Across several millennia of human history, individuals have often succeeded in conveying concepts across linguistic borderlines even when they are aware that much has been lost in such transactions. Some of these translatory migrations are impelled by realpolitik—thus, a king may (have to) learn the alien idioms of revenue collection in his newly conquered territories. If knowledge is power, language is the kinetics of knowledge. Some other linguistic routes are guided by intellectual curiosity or aesthetic sensibility—thus, this king’s royal poet may seek to immerse herself in the religious imaginations of the priests at the mountaintop shrine. And, of course, there are numerous mappings which are necessitated by the demands of sheer survival—thus, if you do not know the local word for “water” on an arid landscape, neither the brute systems of taxation nor the refined consolations of poetry will step in to save you. This type of cross-border traffic across linguistic systems is a pervasive feature of various sociocultural spaces of South Asia, where Sanskritic-Indic and Perso-Arabic streams have intersected at dynamic confluences over the last five hundred years.
This is not to say that such linguistic exercises have proceeded seamlessly in the manner of a charming party game where someone takes a sentence in Latin and methodically replaces its nouns with Aramaic equivalents. People do not speak in a sociopolitical vacuum: they speak languages that are “always-already” marked by differential distributions of economic power and cultural capital. A scholar at the University of Cambridge who speaks “academic English” to his English-speaking uncle may find himself separated by an even vaster social gap than the one that distances a Julius Caesar redivivus when he addresses the present-day Prime Minister of Italy in Latin. Again, after Norman French became the language of the ruling classes in medieval England and Old English was relegated to the lower classes, this power hierarchy generated a linguistic duality that continues in Modern English or Standard English. Many English words refer to objects that the speakers of Old English would have seen in their “natural” state (for instance, “sheep” and “deer”) and the Norman elites would have consumed in their “cultured” form (for instance, “mutton” and “venison”). In our own time, those who do not, or cannot, or indeed will not, speak the Queen’s (or King’s) English may be denounced as not speaking English at all.
Likewise, the multiple inflections of what we call Modern Standard Hindi have been associated with distinct aesthetic markers, cultural locations, and economic hierarchies. The qualifier “Standard” silently signifies that these labels are not serenely descriptive (“for your information, this is how those guys out there happen to speak the language”) but sternly normative (“for your own good, you better speak the language in the way I have prescribed in this grammar book!”). Thus, across the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, at home schoolchildren may converse in Avadhi (Awadhi), Braj Bhasha (Braj), Bundeli, or Bhojpuri, even though at school they would (have to) learn the one “standardized” form of Hindi. We may, of course, seek to dissolve this type of dual linguistic belonging with the sneaky manouevre of characterizing Braj Bhasha and others not as “languages” but as “dialects”, but this would be a Pyrrhic victory where one wins the battle of definition only to lose the war of social reality. Just as no religious person will admit that they worship a “false God” (this accusation is always levelled by outsiders), no human speaker will declare that they use (only) a “dialect” or an “idiolect”.
“To put it bluntly, everywhere in the world one speaks whatever is recognized as the standard form because that is where the money lies.”
To put it bluntly, everywhere in the world one speaks whatever is recognized as the standard form because that is where the money lies. You need to write in this form if you wish to be appointed as a civil servant by the government or inducted into the banking system where financial transactions are meticulously negotiated. Indeed, you have to use this form if you seek to pass your school leaving examination, in the first place. If you stray from this template, your lapses may be excused as delightful diversions, at best, or denounced as colloquial corruptions, at worst. Thus, the manner in which one speaks a language can be as critically important, if not even more so, than the matter of the language being spoken. Afflicted by Freud’s narcissism of small differences, we humans tend to correlate an individual’s façon de parler with matters of good breeding (“oh my goodness, only a peasant would use that verbal form!”), regional background (“she must be from the north!”), or linguistic training (“you need to go to grammar school to learn how to not split the infinitive”). Thus, a vital aspect of linguistic modernism is the characterisation of the everyday vernacular as a regressive force—this is a human condition that needs to be structurally reformed (“re-formed”) at the grassroots through governmental intervention. If the motto of the post-Reformation settlement in Europe was, “one king, one religion”, today it is the slogan, “one nation-state, one language” that makes the world go round. All “low” forms of language will be emended (that is, eradicated) by the nation-state on its seemingly inexorable march to the “high” ground of linguistic uniformity.
