The Genesis of Urdu

Legend has it that Urdu began with the Mughal invasions of the Indian Subcontinent. Bred in diverse war camps – the word is derived from the Turkish ‘ordu’ meaning army – Urdu has often been portrayed as a khichri of Turkish, Farsi, Arabic and Hindi originally used for military communications. Growing up, a friend of mine liked to recount that Urdu began with the poetic genius of Amir Khusrao, who wove verses from Farsi and local dialects into language forming ghazals. Modern linguists refute these theories and date Urdu to older origins, bickering over lineages: whether it descended from Khari Boli, Bhraj Bhasha, or Shaurseni Prakrit, a soup of tongues swirling around Delhi in the 12th century. But do these dialectic delineations mean anything? What is the genesis of Urdu?

The colloquial version, the poetic origin story, and the linguistic debates are partially insightful yet flawed in their own respective ways. Combing through dictionaries and texts on the subject, the consensus I was expecting to find on Urdu’s definite origins was missing. Moreover, the ground that consensus would have been built on, one that treats linguistic categories as tangible and airtight, began to soften. Pundits can barely seem to agree on what constitutes the borders of a language.

For some linguists, “mutual intelligibility” has been the scalpel for differentiating between two languages. In simple terms, if two systems of communication allow for speakers of each system to understand each other, then the two systems constitute the same language. This allows for languages to have dialects, where two different forms of a language (say, with slightly different pronunciations and vocabularies) such as British English and American English are still lumped under the same category. But where does one draw the line of intelligibility?¹ The transitive property presents another issue: if dialect A is mostly intelligible with dialect B, and dialect B is mostly intelligible with dialect C, one would hope dialect A to be mostly intelligible with dialect C (alas this does not hold up; just observe how variants of Punjabi can change from village to village). And then there’s scripts – if two languages are mutually intelligible when spoken but use different scripts when written, are they the same language? Or vice versa – consider near mutually unintelligible systems of communication using the same script, like certain Chinese languages. Most linguists designate scripts as secondary to the verbal core of language, but why then are Urdu and Hindi delineated so forcefully, and Chinese languages grouped into one? Culture, religion and politics lurk in the background.

Let’s address the colloquial “Urdu is the khichri of the camp” narrative. As the scholar and lexicographer Rauf Parekh notes, Urdu’s grammar is derived from Sanskrit. Parekh rests on philologist Max Müller’s position that morphology, syntax, and general grammatical structure stand as essential determinants of language. Verbs are given precedence over nouns, and from nouns certain families of words (say, terms for kin or color) reflect the “foundational” semantics of the language. Running with this theory, the notion that Urdu is a mongrel of Farsi, Hindi, and Arabic bred by a motley of soldiers loses steam, since 99% of Urdu’s verbs and large portions of its foundational vocabulary come from Sanskrit. Adding to this further evidence that camp-evolution narratives are fairly recent* ideas, Parekh soundly discredits the theory.

The debunked origin of the camp does raise an interesting hypothetical: would a language brought up at the barracks evolve from the soldiers or the commanders? Persian-speaking leaders could have privileged Farsi into a language forming under their watch. As a more conscious military project, and assuming Müller’s typology on grammar is followed, would Urdu have had a Persianate grammar and Sanskritic vocabulary adapted for the subcontinent? To understand why such alternate trajectories could never come to pass, let’s consider how artificially constructed languages usually end up – dead. Rauf Parekh writes:

A language takes centuries, even more, to evolve. It is a slow, long, constant, complex and natural process. A language ‘invented’ to serve a specific purpose, such as enabling the troops to communicate with one another, is labelled as ‘artificial’ by linguists. Though there have been hundreds of such attempts, some aimed at facilitating international communication between nations and peoples speaking different languages, none has been successful.

We can reasonably assume that Urdu wasn’t a language concocted around the commander’s campfire. In fact, its rootedness in Sanskrit syntax bust another myth: that Urdu is a language of the Muslims². Regardless, a significant portion of literary vocabulary in Urdu comes from Farsi and Arabic, no doubt having seeped in from military invasions, court poetics and sufi milieus permeating the subcontinent from the 12th century onwards. To say as Parekh does that this doesn’t linguistically matter because “vocabulary has very little importance in this regard” seems disingenuous to the sociolinguistic significance of Urdu’s literary and poetic heritage, which is heavily influenced by Persian words and reflected in the cultivated tehzeeb cultures of cities like Lucknow and Bhopal. Which word families are “foundational” and which aren’t is a debatable and finicky endeavor of lexical typology. Language and culture lay fundamentally intertwined.

All the same, there is no doubt that Urdu is rooted in Prakrits, a set of Indo-Aryan languages themselves derived from Sanskrit (Prakit literally means ‘derived’). Drilling down even further, linguists like Shaukat Sabzwari and Masud Hussain Khan concur that Urdu is connected to Khari Bholi, an offshoot of the Apabhransha family of languages, all of which are types of Prakrit, derived from Sanskrit³. But did Khari Boli come first, or Urdu? Which variant of Apbhransh? And where exactly did they originate? Here the debate devolves into a quagmire of linguistic typology. Even the introduction of The Oxford Urdu-English Dictionary acknowledges the absurdity of classifying these arcane dialects:

The truth is that there is so much disagreement in ancient sources about the names, types, and regions of Apabhransh that it’s impossible to determine the reality behind them. Some declare there are twenty seven Apabhranshas while others say there are three. Many of these names are merely names, without any specimens. It’s not even settled whether Shauraseni Apabhransha, Western Apabhransh, and Agra Apabhransha are the same or if there are differences between them. There’s also no consensus about their regions. While Mathura is said to be the center of Shauraseni and Agra Gujarat’s, both are attributed to various places. The same disagreements found in the statements of ancient scholars are now equally present in the writings of modern Hindi linguists. Reading them creates a situation of “severe confusion from the multitude of interpretations.” If even Sanskrit and Hindi linguistics experts cannot decide which Apabhransha was spoken in which region, how can any Urdu scholar engage in such a painful endeavor in this field?⁴

All of this reminds me of the great Urdu postmodernist Naiyer Masud’s short story The Fifth Sasaan, in which Masud depicts the absurd quest by linguists to study the questionably existent language of the questionably existent Fifth Sassanid king. Naiyer Masud writes:

In proving all these things, our scholars displayed evidence of incredible study and intellectual effort using both knowledge and reasoning, and every new discovery related to this matter further strengthened their claims. Nevertheless, on the basis of these same discoveries, our scholars also acknowledged that for a long time the Fifth Saasaan was considered real and his language genuine, and scholars of the past had used the words of that language proudly. However, those earlier scholars had not succeeded in coming up with the original spoken or written language that used these words, although several of them reportedly claimed an acquaintance with that language.

… And these meaningless words that were considered a language. That language also didn’t really exist. Although scholars would not deny the possibility that at some time, somewhere, this language may have been spoken and understood, nevertheless, it was not, in fact, a language at all. The sum of the entire investigation of our scholars was that there was no Fifth Saasaan, nor was any language put forward by him, nor did that language have a single word, nor did that word have any meanings. However, the sum of the entire investigation was also that at one time there were some meanings that were expressed through certain words, and these words were ascribed to a language, and one person introduced this language, and that person called himself the Fifth Saasaan.

Language is a beautiful, messy human phenomenon with few objective truths. Our appetite to slice it into neat pieces – fruitful as it may be in telling us about how we communicate – often reveals more about our politics⁵, belief systems and urges to typify our world than anything particularly scientific. Perhaps nothing about Urdu is more poetic than its unwillingenss to be pinned down, its origins shrouded by time.