms of present day Hindi-Urdu (Hindustani) emerged from the Middle Indo-Aryan apabhramsha vernaculars of North India in the 7th–13th centuries CE. Amir Khusro, who lived in the 13th century CE during the Delhi Sultanate period in North India, used these forms (which was the lingua franca of the period) in his writings and referred to the language as Hindavi. The Delhi Sultanate, which comprised several Turkic and Persian dynasties that ruled from Delhi, was succeeded by the Mughal Empire in 1526.

Although the Mughals were of Timurid (Gurkānī) Turko-Mongol descent, they were Persianized, and Persian had gradually become the state language of the Mughal empire after Babur.

Towards the end of the Mughal period, with the fragmentation of the empire and the elite system, a variant of Khariboli, one of the successors of apabhramsha vernaculars at Delhi, and nearby cities, came to gradually replace Persian as the lingua franca among the educated elite upper class particularly in northern India, though Persian still retained much of its pre-eminence. The term Hindustani (literally "of Hindustan") was the name given to that variant of Khariboli.

For socio-political reasons, though essentially the variant of Khariboli with Persian vocabulary, the emerging prestige dialect became also known as Urdu (properly zabān-e Urdu-e mo'alla "language of the court" or zabān-e Urdu زبان اردو‎, ज़बान-ए उर्दू, "language of the camp" in Persian, derived from Turkic Ordū "camp", cognate with English horde; due to its origin as the common speech of the Mughal army). The more highly Persianized version later established as a language of the court was called Rekhta, or "mixed".

As an emerging common dialect, Hindi-Urdu absorbed large numbers of Persian, Arabic, and Turkic words, and as Mughal conquests grew it spread as a lingua franca across much of northern India. Written in the Perso-Arabic Script, it remained the primary lingua franca of northern India for the next four centuries (although it varied significantly in vocabulary depending on the local language) and achieved the status of a literary language, alongside Persian, in Muslim courts. Its development was centered on the poets of the Mughal courts of north Indian cities such as Delhi, Lucknow, Lahore, and Agra.

John Fletcher Hurst in his book published in 1891 mentioned that the Hindustani or Camp language or Language of the Camps of Moughal courts at Delhi was not regarded by philogists as distinct language but only as a dialect of Hindi with admixture of Persian. He continued: "But it has all the magnitude and importance of separate language. It is linguistic result of Mohammedan invasions of eleventh & twelfth centuries and is spoken (except in rural Bengal ) by many Hindus in North India and by Musalman population in all parts of India". Next to English it was the official language of British Government of India, was commonly written in Arabic or Persian characters, and was spoken by approximately 100,000,000 people.

When the British colonized India from the late 18th through to the late 19th century, they used the words 'Hindustani' and 'Urdu' interchangeably. They developed it as the language of administration of British India, further preparing it to be the official language of modern India and Pakistan. However, with independence, use of the word 'Hindustani' declined, being largely replaced by 'Hindi' and 'Urdu', or 'Hindi-Urdu' when either of those was too specific. More recently, the word 'Hindustani' has been used for the colloquial language of Bollywood films, which are popular in both India and Pakistan and which cannot be unambiguously identified as either Hindi or Urdu.