The language of the Deccan

Subah ki dhoop mein agar saaya lamba nazar aya, tum apney kad ke baarey mein ghalatfehmi mey mat rehna (If in the morning sun you see that your shadow is long, don’t get deluded about your height): Ghouse ‘Khamakha’ or ‘Khamakha’ Hyderabadi.

When people hear of Dakhani, they tend to associate it with the unique dialect spoken in Hyderabad, often understood by outsiders and locals as a form of hybridised Urdu. There are other associations with Dakhani too – ribald humour and wry social commentary; an idiom so earthy and direct that it might border on insult to more sensitive ears; philosophical reflections on human nature, as in the verse above.
Gautam Pemmaraju’s ambitious documentary A Tongue Untied: The Story of Dakhani explores the cultural history of the language. The production began as a grant from the Indian Foundation for the Arts in 2012 to document the tradition of humour and modern satire in performance poetry. The filmmaker soon found that mere documentation would be inadequate.

“This began as a very conventional art history project, but it has expanded slightly,” Pemmaraju said. “Very soon, the mandate expanded into not just looking at humour and satire through poetry, but at the elephant in the room, which was, ‘What is Dakhani?’ That became something I needed to tackle in order to explain everything else.”

Dakhani is far more than a dialect, he said. It is a language that developed in northern India alongside Urdu. When it moved to the Deccan plateau, it gradually developed a literary culture that lasted 350 years, from the 14th century when the language first seems to have appeared, to the early 18th, when Aurangzeb finally gained control of the Deccan.

People across the Deccan speak forms of Dakhani with regional infusions even today, from its northern reaches in Aurangabad, to Marathwada and Telangana, down southwards to the northern parts of Karnataka. There are a few Dakhani speakers in Tamil Nadu and north Kerala and in Hyderabad, there is even an entire news channel in Dakhani.

The film will be a culmination of conversations that began nearly seven years ago. Pemmaraju began his research by meeting poets and organisers of mushairas, or forums where poets congregate to perform their art.

Everyone Pemmaraju met had different ideas of and associations with the language, many of which were stereotypes. Pemmaraju decided to bring some academic rigour to his study. He also met scholars and experts such as historians and philologists who worked with language and history to pin down what Dakhani really was and what were its origins.

“The film in that sense is an aggregation of poets and artistry on one side, and an aggregation of scholarly opinions on the other side,” he said. “What I have been attempting to do is to put these into a narrative that makes sense and gives viewers a broad picture of the language and the colour of the language.”
With 60 interviews, 70 hours of filmed footage and 40 hours of archival footage, Pemmaraju has had a difficult task cutting the film down to a viewer-friendly length. The final film will be driven by around five experts in the language as well as by poets and artists. Parts of the film are devoted simply to hearing how people in different regions speak the language today.

“What is striking immediately is the diversity of Dakhani,” Pemmaraju said. “It’s a large region, and there are many forms of the language.” There were also many interlocutors, who had a lot to say because of their deep sense of ownership and pride in the language, he added.
While Dakhani is broadly thought of as a language of Muslims, its presence across the plateau also means that there is a rich body of material available in the Devanagari script, for instance, which has not been studied well. Dakhani is also heavily influenced by Marathi, and many Persian words that appear in Dakhani seem to have travelled there via Marathi.

One of Maharashtra’s famous poet saints, Amrutray of Paithan, even wrote a Sudamacharitra, or the story of Sudama, friend of Hindu god Krishna, in Dakhani at some point during the 18th century.
Mushairas have been a crucial part of the culture of Hyderabad and areas around it for decades now. From the 1970s and ’80s, the Hyderabadi diaspora began to organise mushairas where they stayed as well, leading to such gatherings in places as disparate as Chicago and countries in the Middle East.
Zinda Dilan-e-Hyderabad, an organisation formed in the mid-1960s to promote literary activities, particularly those pertaining to humour and satire, organised the first modern mushaira at that time. The organisation’s last mushaira was in 2010, but there are other groups who still conduct them.
Senior poets and scholars all agree that the quality of poetry is declining, Pemmaraju said. The texture of poetry has also changed greatly in recent times, he added. Early poetry tended to have pithy statements about poverty and the immediate circumstances of people. There was also a fair amount of sharp satire directed at religious figures, political leaders and even at poets themselves. Now, poetry is far more political.
Take one, by Sardar Asar, a couplet in a ghazal that says:
Bam key nazdeek jaako dekha mai,
Zafrani hai, hara thodeech hai
I went near a bomb to look at it
It was hardly green – it was saffron.
“Of course there is a milieu of social conservatism and its Muslim social culture which informs all this, but you can very clearly see the poetry has shifted from pithy folk wisdom to this direct commentary on politics,”

Pemmaraju pointed out.
That said, Dakhani is ultimately a cultural history of southern India, particularly of the “Islamic encounter” south of the Narmada that is pre-Mughal. “I don’t think it’s a counterpoint between the north and the south,” the filmmaker said. “It’s not a battle. It’s looking at a vernacular region’s oral traditions which reveal to us a richer history.”
.............................
Pemmaraju is now looking to raise funds to complete the editing of A Tongue Untied.
Gautam Pemmaraju. Courtesy Twitter.

