Dakhani – remains of an era

Like empires and civilizations, languages too suffer from irreversible decline. Dakhani, a vernacular form of Urdu in the Deccan, that had once enjoyed a glorious run of 250 years between 14th and 17th centuries is now a crumbling memory. Writer-filmmaker Gautam Pemmaraju's documentary A Tongue Untied: Story of Dakhani explores the language's birth, growth and decay using its contemporary form of satire and humour poetry. The 90-minute film is in the final stages of editing and is likely to hit the international film festival circuit soon.

"The humorous and satirical performance poetry in Dakhani that began in the late 1930s and early 1940s and reached its peak in the 1960s is used as a narrative device to draw attention to the scholarly work of historians and linguists on the language," says Pemmaraju.

Since 2006, Pemmaraju has been actively pursuing the cultural history of Hyderabad and the Deccan region. His research has led him to poets and mushaira organisers, scholars, historians and literary figures. Dakhani began as a vernacular form from 13th century onwards due to migrations from the north. "In the concluding decades of that century, North Indian Sufi saints began coming in with their entourages. A large migration happened in 1297 when Allauddin Khilji took control of Devgiri, which later became the short-lived imperial capital of Muhammad bin Tughlaq," he says.

As migrants from different regions of North India speaking different tongues settled in the Deccan, it led to an intermingling with locals speaking Marathi, Kannada and Telugu languages. What emerged is a language with mixed parentage that used a Persian-Arabic script.

"The Sufi saints are largely credited with the birth of the literary language, chief among them being Saint Gesu Daraz of the Chisti order. A large number of religio-mystical texts are attributed to him. The language soon evolved to incorporate secular literature and the oldest extant poetic work of that genre was Kadam Rao Padam Rao, a fantasy tale, by Fakhruddin Nizami written in 1458," he says.

According to some experts, by then the language had already become supple and sophisticated, and in the next 100 years, it received patronage from king poets like Md Quli Qutub Shah of Golconda and Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur. "Between 14th and 17th centuries, there was a remarkable efflorescence of talent with many poets and litterateurs taking the language even further. A large body of work from that era has survived. Many medieval Dakhani texts are held in libraries, museums and private collections across the world, including the British Library, the National Museum in Karachi and at the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad," says Pemmaraju.

Following Aurangzeb's conquest of the Deccan around 1700, Dakhani was gradually edged out and replaced by Persian, the official language of the Mughal courts.

It is interesting to note that some Hindu saints from Maharashtra also wrote in Dakhani: Amrut Ray, Eknath and Dnyaneshwar Muktabai from Marathwada.

Thanks to mushaira organisers, Dakhani isn't entirely extinct yet. The film highlights the contribution of Zinda Dilane Hyderabad, a literary organisation responsible for conducting mushairas (poetry gatherings), conferences and other literary events since the early 1960s. "Another important figure in the promotion of Dakhani and especially humour and satire is Syed Mustafa Kamal, one of the founder-members of Zinda Dilane Hyderabad. He is also the editor of the 50-year-old Urdu literary magazine Shugoofa, and has been tirelessly promoting Urdu and Dakhani humour and satire," says Pemmaraju, adding that mushairas were extremely popular between 1960s and 1980s, attracting upto 25000 people. They were part of the cultural fabric of the city.