Some myths are so deep-rooted that one has
to work really hard to make people, especially students face facts. One
such myth is about the origin of Urdu. Most of our students subscribe
to the view that Urdu is a ‘lashkari zaban’ or ‘camp language’. With due
apologies, let me add that even some of our teachers, too, believe in
this old notion that was proved wrong long ago.
According
to the popular myth, Urdu is a ‘camp language’ or ‘lashkari zaban’
because it originated in the army camps of the Mughals. The reasoning —
if it can be called as such at all — behind the so-called theory is that
Urdu is a mixture of words taken from different languages such as
Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Hindi. The soldiers who spoke these
languages were recruited to the Mughal army and to communicate among
themselves they used this new language, and thus Urdu was born. People
holding this view cite the fact that ‘Urdu’ is a Turkish word and it
literally means ‘lashkar’ or ‘army’ or ‘army camp’. Interestingly, there
is hardly any language in the world that has not absorbed words from
other languages.
English, being most
‘open’ of them all, has, according to David Crystal, borrowed from over
100 languages, but nobody has ever called English a mixture of
different languages.
It was Mir
Amman (1750-1837) who first presumed Urdu was born that way. In his
preface to ‘Bagh-o-Bahar’ (1802), he wrote that Mughal emperor Shah
Jahan (who reigned between 1628 and 1658 made Delhi his capital and named its bazaar ‘Urdu-e-moalla’. According
to Hafiz Mahmood Sherani, what Mir Amman had written about Urdu’s origin
was paraphrased by many writers over the next 100 years or so, and it
included figures like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Muhammad Hussain Azad, Syed
Ahmed Dehlvi (compiler of ‘Farhang-e-Aasifya’), Chiranji Lal (compiler
of ‘Makhzan-e-muhavraat’), Imam Bakhsh Sehbai and, in the 20th century,
Hakeem Shamsullah Qadri. This repetition naturally lent credence to the
theory and it became ‘common knowledge’ that Urdu was a ‘camp language’,
made up of words from different languages. Even scholars like A.F.
Rudolf Hoernle and G.A. Grierson were misled and believed in the theory
initially. But when Grierson carried out massive research on the
dialects and languages of India he admitted his mistake. After writing
in the ninth volume of his famous ‘Linguistic survey of India’ (1916)
that “Literary Hindustani [Urdu] is based on the vernacular Hindustani
spoken in the Upper Doab and in the Western Rohilkhand”, Grierson adds
in the footnotes that “it will be noticed that this account of
Hindustani and its origin differs widely from that which has been given
hitherto by most authors (including the present writer), which was based
on Mir Amman’s preface to the ‘Bagh-o-Bahar’. According to him Urdu was
a mongrel mixture of the languages of the various tribes who flocked to
the Delhi bazar”.
Now the question is: why is this theory of so-called camp language incorrect?
Hafiz
Mahmood Sherani and Shams-ur-Rahman Farooqi have described in detail
that the word Urdu was in use much earlier than the Mughal period and it
had carried different nuances through centuries. The word ‘Urdu’ was
used for this language much later, in fact in the last quarter of the
18th century, and in the beginning the word ‘Urdu’ had quite different
meanings. Also, the Urdu language has had many names before the present
nomenclature came in vogue. Those who are convinced that Urdu was born
in Shah Jahan’s era ignore the fact that the Mughal era began in 1526
after Babar’s success at Panipat while poets like Ameer Khusrau (died
1325) had been composing poetry in Urdu much earlier than that. Even in
Babar’s writings one can find quite a few Urdu words. In other words,
the Urdu language did exist before Shah Jahan and it was there even
before the name Urdu was given to it.
Those
who believe in the ‘lashkari zaban’ myth perhaps think that it is
possible to form a new language by combining two or more languages. This
is not the case. Max Muller, the renowned linguist, has given us two
guiding principles in this regard: one, the classification of a language
and its relationship with the other language is based on morphological
and syntactical structures of that language and vocabulary has very
little importance in this regard; two, it is totally wrong and
misleading to believe that by combining two or more languages a new,
third language can be formed. A language may get enriched and
strengthened by obtaining nourishment from the dialects and languages
spoken in its surrounding geographical territories, but it is impossible
for a language to form a new language by inter-mingling with another
one.
A language takes centuries,
even more, to evolve. It is a slow, long, constant, complex and natural
process. A language ‘invented’ to serve a specific purpose, such as
enabling the troops to communicate with one another, is labelled as
‘artificial’ by linguists. Though there have been hundreds of such
attempts, some aimed at facilitating international communication between
nations and peoples speaking different languages, none has been
successful. Esperanto, a language formed with the basic roots of some
European languages, died despite its early success. In other words,
experiments to devise a language have failed and no artificial language
could survive. Urdu, like other languages of the world, has been
classified by linguists on the basis of its morphological and
syntactical features. Urdu nouns and adjective can have a variety of
origins, such as Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Pushtu and even Portuguese,
but ninety-nine per cent of Urdu verbs have their roots in
Sanskrit/Prakrit. So it is an Indo-Aryan language which is a branch of
Indo-Iranian family, which in turn is a branch of Indo-European family
of languages. According to Dr Gian Chand Jain, Indo-Aryan languages had
three phases of evolution beginning around 1,500 BC and passing through
the stages of Vedic Sanskrit, classical Sanskrit and Pali. They
developed into Prakrit and Apbhransh, which served as the basis for the
formation of later local dialects.
Around
1,000 AD, the modern Indo-Aryan era began and with the arrival of
Muslims Arabic, Persian and, to a lesser extent, Turkish vocabulary
began assimilating into local dialects. One of those dialects later
evolved further and became an early version of Urdu/Hindi. Now the only
question remaining unanswered is which dialect or dialects developed
further to become a language that was basically one and was later
divided into two languages, Hindi and Urdu, on the basis of two
different scripts.
Though there are a
number of theories about the origin of Urdu (that is, aside from camp
language theory) that say, for example, Urdu has its origin in Punjabi,
or it was born in Deccan or in Sindh, few have stood up to research
based on historical linguistics and comparative linguistic. Of the
theories considered to be holding water, the most plausible seems to be
the one that says Urdu developed from some dialects spoken in and around
Delhi in the 11th and 12th centuries AD. These dialects include Brij
Bhasha, Mewati, Khari Boli and Haryani, which, in turn had developed
from Apbhransh. The name Apbhransh refers to a number of
languages/dialects which were born from Prakrit languages. The question
that still requires a precise answer is: from which Apbhransh did Urdu
originate? Some linguists believe it was most probably an offshoot of
Shourseni Prakrit, spoken in and around Mathura. Dr Gian Chand Jain says
it was Khari Boli.
In brief, Urdu
is much older than just a few hundred years and its roots go right back
to Sanskrit. At least, it has been established beyond doubt that Urdu is
not a camp language
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