Is Urdu Indian

Hindi and Urdu are generally considered to be one spoken language with two different literary traditions. That means that Hindi and Urdu speakers who shop in the same markets have no problems understanding each other -- they'd both say yeh kitne kaa hay for 'How much is it? And the Urdu one will be یہ کتنے کا ہے؟ Hindi is written from left to right in the Devanagari script, and is the official language of India, along with English. Urdu, on the other hand, is written from right to left in the Nastaliq script and is the national language of Pakistan.

It's also one of the official languages of the Indian states of Bihar and Jammu & Kashmir. Considered as one, these tongues constitute the second most spoken language in the world, sometimes called Hindustani. In their daily lives, Hindi and Urdu speakers communicate in their 'different' languages without major problems. Both Hindi and Urdu developed from Classical Sanskrit, which appeared in the Indus Valley at about the start of the Common Era. The first old Hindi poetry was written in the year 769 AD, and by the European Middle Ages it became known as 'Hindvi'.

Muslim Turks invaded the Punjab in 1027 and took control of Delhi in 1193. They paved the way for the Islamic Mughal Empire, which ruled northern India from the 16th century until it was defeated by the British Raj in the mid-19th century. It was at this time that the language of this book began to take form, a mixture of Hindvi grammar with Arabic, Persian and Turkish vocabulary. The Muslim speakers of Hindvi began to write in the Arabic script, creating Urdu, while the Hindu population incorporated the new words but continued to write in Devanagari script.

In the Delhi region of India the native language was Khariboli, whose earliest form is known as Old Hindi . It belongs to the Western Hindi group of the Central Indo-Aryan languages. The contact of the Hindu and Muslim cultures during the period of Islamic conquests and in the Indian subcontinent led to the development of Hindustani as a product of a composite Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb. In cities such as Delhi, the Indian language Old Hindi began to acquire many Persian loanwords and continued to be called "Hindi" and later, also "Hindustani".

In southern India , a form of the language flourished in medieval India and is known as Dakhini, which contains loanwords from Telugu and Marathi. An early literary tradition of Hindavi was founded by Amir Khusrau in the late 13th century. From the 13th century until the end of the 18th century the language now known as Urdu was called Hindi, Hindavi, Hindustani, Dehlavi, Lahori, and Lashkari.

The Turko-Afghan Delhi Sultanate established Persian as its official language in India, a policy continued by the Mughal Empire, which extended over most of northern South Asia from the 16th to 18th centuries and cemented Persian influence on Hindustani. The name Urdu was first introduced by the poet Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi around 1780. While Urdu retained the grammar and core Indo-Aryan vocabulary of the local Indian dialect Khariboli, it adopted the Nastaleeq writing system – which was developed as a style of Persian calligraphy.

In India, although Urdu is not and never was used exclusively by Muslims , the ongoing Hindi–Urdu controversy and modern cultural association of each language with the two religions has led to fewer Hindus using Urdu. In part because the Pakistani government proclaimed Urdu the national language at Partition, the Indian state and some religious nationalists began to regard Urdu as a 'foreign' language, to be viewed with suspicion. Urdu advocates in India disagree whether it should be allowed to write Urdu in the Devanagari and Latin script to allow its survival, or whether this will only hasten its demise and that the language can only be preserved if expressed in the Perso-Arabic script.

Urdu, which was often referred to by the British administrators in India as the Hindustani language, was promoted in colonial India by British policies to counter the previous emphasis on Persian. Urdu replaced Persian as the official language of India in 1837 and was made co-official, along with English. Well so much for the political background of these two languages i just proud to know that Urdu is not just spoken & understood in the whole of Sub-continent but also in middle east and Africa as a native language and even in the southamerican country of Guiyana.

During more than two hundred years of British rule, shifting winds of patronage changed the linguistic landscape immensely. It was during the colonial period that the Indian public became more invested in language politics, and began to promote Hindi and Urdu as distinct languages, distinguished not only by orthography, but on a more fundamental level, as markers of cultural identity. Some even engaged in language debates and sought to "purify," standardize, and garner institutional recognition of "their" language. With independence and Partition in 1947, Hindi became the official language of India, and Urdu the official language of Pakistan, though one of the ironies of this history is that more people claim Urdu as their first language in today's India than in Pakistan. Given the present geopolitical reality in the subcontinent, we may expect to see further consolidation of distinct national standards in the future. Like all biased proposals, this, too, is based on total, to some extent deliberate, ignorance.