History of URDU ; part-7

Urdu and Hindi 

Modern Standard Urdu and Modern Standard Hindi are considered different languages officially and in the sociolinguistic sense. However, they are not even distinct dialects, but rather different literary styles of a single dialect, Dehlavi. At the colloquial level they are virtually identical, to the point that speakers often cannot tell whether someone is speaking "Hindi" or "Urdu". There are minor differences in vocabulary and the pronunciation of foreign sounds, but the grammar is identical, and both styles have heavy Persian and Sanskrit influences. This ambiguous colloquial language is often called Hindustani, and is intentionally used in Bollywood films to target a more universal audience, including Pakistan. In formal and academic registers, however, the differences in vocabulary become substantial, with Urdu drawing from Arabic and Persian, and Hindi from Sanskrit, to the point where they become mutually unintelligible. There is also the convention, generally followed, of Urdu being written in Persio-Arabic script, and Hindi in Devanagari. 

These two standardised registers of Hindustani have become so entrenched as separate languages that often nationalists, both Muslim and Hindu, claim that Urdu and Hindi have always been separate languages. There have been some observations that the "fully standardized" Hindi register is artificial enough to make it partially incomprehensible to many people classified as Hindi speakers. 

Because of the difficulty in distinguishing between Urdu and Hindi speakers in India and Pakistan and estimating the number of people for whom Urdu is a second language the estimated number of speakers is uncertain and controversial. For further information the reader is referred to the following Wikipedia articles: Hindi-Urdu controversy, Hindustani language and Hindi

History of URDU ; part-6

Literature

Urdu has become a literary language only in recent centuries, as Persian and Arabic were formerly the idioms of choice for "elevated" subjects. However, despite its relatively late development, Urdu literature boasts some world-recognised artists and a considerable corpus. 

Religious

Urdu holds the largest collection of works on Islamic literature and Sharia after Arabic. These include translations and interpretation of the Qur'an as well as commentary on Hadith, Fiqh, history, spirituality, Sufism and metaphysics. A great number of classical texts from Arabic and Persian, have also been translated into Urdu. Relatively inexpensive publishing, combined with the use of Urdu as a lingua franca among Muslims of South Asia, has meant that Islam-related works in Urdu far outnumber such works in any other South Asian language. Popular Islamic books are also written in Urdu.

It is interesting to note that a treatise on Astrology was penned in Urdu by Pandit Roop Chand Joshi in the eighteenth century. The book, known as Lal Kitab, is widely popular in North India among astrologers and was written at a time when Urdu was very much spoken in the Brahmin families of that region. 

Literary

Secular prose includes all categories of widely known fiction and non-fiction work, separable into genres. The dāstān, or tale, a traditional story which may have many characters and complex plotting. This has now fallen into disuse. The afsāna, or short story, probably the best-known genre of Urdu fiction. The best-known afsāna writers, or afsāna nigār, in Urdu are Munshi Premchand, Saadat Hasan Manto, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Krishan Chander, Qurratulain Hyder (Qurat-ul-Ain Haider), Ismat Chughtai, Ghulam Abbas, and Ahmad Nadeem Qasimi. Towards the end of last century Paigham Afaqui's novel Makaan appeared with a reviving force for Urdu novel resulting into writing of novels getting a boost in Urdu literature and a number of writers like Ghazanfer, Abdus Samad, Sarwat Khan and Musharraf Alam Zauqi have taken the move forward. Munshi Premchand, became known as a pioneer in the afsāna, though some contend that his were not technically the first as Sir Ross Masood had already written many short stories in Urdu. Novels form a genre of their own, in the tradition of the English novel. Other genres include saférnāma (travel story), mazmoon (essay), sarguzisht (account/narrative), inshaeya (satirical essay), murasela (editorial), and khud navvisht (autobiography). 

