It is only fair then, that identity have a bearing on language too.
The Hindiwalas contend that Hindustani's lingua franca status is an organic, emergent outgrowth of the porous and intertwined literary-linguistic landscape of north India. They point to abundant Bhakti poetry in medieval varieties as an obvious precursor, notwithstanding tenuous mutual intelligility. To compensate for the dearth of literary production in Sanskritised Hindustani before 1900, proponents of Sanskritisation retroproject the unity of a wide variety of languages (including Braj, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Marwari, Haryanvi, even Panjabi and Maithili at one point), appropriate their literary histories, and finally term them mere dialects, subordinate to Hindi.
This theory ignores two vital facts or at best treats them as incidental- first, that Hindustani is based on the dialect of Dehli, India's longstanding imperial capital, and second, that the use of Hindustani has been attested far earlier in the Gujarat and Dakhan regions (outside the theorised Hindi belt) than, say modern Bihar or Rajasthan.
Hindustani as it is spoken today had only one literary culture during the critical period of its diffusion throughout the subcontinent. The invention of modern sanskritised Hindi was a later reaction rooted in Hindu revivalism that, cognisant of the critical mass of intelligibility and legitimacy that Dehlavi possessed, sought to capitalise on it while delegitimising its Persianate underpinnings.
In doing so, they attempt to obfuscate the centripetal role of Muslim imperium in India, that contributed to the free flow of linguistic, sartorial, culinary and architectural culture, and is upstream of many aspects of what is today "national" culture.
Urduwalas believe that the language fundamentally emerged as some sort of "mixture" between Sanskrit, Farsi and even Turkish.
Dr Pien's argument, which I find convincing partly because I intuitively, is that we must instead investigate the historical processes behind how the dialect of a particular region, Dehli became the lingua franca.
The dissertation argues for a new approach to understanding Hindi-Urdu’s history as that of a regional variety’s transformation into an interregional lingua franca.
| Vector | Space | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Dehlavi imperial emanation | ||
| Imperial prestige (1750s-1850s) | Allahabad, Lakhnau, Murshidabad, Azimabad | |
| British |
Muslim identity (1850s-present)
Indian nationalism (1900s-present)
Diffusion with new technologies (railway, print, school education)
Primary sources
| Name | Author | Locale | Dated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tārīkh è ğarībī | Unknown | Gujarat | 1751-57 |
Secondary sources: