Migration & languages

I turned off the Delhi-Agra Expressway on to the road that would take me to Aligarh, and the buzz in my ears vanished. Time coasted to a gentle halt, then eased into rewind mode. It was a beautiful spring day, with the kind of open skies that make you feel you can see beyond the horizon and into the past. The road was now two-lane, with the occasional truck loaded with sugar cane bound for the mills, a few cars, and scooters and bicycles moving lightly on two wheels. Then I passed over a bridge into the town my great-great-grandmother had left with her father and brothers a hundred and forty years ago, on another Indian migration. The next morning, I would be meeting with Irfan Habib, professor emeritus of history at Aligarh Muslim University.

His room was in the history department building, up a flight of stairs and part way down a corridor. I was early. A small electric heater hummed below his desk warming my feet, but the walls, furniture, books and papers on his desk and coffee table were sepia-toned, as if asserting their antiquity. I sat and collected my thoughts, waiting for him to come and tell me if I was on the right track.

My first question was the wrong one, and it served to derail our discussion for a bit. 'Urdu' was not the name given to this language until quite late, by which time the British were already here and all set to replace the Mughals as rulers of India. Before that, the language we now call Urdu, or Hindi, was merely one of many vernacular languages in a very polyglot society.

Around the year 1700 in Hyderabad, in the Deccan, the poet Jafar Zatalli started the shift away from Persian, the language of the royal court, by writing his ghazals not in Persian, but in a Persianized form of 'Hindi'. His ghazals expressed bold and radical ideas, critical of the monarchy, and he started a new literary tradition. Zatalli, his takhallus, or 'pen name', literally meant 'the one who talks nonsense', with the same sense of the court jester who speaks truth to power. Zatalli's mixed variety was as yet unnamed, and it kept to an earthy simplicity. At times he would even refer to it as 'Hindi':

Agarche huma kuḍāo karkartast

Bahindī-dashindī zubāN

Va lekin kisī ne bhalī yeh kahī

Jise piyū chāhe, suhāgan wahī

(Though it may seem like rubbish,

This Hindi language,

As they say:

Whoever the lover loves, she becomes his wife)

Later, it was the poet Mus'hafi, writing in Lucknow in 1780, who called the language 'Urdu' for the first time in writing:

Khudā rakhe zubāN hamne sunī hai Mīr-o-Mirzā kī

KahīN kisī mūNh se ham, e Mushāfī, Urdū hamārī hai

(May God preserve this language that I first heard somehow

From the mouth of Mir Taqi Mir and Mirza Sauda, oh Mus'hafi!

Urdu belongs to all of us!)

But this made no sense. How could such an obviously north Indian language have originated in southern India? And how did it all happen so late? Urdu had to have come from some earlier vernacular language that had begun its life in north India, and that dialect would have to have emerged much earlier, around the time that the Central Asians came into contact with the local people of north India. Wasn't that how new languages were born?

At last Professor Habib saw that I was not asking about literary Urdu. He paused and scrolled back a full millennium, and we started again.

Arabs had been coming to the western coast of India as traders in the Malabar region and along the Konkan-Gujarat coast since the fourth century CE, before the advent of Islam. These same visitors, after the seventh century CE, adopted Islam in their homeland and became the first Muslims to reach India. In Gujarat some of them even stayed back with their local families as trading communities.

Farther down the Malabar coast were the Mappila Muslims we met in Chapter 3, the descendants of male Arab traders and their local wives, and they became the first native Muslim community in India, converting as soon as Islam appeared in Arabia. Soon other local converts joined this group, which now makes up about a quarter of the population of Kerala.

The first conquest by an Arab army was in the year 712 when Muhammad bin Qasim conquered the province of Sindh, in the north-west, and made it a province of the Umayyad Caliphate. The next major conquest was in the tenth century, when Mahmud of Ghazni, from southern Afghanistan, conquered Punjab and made it a part of his Ghaznavid Empire.

In the twelfth century, another Afghan, Muhammad of Ghor, defeated the Ghaznavids and ousted them from north India. Ghori's conquest of Lahore in 1186 paved the way for Qutbuddin Aibak, his lieutenant and a former Mamluk slave from Turkic Central Asia, to become the first Sultan of Delhi. The Delhi Sultanate period lasted from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century and was as close to a Golden Age as one could hope for. There were five dynasties in that time: the Mamluks, the Khaljis, the Tughlaqs, the Sayyids and the Lodi dynasty. The first four of these dynasties were Central Asian Turkic in origin, and the last, the Lodi dynasty, was Pashtun. With the Delhi Sultanate, Turkic culture and language had arrived in India.

Ramızān āyı tārīkh sekkizyüz tokhsān toqquz da

Farghāna vilāyatı da onıkı yāshta pādıshāh oldūm.

(In the month of Ramzān of the year 899

In the twelfth year of my age I became king of the land of Farghana.)

(Excerpted with permission from Wanderers, Kings, Merchants, published by Penguin Random House)