Poetry

Urdu has been one of the premier languages of poetry in South Asia for two centuries, and has developed a rich tradition in a variety of poetic genres. The Ghazal in Urdu represents the most popular form of subjective music and poetry, while the Nazm exemplifies the objective kind, often reserved for narrative, descriptive, didactic or satirical purposes. Under the broad head of the Nazm we may also include the classical forms of poems known by specific names such as Masnavi (a long narrative poem in rhyming couplets on any theme: romantic, religious, or didactic), Marsia (an elegy traditionally meant to commemorate the martyrdom of Hazrat Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of Muhammad, and his comrades of the Karbala fame), or Qasida (a panegyric written in praise of a king or a nobleman), for all these poems have a single presiding subject, logically developed and concluded. However, these poetic species have an old world aura about their subject and style, and are different from the modern Nazm, supposed to have come into vogue in the later part of the nineteenth century. 

Probably the most widely recited, and memorised genre of contemporary Urdu poetry is nāt—panegyric poetry written in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. Nāt can be of any formal category, but is most commonly in the ghazal form. The language used in Urdu nāt ranges from the intensely colloquial to a highly Persified formal language. The great early 20th century scholar Ala Hazrat, Imam Ahmed Raza Khan Barelvi, who wrote many of the most well known nāts in Urdu (the collection of his poetic work is Hadaiq-e-Baqhshish), epitomised this range in a ghazal of nine stanzas (bayt) in which every stanza contains half a line each of Arabic, Persian, formal Urdu, and colloquial Hindi. The same poet composed a salām—a poem of greeting to the Prophet Muhammad, derived from the unorthodox practice of qiyam, or standing, during the mawlid, or celebration of the birth of the Prophet—Mustafā Jān-e Rahmat, which, due to being recited on Fridays in some Urdu speaking mosques throughout the world, is probably the more frequently recited Urdu poems of the modern era. Another notable nāt natkhwan (writer) is Maulana Shabnam Kamali whose nāts have been widely appreciated and acknowledged.

Another important genre of Urdu prose are the poems commemorating the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali Allah hiss salam and Battle of Karbala, called noha (نوحہ) and marsia. Anees and Dabeer are famous in this regard. 

Terminology

Ash'ār (اشعار, couplet). It consists of two lines called Misra (مصرعہ); first line is called مصرع اولی (Misra-e-oola) and the second is called (مصرعہ ثانی) (Misra-e-sānī). Each verse embodies a single thought or subject (singular) شعر She'r.

In the Urdu poetic tradition, most poets use a pen name called the takhallus. This can be either a part of a poet's given name or something else adopted as an identity. The traditional convention in identifying Urdu poets is to mention the takhallus at the end of the name. Thus Ghalib, whose official name and title was Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan, is referred to formally as Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, or in common parlance as just Mirza Ghalib. Because the takhallus can be a part of their actual name, some poets end up having that part of their name repeated, such as Faiz Ahmad Faiz.

The word takhallus is derived from Arabic, meaning "ending". This is because in the ghazal form, the poet would usually incorporate his or her pen name into the final couplet (maqta) of each poem as a type of "signature".

History of URDU ; part-5

Writing system 

The Urdu Nastaʿliq alphabet, with names in the Devanāgarī and Latin alphabets

Persian script

Urdu is written right-to left in an extension of the Persian alphabet, which is itself an extension of the Arabic alphabet. Urdu is associated with the Nastaʿlīq style of Persian calligraphy, whereas Arabic is generally written in the simpler Naskh style. Nasta’liq is notoriously difficult to typeset, so Urdu newspapers were hand-written by masters of calligraphy, known as katib or khush-navees, until the late 1980s. 

Kaithi script

Urdu was also written in the Kaithi script. A highly Persianized and technical form of Urdu was the lingua franca of the law courts of the British administration in Bengal, Bihar, and the North-West Provinces & Oudh. Until the late 19th century, all proceedings and court transactions in this register of Urdu were written officially in the Persian script. In 1880, Sir Ashley Eden, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal abolished the use of the Persian alphabet in the law courts of Bengal and Bihar and ordered the exclusive use of Kaithi, a popular script used for both Urdu and Hindi. Kaithi's association with Urdu and Hindi was ultimately eliminated by the political contest between these languages and their scripts, in which the Persian script was definitively linked to Urdu. 

Devanagari script

More recently in India, Urdu speakers have adopted Devanagari for publishing Urdu periodicals and have innovated new strategies to mark Urdū in Devanagari as distinct from Hindi in Devanagari. The popular Urdu monthly magazine, महकता आंचल (Mahakta Anchal), is published in Delhi in Devanagari in order to target the generation of Muslim boys and girls who do not know the Persian script. Such publishers have introduced new orthographic features into Devanagari for the purpose of representing Urdu sounds. One example is the use of अ (Devanagari a) with vowel signs to mimic contexts of ع (‘ain). To Urdu publishers, the use of Devanagari gives them a greater audience, but helps them to preserve the distinct identity of Urdu when written in Devanagari. 

