Birth of a language for commoners

We have all grown up hearing the phrase that the British ruled us by dividing us. “Divide and Rule” was their policy we are told. They succeeded in dividing us and thus they succeeded in ruling us. The phrase has been repeated ad nauseam but how did they do this is never explained and so everyone interprets it according to their own understanding of how united Indians were before the arrival of the British and how did the British tear through this fabric of unity.

The standard explanation is that they divided the Hindus and Muslims but little time is spent in understanding how was this division realised. We will try in this piece to look at one aspect, a crucial aspect of our cultural expression, Language. We will talk about a language called Hindavi, that was born in Delhi in the 12th and 13th centuries, travelled all over with marching armies, traders, travellers and Sufis, came back as Deccani in the early 18th century and evolved into Urdu. We will talk about the growth of the language on some other occasion but today we will talk about how this language was turned into a weapon in the hands of the Imperialists.

But before we go into the imperialist machinations that played havoc with our syncretic traditions, we need to contextualise the developments that led to the rise of many of the languages that were to evolve into vehicles of literary expression through the length and breadth of the Indian subcontinent.

The dominance of Sanskrit as the only medium for dealing with matters spiritual was challenged in the fifth and sixth centuries before the common era by Mahavir Jain and Gautama Buddha, both Kshatriya princes who chose to communicate with their followers in the Prakrits (literally, natural languages or the languages of the people) and thus the languages of the people began to be used to discuss issues of being and existence and of spirituality and divinity. The monopoly of Sanskrit (literally the enriched language, the language of the elite and by extension of the Brahmin) on mediums of creation and communication of knowledge was loosened and this created the conditions for a large number of people’s languages, the apabhramsas – fallen languages – to grow rapidly. It was one of these apabhramsas called Shurseni that had grown by the 1th century to hold sway from Gujarat to Bengal and was to later break up into the many languages spoken in Gujarat and Rajasthan, In Punjab and Haryana and the hills and plains of UP — now Uttarakhand and UP, and MP — now MP and Chhattisgarh, Bihar – now Bihar and Jharkhand, Bengal, Orissa and elsewhere.

The language that was spoken around Delhi and was a mix of Haryanvi and Braj, Khadi Boli and some local dialects began receiving diverse linguistic influences starting from the close of the 12th century with the incursion of Turks and other central Asians into the north Indian plains. There were travellers, traders, Sufis, mendicants and those in search of new territories upon which they wanted to build new empires. Multifaceted interventions and amalgamations began to take places throughout the vast dusty plains of the Sindh and the fertile plains of the Punjab and the Ganga-Jamuna Doab.

Traders criss-crossed the land, staying overnight at makeshift caravanserais that had begun to sprout all across the newly evolving trade routes. Just as tourist guides and their apprentices at the popular tourist haunts of India can converse effortlessly in several languages, the owners of the caravanserais too picked up words from many languages and a pidgin began to develop, known loosely as the language of the caravanserai. The language acquired the name Saraiki or the language of the Sarai. This was a language that drew from, Sindhi, Multani, Punjabi, Pashtoon, Persian, Dari, Turkish and many other languages and dialects of the region and also borrowed from the language of the travellers that were flocking to India for trade and commerce. The language became the medium in which almost all the famous Sufi poets of Punjab, Sindh and Multan wrote their poetry. The language came to be known as Saraiki or of the Serai.

There were at least four other sites where this mixing together of diverse linguistic and cultural resources was taking place, in the market, in the workplace of the artisans, the shrines of the Sufis, and in the battlefields. What were the dynamics of these unlikely nurseries of a language and other related issues will be taken up in the weeks to come.

The author is a historian