Hamari History

The superficial Hindi-Urdu divide is the unfortunate result of British language policies during the colonial period. Historically, Hindustani developed in the post-12th century period under the impact of the incoming Afghans and Turks as a linguistic modus vivendi from the sub-regional apabhramshas of north-western India. Its first major folk poet was the great Persian master, Amir Khusrau (1253-1325), who is known to have composed dohas (couplets) and riddles in the newly-formed speech, then called ‘Hindavi’. Through the medieval time, this mixed speech was variously called by various speech sub-groups as ‘Hindavi’, ‘Zaban-e-Hind’, ‘Hindi’, ‘Zaban-e-Dehli’, ‘Rekhta’, ‘Gujari’. ‘Dakkhani’, Zaban-e-Urdu-e-Mualla’, ‘Zaban-e-Urdu’, or just ‘Urdu’. By the late 11^th century, the name ‘Hindustani’ was in vogue and had become the lingua franca for most of northern India. A sub-dialect called Khari Boli was spoken in and around Delhi region at the start of 13th century when the Delhi Sultanate was established. Khari Boli gradually became the prestige dialect of Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) and became the basis of modern Standard Hindi & Urdu.

By the time of Mughal conquest, Hindustani (originally khari boli) had acquired a very rich vocabulary from Persian, Arabic, and Turkic languages and had evolved greatly in grammar and style than the previous Sanskrit and Prakrits influenced Khari boli. 

During the Mughal era, tho the official court language was Persian, Hindustani gradually became the prestige language of the nobility and became known and standardized as ‘Zubaan-e Urdu-e Muallah’.  The colloquial variant became known simply as Urdu/Hindi/Hindustani and was written in both Perso-Arabic and Devanagari scripts.  By the end of 18^th century, Hindustani was the lingua franca of the empire. Up to that time there was no literary distinction between Urdu and Hindi and both terms were taken as synonymous and used interchangeably. Masters of the Language (Asaatiza) kept referring to their speech as ‘Hindi’, or ‘Hindavi’ till as late as the beginning of the 19th century:

            ~ najane log kehte hain kis ko suroor-e-qalb
               aya nahin ye lafz to Hindi zaban ke beech
                                                                          - Mir Taqi Mir (d. 1810)
            ~ Mushafi farsi ko taq pe rakh
               Ab hai ashaar-e-Hindavi ka rivaj
                                                              - Mushafi (d.1824)

After European arrival, there were several linguistics/philology initiatives, most significant of which were the ones taken at Fort Williams College, Calcutta (established 1800). The divide between Urdu and Hindi occurred under the colonial impact with the growing cultural consciousness as part of the processes of political modernization. The beginning, in fact, was affected at the Fort William College under John Gilchrist (1789-1841). The British tied down the question of the varieties of 'Hindavi', first to the cultural heritage and social hierarchy, and later to religion and political power play. Thus, it was at the Fort William College that the two distinct trends in literary prose writing came to the fore. On the one hand, there was Mir Amman's Bagh-o-Bahar (1800-1802) and, Hyder Bakhsh Hyderi's Aaraish-e-Mehfil (1802-1804) as Urdu prose, and, on the other, Lallu Lal's Premsagar and Sadal Mishra's Nasiketopakhyan as Hindi prose. 

Later, with the rise of India's freedom struggle, Gandhi sensed the communalization of the language issue and the political twist given to it by the British. He, therefore, supported the composite concept of Hindustani as a common variant of the colloquial usage written in both scripts as the national language of the country. Much before Gandhi's proposal of Hindustani as a language of composite Indian culture, Raja Shiva Prasad in his book of grammar, in the year 1875, lamented that Hindi and Urdu have no difference on the level of the vernacular;

"The absurdity began with the Maulvis and Pundits of Dr. Gilchrist's time, who being commissioned to make a grammar of the common speech of Upper India made two grammars... The evil consequence is that instead of having a school grammar of the vernacular as such... we have two diverse and discrepant class books, one for the Mohammedan and Kayastha boys and the other for the Brahmins and Banias."