Roman script

Urdu is occasionally also written in the Roman script. Roman Urdu has been used since the days of the British Raj, partly as a result of the availability and low cost of Roman movable type for printing presses. The use of Roman Urdu was common in contexts such as product labels. Today it is regaining popularity among users of text-messaging and Internet services and is developing its own style and conventions. Habib R. Sulemani says, "The younger generation of Urdu-speaking people around the world, especially Pakistan, are using Romanised Urdu on the Internet and it has become essential for them, because they use the Internet and English is its language. Typically, in that sense, a person from Islamabad in Pakistan may chat with another in Delhi in India on the Internet only in Roman Urdū. They both speak the same language but would have different scripts. Moreover, the younger generation of those who are from the English medium schools or settled in the west, can speak Urdu but can’t write it in the traditional Arabic script and thus Roman Urdu is a blessing for such a population." Roman Urdu also holds significance among the Christians of Pakistan and North India. Urdū was the dominant native language among Christians of Karachi and Lahore in present-day Pakistan and Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh Rajasthan in India, during the early part of the nineteenth and twentieth century, and is still used by Christians in these places. Pakistani and Indian Christians often used the Roman script for writing Urdū. Thus Roman Urdū was a common way of writing among Pakistani and Indian Christians in these areas up to the 1960s. The Bible Society of India publishes Roman Urdū Bibles which enjoyed sale late into the 1960s (though they are still published today). Church songbooks are also common in Roman Urdū. However, the usage of Roman Urdū is declining with the wider use of Hindi and English in these states. 

Differences with Perso-Arabic script

Perso-Arabic script has been extended for Urdu with additional letters ٹ,ڈ,ڑ. In order to make the language suitable for the people of South Asia (mainly Pakistan), two letters ہ and ی have added dimensions in use. ہ is used independently as any other letter in words such as ہم (we) and باہم (mutual). As an extended use, ہ is also used denote uniquely defined phonetics of South Asian origin. Here it is referred as do-chashmi he and it follows the nearest letters of the Perso-Arabic script to render the required phonetic. Some example of the words are دھڑکن (heartbeat), بھارت (India). On the other hand ی is used in two vowel forms: Chhoti ye (ی) and Badi ye (ے). Chhoti ye denotes the vowel sound similar to "ea" in the English word beat as in the word ساتھی (companion). Chhoti ye is also used as the Urdu consonant "Y" as in word یار (companion/friend). Badi ye is supposed to give the sound similar to "a" in the word "late" (full vowel sound - not like a diphthong) as in the word کے (of). However, in the written form both badi ye and chhoti ye are same when the vowel falls in the middle of a word and the letters need to be joint according to the rules of the Urdu grammar. Badi ye is also used to play a supporting role for a diphthong sound such as the English "i" as in the word "bite" as in the word مے (wine). However, no difference of ye is seen in words such as کیسا (how) where the vowel comes in the middle of the written word. Similarly the letter و is used to denote vowel sound -oo similar to the word "food" as in لوٹ (loot), "o" similar to the word "vote" as in دو (two) and it is also used as a consonant "w" similar to the word "war" as in وظیفہ (pension). It is also used as a supportive letter in the diphthong construction similar to the "ou" in the word "mount" as in the word کون (who). و is silent in many word of Persian origin such as خواب (dream), خواہش (desire). It has diminutive sound similar to "ou" in words such as "would", "could" as in the words خود (self), خوش (happy). The vowel/accent marks (اعراب) mainly support the core Arabic vowels. Non-Arabic vowels such as -o- in mor مور- (peacock) and the -e- as in Estonia (ایسٹونیا) are referred as مجہول (alien/ignorant phonetics) and hence are not supported by the vowel/accent marks (اعراب). A description of these vowel marks and the word formation in Urdu can be found at this website. 

Encoding Urdu in Unicode

Like other writing systems derived from the Arabic Script, Urdu uses the 0600-06FF Unicode range. Certain glyphs in this range appear visually similar (or identical when presented using particular fonts) even though the underlying encoding is different. This presents problems for information storage and retrieval. For example, the University of Chicago's electronic copy of John Shakespear's "A Dictionary, Hindustani, and English" includes the word 'بهارت' (India). Searching for the string "بھارت" returns no results, while querying with the (identical-looking in many fonts) string "بهارت" returns the correct entry. This is because the medial form of the Urdu letter do chashmi he (U+06BE) - used to form aspirate digraphs in Urdu - is visually identical in its medial form to the Arabic letter hāʾ (U+0647; phonetic value /h/). In Urdu, the /h/ phoneme is represented by the character U+06C1, called gol he (round he), or chhoti he (small he).

