Was Hindi a recent language?

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 Murad Ali Baig

 

Language is a huge issue in India and making the national language Hindi adopted by all Indian states has been one of the main pillars of the `Hindutva’ ideology that is the base philosophy of the ruling BJP Government. Its efforts to force Hindi on all states has however been staunchly resisted especially in the states of south India that have a very long and rich language and literary tradition. In reaction they have pointed out that Hindi has never been used or even mentioned in any old Indian texts.

Many will be shocked to learn that Hindi is actually just over 300 years old and that it was largely the result of the British effort to create a common language that they needed for the command of their mainly north Indian soldiers who spoke a number of languages and dialects.

Very few people know that it was as recently as 1798 that a Scottish surgeon of the East India Company named John Borthwick Gilchrist compiled a `Hindustani – English Dictionary of Hindustanee’ fusing the Mughal state language of Farsi with Hindavi of the Delhi region, Braj of the Mathura region, Awadhi of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bhojpuri of Bihar to make this `Hindustanee’ that soon became the foundation for both Hindi and Urdu. Both languages are therefore just over 300 years old.

The new language soon became popular but many purists catering to Hindu religious sentiments were determined to try to replace the Farsi words with Sanskrit words into this evolving Hindi. 

Unfortunately Sanskrit, that had earlier been reserved for Brahmin men, although a great language for philosophy was a poor language for householders. Thus, the Indian cinema has continued using Hindustani because Farsi, with a very rich vocabulary of adjectives, was much more emotive, poetic and romantic.

 

The adoption of an official language for the Indian Republic was consequently a hotly debated issue during the framing of the Indian constitution because only 41% of Indian people had stated that Hindi was their mother tongue. In fact, about a third of these actually spoke dialects of Hindi like Himalachi, Kumaoni, Garhwali, Bundelkhandi and Bhojpuri. After much debate, Hindi was adopted as the official language with English to continue as an associate official language for a period of fifteen year after which Hindi was to become the sole official language.

 

Hindi was thus a newly created language that had been mainly confined to the Gangetic areas parallel to Urdu that contained many Arabic and Persian loan words. Hindi chauvinists not only demanded Hindi but wanted a highly Sanskritized Hindi from which all foreign words were to be deleted. Efforts by the Indian Government to make Hindi the sole official language after 1965 was angrily resisted in many Indian states, who wanted their own language as the official language in their states and the continued use of English for correspondence with the center.

 

To allay their fears, Prime Minister Nehru pushed through the Official Languages Act of 1963 to ensure the use of English beyond 1965. For the RSS and BJP bigots however, this continuation of a foreign language was an anathema. They also became alarmed that a large number of young people wanted to learn English even at their own cost in private schools as a knowledge of English was becoming necessary in an increasingly international work environment. School children in India today have to therefore learn Hindi as their national language as well as their regional language in many non-Hindi states. They usually also have to also study English that is demanded by students. There are many English medium schools where Hindi and a regional language are taught but English is usually the medium for other subjects. There are also many Hindi medium schools but also a rising demand for English.

 

The rapid growth of mobile phones and internet, especially with social media like Facebook, What’s App, Instragram and Twitter, has also accelerated the desire for English even though Hindi programs are available. The rapid advances in telecommunications in a rapidly expanding global society are insidiously contributing to a monocultural world and many minor languages and dialects are fading out quite rapidly all over the world despite the efforts in every country to preserve them.

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Language follows the geography that shapes history. India had for many centuries been a gigantic patchwork of numerous small, fertile areas separated from each other by mountains, rivers and thick forests that were like a thousand islands of different cultures. In ancient Sanskrit and Pali texts there used to be sixteen Mahājanapadas or "great kingdoms" that had existed before the sixth century BCE. Each `maha’ or great kingdom contained a number of `janapadas’ or lesser vassal kingdoms so there may have been some two hundred smaller kingdoms. India has therefore always been a land with dozens of ethnic groups, hundreds of kingdoms and thousands of deities so a multitude of languages was inevitable.

 

Many of the old kingdoms have vanished but the vestiges of their culture, language, religious practices and myths survive. The territories of these kingdoms would also have waxed and waned over the centuries and some Indian rulers had even briefly ruled areas outside of modern India but there had never been any great mythical Hindu nation of an Akhand Bharat as some chauvinists want to believe.