Urdu as a language was born in India, based on Hindi, Persian and Arabic. As it evolved, perhaps from the 6th to the 13th centuries, it was variously called Hindustani, Hindavi, Dehlavi and other names and was spoken by large swathes of the people. Both Hindu and Muslim poets and writers have written in Urdu right down to the early 20th century. Urdu stands witness to the rich syncretism of Indian culture that is reflected in Indian music, art and architecture too. But the history of a language is never simple, nor is its development unilinear.

In the oppositional politics before Partition, Urdu, written in the Nastaliq script and not in Devanagari, became identified with Muslims, and after 1947, it became the national language of Pakistan. Literature and poetry even today would demonstrate the artificiality of such divisions. Yet the politics of language is a powerful tool to unite — as in Bangladesh — and divide people — as happened during Partition. It is this politics in which the Narendra Modi-led government apparently wishes to dabble now. What is a national language in Pakistan cannot be a scheduled language in Mr Modi's India.

Maybe the Centre should concentrate on more urgent matters rather than waste time playing with the status of languages for no reason whatsoever. In conclusion, history writing in India and about India of the 18th and 19th centuries was a product of a complex crosscurrent of languages and ideas. In the 18th century, historiography of India was defined by Persian language histories written for the courts of Muslim, Sikh and Hindu rulers. British colonial administrators approached this literary heritage with an eye to translating and moulding that knowledge for their own uses.

Persian histories and the Persian language were studied in an intensified effort to understand India's past. Through the acquisition of historical forms of knowledge and as a product of colonial politics, a new literary socio-cultural understanding was enabled through the efforts of the munshī. Individuals occupying this post crafted a " modern " colonial historical understanding of India. Through the creation of British colonial histories, first in translation, and later through " original " English language histories, colonial historiography was born.

In many ways the historiography produced in South Asia came full circle. Once a matter of translating Persian historiography into English, now, English conceptual history was translated back into India. This dense engagement of language and politics produced a transcultural globalized sphere where a new literary product and a new historical understanding of India in the 19th century was born. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan group of languages, a subset of Indo-European.

Hindi and Urdu are descended from the language that was spoken in the area in and around Delhi in North India roughly in the ninth and tenth centuries. This language was given the Persian metonym Hindvi/Hindi, i.e the language of Hind , by the Persian-speaking Turks who overran Punjab and the Gangetic plains in the early eleventh century and established what is known as the Delhi Sultanate. Hindvi was constructed largely from Sanskrit loan words which had been 'softened' for 'bol-chal' or common speech. It also absorbed Persian, and through Persian, Arabic loan words, and developed as a mixed or broken language of communication between the newly arrived immigrants and the resident native population of North India. It travelled south and west as the Sultanate expanded beyond the Gangetic plains. From the eighteenth century Hindvi began to flower as a literary language.

In the course of another century it split into Hindi and Urdu, the former representing a Sanskrit bias and the latter a Persian one. Contemporary spoken Hindi and Urdu speech registers have a measure of English thrown in too. With such rich historical antecedents, it's an exciting language to learn.

If you choose to learn the Urdu script, you get two languages for the price of one. Confusingly, Khariboli is also used to denote the standard form of Hindi-Urdu today, as this regional dialect, once called Dehlavi and centered around the old Mughal capital of Delhi, has had great impact on the official shape of language. Urdu is the sole national, and one of the two official languages of Pakistan .

It is spoken and understood throughout the country, whereas the state-by-state languages are the provincial languages, although only 7.57% of Pakistanis speak Urdu as their first language. Its official status has meant that Urdu is understood and spoken widely throughout Pakistan as a second or third language. It is used in education, literature, office and court business, although in practice, English is used instead of Urdu in the higher echelons of government. Article 251 of the Pakistani Constitution mandates that Urdu be implemented as the sole language of government, though English continues to be the most widely used language at the higher echelons of Pakistani government.

In pre-colonial India, the historian writing in Persian frequently served in administrative posts as judges, advisors, ministers, and mid-level bureaucrats. The crafters of history were rarely, if ever, exclusively authors14. As such, Persian history writing was didactic in nature and closely wedded to the genre of advice literature.

As the British acquired more knowledge and power and employed larger numbers of Persian literati within the colonial apparatus, a significant transformation took place in the social function of the Persian historian. During 17th century Mughal times, the title of munshī had been conferred upon court scribes responsible for official correspondence. Under British service this position increasingly and exclusively evolved into the " Moonshee ", " a native teacher of languages, especially of Arabic, Persian, and Urdū "15. The transformation of the munshī into a cross-cultural interlocutor can be seen " literally " in the most important Persian grammar of the period titled, The Persian Moonshee16. Major shifts in the administrative cadre from Mughal to British institutional governance appeared across bureaucratic offices such as was the case of the akhbār navīs17. Members of the new class of " native " colonial scholars produced, at the impetus of British colonial administrators and for the first time, a colonial Persian historiographical tradition.

Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and is used as an official language in parts of India. Urdu shares an everyday vernacular with Hindi, but the two languages are written in different scripts and have developed different literary styles. Students with no knowledge of Urdu who wish to pursue it at Cornell should take the first-year Hindi class in order to learn basic speaking and listening skills.

If they also take the Urdu script course in the Spring of the first year, they should be ready for Intermediate Urdu the next Fall. Although Persian was the official language, used at the Imperial court and within the socio-economic institutions of the time, Arabic remained as the official language of the Muslim religion in the Indian subcontinent. Amir Khosrow was its first known poet, and the mixed language that he wrote in was variously termed Hindvi, Dehlavi, Rekhta, Hindustani at different points of its evolution. It was the language of the common people, spoken in army camps, in markets, by artisans, said Dr. Jawed.

The history and origins of any language will have complicated and lateral developments. It is difficult for any language to have a linear and time lined progression. Similarly, the evolution or origin of Urdu has multiple theories surrounding its existence and growth.

However, being itself is an essence of what true integration of cultures might mean. Hindustani was the language whose grammar and syntax was 'Hindi' and whose script was 'Urdu'. It was this language that was spoken, written and expounded by the great minds of its time, including Amir Khusrau.

The Hindustani or Hindavi language is what later was referred to as Urdu, but it was laden heavily with vocabulary from both Sanskrit and Persian. Many linguists count both Hindi and Urdu as the same language because of their grammar and vocabulary similarities. Many others cite it as a socio-political reason for reading and counting them as two separate languages.

Hence Urdu emerges perhaps as a wonderful amalgamation of cultures that decided to flourish by taking the best of each other. And in the course, creating a linguistic and literary treasure that finds keepers till date. The Delhi Sultanate had made Persian as their official language, and this continued even during the Mughal Empire.

Amir Khusrau in the 13th century was a famous scholar who wrote his renditions and poems in Hindavi. Though the language was the written and spoken language of the region, it was only at the end of Aurangzeb's rule in the 18th century that it began to be called Zaban-e-Urdu. Before that, the language was known by its many names, including Hindi, Hindavi, Dehlavi, etc., and it was the language of all irrespective of them being Hindus or Muslims. It flourished in the elite and courtly surroundings retaining its core vocabulary from the Indo-Aryan language base akin to the local Khariboli but its writing or script was adopted in the Persian style of calligraphy. South Asia is a now a major economic and geopolitical power, and home to one fifth of the world's population. By conservative estimates, over half a billion people speak the language in South Asia, and depending on chosen parameters, it is variously ranked as the second- to fourth-most widely spoken language in the world!

To directly communicate with this vast population of Hindi-Urdu speakers and have unfettered and unfiltered access to the rich cultural history of North India and Pakistan, fluency in Hindi-Urdu is essential. There a rich literary tradition in Hindi-Urdu, and its dialectal ancestors going back about a thousand years. There is also a thriving popular culture of South Asia, one which is very much dependent on Hindi-Urdu. Soap operas, comic books, Bollywood films, street theater, and love songs, all communicate in this language. The name Urdu was first used by the poet Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi around 1780.

Where In India Do They Speak Urdu From the 13th century until the end of the 18th century Urdu was commonly known as Hindi. The language was also known by various names such as Hindavi or Dehlavi. Hindustani in Persian script was used by Muslims and Hindus but was current chiefly in Muslim-influenced society. Hindustani was promoted in British India by British policies to counter the previous emphasis on Persian. This triggered a Hindu backlash in northwestern India, which argued that the language should be written in the native Devanagari script. This literary standard called "Hindi" replaced Urdu as the official language of Bihar in 1881, establishing a sectarian divide of "Urdu" for Muslims and "Hindi" for Hindus, a divide that was formalized with the division of India and Pakistan after independence.

C. Rajagopalachari, chief minister of Madras Presidency introduced Hindi as a compulsory language in secondary school education though he later relented and opposed the introduction of Hindi during the Madras anti-Hindi agitation of 1965. Bal Gangadhar Tilak supported Devanagari script as the essential part of nationalist movement. The language policy of Congress and the independence movement paved its status as an alternative official language of independent India.