In 2003, the Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing (CRULP) - a research organization affiliated with Pakistan's National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences - produced a proposal for mapping from the 1-byte UZT encoding of Urdu characters to the Unicode standard. This proposal suggests a preferred Unicode glyph for each character in the Urdu alphabet.

History of URDU ; part-4

Vocabulary

Urdu has a vocabulary rich in words with and Middle Eastern origins. The language's Indic base has been enriched by borrowing from Persian and Arabic. There are also a smaller number of borrowings from Chagatai, Portuguese, and more recently English. Many of the words of Arabic origin have been adopted through Persian and have different pronunciations and nuances of meaning and usage than they do in Arabic.

Levels of formality 

Urdu in its less formalised register has been referred to as a rekhta (ریختہ, [reːxt̪aː]), meaning "rough mixture". The more formal register of Urdu is sometimes referred to as zabān-e-Urdu-e-mo'alla (زبان اردو معلہ [zəbaːn eː ʊrd̪uː eː moəllaː]), the "Language of the Exalted Camp", referring to the Imperial Bazar.

The etymology of the word used in the Urdu language for the most part decides how polite or refined one's speech is. For example, Urdu speakers would distinguish between پانی pānī and آب āb, both meaning "water" for example, or between آدمی ādmi and مرد mard, meaning "man". The former in each set is used colloquially and has older Hindustani origins, while the latter is used formally and poetically, being of Persian origin.

If a word is of Persian or Arabic origin, the level of speech is considered to be more formal and grand. Similarly, if Persian or Arabic grammar constructs, such as the izafat, are used in Urdu, the level of speech is also considered more formal and grand. If a word is inherited from Sanskrit, the level of speech is considered more colloquial and personal 

That distinction has likenesses with the division between words from a French or Old English origin while speaking English. 

Politeness

Urdu syntax and vocabulary reflect a three tiered system of politeness called ādāb. Due to its emphasis on politeness and propriety, Urdu has always been considered an elevated, somewhat aristocratic, language in South Asia. It continues to conjure a subtle, polished affect in South Asian linguistic and literary sensibilities and thus continues to be preferred for song-writing and poetry, even by non-native speakers.

Any verb can be conjugated as per three or four different tiers of politeness. For example, the verb to speak in Urdu is bolnā (بولنا) and the verb to sit is baiţhnā (بیٹھنا). The imperatives "speak!" and "sit!" can thus be conjugated five different ways, each marking subtle variation in politeness and propriety. These permutations exclude a host of auxiliary verbs and expressions which can be added to these verbs to add even greater degree of subtle variation. For extremely polite or formal situations, nearly all commonly used verbs have equivalent formal synonyms (Row 5 below). The phrase category '[āp] bolo', mentioned in Row 3 below, is associated with the Punjabi usage 'tusi bolo' and is rarely used in written Urdu. It is considered grammatically incorrect, particularly in the Gangetic Plain, where the influence of Punjabi on Urdu is minimal.

Literary*              [tu] bol!               تو بول                [tu] baiţh!           تو بیٹھ

Casual and Intimate        [tum] bolo.         تم بولو               [tum] baiţho      تم بیٹھو

Polite and Intimate         [āp] bolo              آپ بولو               [āp] baiţho.        آپ بیٹھو

Formal yet Intimate        [āp] bolen           آپ بولیں            [āp] baiţhen.      آپ بیٹھیں

Polite and Formal             [āp] bolīye          آپ بولیئے       [āp] baiţhīye.     آپ بیٹھیئے

Ceremonial / Extremely Formal                 [āp] farmaīye     آپ فرمایئے       [āp] tašrīf-rakhīye.          آپ تشریف رکھیئے

Similarly, nouns are also marked for politeness and formality. For example, uskī vālida, "his mother" is a politer way of say uskī ammī. Uskī vālida-mohtarmā is an even more polite reference, while saying uskī mān would be construed as derogatory. None of these forms are slang or shortenings, and all are encountered in writing. 

Expressions are also marked or politeness. For example, the expression "No!" could be nā, nahīn or jī-nahīn in order of politeness. Similarly, "Yes!" can be hān-jī, hān, jī or jī-hān in order of politeness.