 

The Vedic people had made Sanskrit their sacred language. This highly evolved language nurtured by Brahmin scholars had never however been the language of the common people anywhere in India. Prakrit and Pali that been the canonical language of Buddhism the people’s languages in north India in the Buddhist period while Tamil, Bengali and many other languages had continued to flourish elsewhere. Most rulers had to therefore employ Brahmin ministers who were able to communicate with the Brahmin ministers of the other kingdoms to make Sanskrit a virtual bridging language for communication from one kingdom to another.  

 

The process of writing had also been a major problem in ancient times. The fact that the scribes of the emperor Ashoka had to laboriously chisel out his edicts on hard rocks and pillars demonstrates how very slow and difficult it had been to communicate by writing in the fourth century BCE. There had also been very severe limitations of writing materials in ancient times and written texts on perishable materials like parchment, birch bark or palm leaves appeared very much after the early oral traditions. As they were perishable, they had to also be laboriously rewritten every few centuries.

 

Curiously, the oldest Indian scripts are almost identical to the Assyrian Mesa inscriptions of the 7th century BCE while some are similar to the northern Semitic alphabet. These scripts first appeared in south Indian scripts presumably brought to India by the seafaring traders although some historians believe that it was the result of Dravidian people migrating into India from the advanced cultures of Assyria and Babylon. This writing was with the impressions of a wooden stylus pressed into wet clay tablets as papyrus had been used in ancient Egypt.

 

In India a triangular iron stylus used to be pressed on to pieces of parchment, bark, palm leaves or stamped onto copper sheets to create similar triangular ‘Pin Man’ impressions. But these were slow to inscribe and fragile so it took almost another thousand years for this script to develop into Brahmi Lipi that later mutated into Ashokan and Gupta Lipi in which most Pali or Prakrit texts had been written.

 

The early Avestan and Sanskrit texts had originally been in the script of Kharaoshti that was a cursive script written from right to left like Persian. This was later transliterated into the Grantha, Brahmi lipi, Gupta lipi and then Nagri that was the most scientific and phonetic script. The Brahmin scholars, who held the exact intonations of their hymns to be sacred, quickly adopted it and abandoned all the earlier scripts and perhaps some of the other texts as well.

 

The first Sanskrit texts of the Rig Veda, as in the Zend Avesta of ancient Persia, had probably been written in the Kharoshti script that later evolved into Persian during the sixth century BCE and later mutated into a simpler Arabic about a thousand years later. The oldest Kharoshti manuscript was found near Khotan in south west China. The oldest inscription in Old Sanskrit written in the Brahmi Lipi script was Rudradaman’s rock inscription found at Girnar dated to the second century CE. This supports the belief that Sanskrit was not widely written in the Devanagri script till about the fifth century CE.

 

As the early Afghan and Turkic rulers after the 12th Century CE had been nomadic people their languages were not very sophisticated and suitable for the sophistications of literature and culture so their rulers soon began using the much more evolved old language of Farsi (Persian) for most of their official correspondence and records. It therefore became the state language of north India for eight hundred years from the twelfth to the nineteenth century from the Sultanate rulers till well into the British period.

 

Most of the mediaeval records of the Marathas, Rajputs, Sikhs and other Indian rulers had therefore also been in Farsi. In fact, most of the correspondence of Shivaji, Ranjit Singh and other rulers had been in Farsi or with very Persianized local scripts that many scholars find very difficult to read today. The land records in many states had continued to be in Farsi until very recent times when they are being computerized.

 

In recent times many passionate Hindu chauvinists have tried to make Hindi the national language and the main medium for all official and unofficial communication, The move has been strongly resisted by people outside north India who continue to have strong attachments to their own languages like Tamil, Telegu, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Oriya, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi and others. If all government communications were to be in Hindi it would put many millions of people from the non-Hindi speaking states at a huge disadvantage in Government employment or for promotions among those already employed in Government posts.

There is a huge body of myths about languages. As languages matured mostly in religious places the priests’ created myths that their languages were sacred. As with Hebrew for Jews, Greek for orthodox Christianity and Latin for the Catholics, Sanskrit became the sacred language of Brahmins and Arabic the sacred language of Islam. Languages however change and evolve very quickly as every generation quickly adds new words and loan words.

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