However, to put it less bluntly, between the normative text of the nation-state and the wayward context of the masses there lies a vast social gap, and it is here that many “hybrid” linguistic forms live, move, and have their being. Often, the vernacular can be valorized precisely because it is not the prescriptive standard which is now chastised as “artificial” or—dare I say it—“posh”. Consider the case of Braj Bhasha (braj–bhāṣā) which is the standard idiom of many north Indian Hindu devotional texts dedicated to the supreme divinity Kṛṣṇa (Krishna). The central protagonists of a paradigmatic narrative are the cowherd women (gopīs) who are eulogised as the archetypal devotees of Kṛṣṇa: they are “illiterate” insofar as they have no proficiency in Sanskritic learning, but precisely this illiteracy is presented as an aspect of their spiritual virtue (dharma). For what good will it be for a gopī if she can gain mastery over all the books in the British Library but does not lose her soul (jīva-ātman) to the bewitchingly beautiful Kṛṣṇa?
“However, to put it less bluntly, between the normative text of the nation-state and the wayward context of the masses there lies a vast social gap, and it is here that many ‘hybrid’ linguistic forms live, move, and have their being.”
In short, what is deviant in South Asia, from one perspective, can be praised, from another perspective, precisely because of its subalternity. Moving across Hebrew and Greek, Saint Paul once declared that the wisdom of the world is foolishness in God’s sight: the gopīs would have agreed that the heart has its languages that the mind does not know (or will not speak). The moral of the story is that we should view standardized texts and everyday mannerisms as interrelated on a dynamic continuum: in many “real-world” circumstances, individuals (have to) move back and forth between the purity of a normative template and the fluidity of a quotidian context. Thus, someone who uses the standard form of Hindi in (New) Delhi may be able to slide, without any linguistic dissonance, into the register of Braj Bhasha when she speaks to her grandmother in (Old) Mathura.
What happens, however, when such projections of “high” and “low” linguistic forms become aligned with religious affiliation? A language is not simply a compilation of words and phrases: a linguistic system may encode a particular cosmology in terms of what it enables or allows its users to think. Consider the fairly common presentation, in Braj Bhasha traditions of Kṛṣṇa-worship, of the supremely sovereign Lord Kṛṣṇa as situated within the human heart—this theology of divine intimacy is partly facilitated by the Sanskritic vocabularies of param-ātman and antar-ātman which may be translated as “the supreme self” and “the inner self”. As the foundation and the governor of your innermost being (jīva-ātman), Kṛṣṇa is your divine beloved who is always with, indeed within, you. So, if you truly dis-cover your own self you begin to move towards Kṛṣṇa.
“What happens, however, when such projections of ‘high’ and ‘low’ linguistic forms become aligned with religious affiliation? A language is not simply a compilation of words and phrases: a linguistic system may encode a particular cosmology in terms of what it enables or allows its users to think.”
Increasingly from the turn of the twenty-first century, various projects were initiated to demarcate a “pure” domain of Hindi that would be rooted in such Sanskritic idioms and eschew the Perso-Arabic vocabularies of Urdu. In this fateful intertwining of the categories of language and religion, Hindu nationalists often exhorted Hindus to speak and write in a highly Sanskritized style of Hindi and reject the linguistic mannerisms of a speaker of Urdu which was projected as a Muslim language. Meanwhile, some Muslim writers themselves began to draw Urdu away from its quotidian styles and refashion it with a heavy infusion of Persian words. After all, if anything said in Latin sounds profound, whatever is articulated in Persian sounds poetic. However, this polarised presentation obscures the sociolinguistic fact that different styles of “Hindi” and “Urdu” can be placed on a continuum, and these styles themselves occupy different niches in a linguistic matrix called “Hindustani”.
Just as a Christian may write, in “Christian Arabic”, beautiful poetry in Arabic dedicated to Jesus Christ, Muslim poets in India may write—and indeed have written—songs of praise to the Prophet Muhammad in (Modern Standard) Hindi. In northern India, the Avadhi language became a vital site of these linguistic transitions across Indic and Islamic theological visions. Malik Muhammad Jāyasī (1477–1542) composed an Avadhi retelling of the narrative of Kṛṣṇa (Kanhāvat) by resituating vernacular Hindu idioms in Indo-Persianate Sufi cosmological systems. In these Sufi milieus, the passionate love (rati) of the gopīs for Kṛṣṇa, their antara-ātman, becomes the cultural analogue for expressing in the regional (deśī) language of the hinduān (“people of Hind”) the motif that love for the human beloved (‘ishq-i majāzī) is a reflection of love for the divine beloved (‘ishq-i ḥaqīqī).1 Conversely, some poets from Hindu religious backgrounds have made significant contributions to the poetic styles of ghazal and marsiya in Persian and Urdu. Hindu poets with names such as “Śrī Gopāl” and “Brindāvan Dās” gathered around the Sufi poet Mīrzā Abdul Qādir “Bīdil” (1642–1720) at Delhi, whom they took as their master (sheikh) and on whom they produced a memorial literature that followed Persian canons. Around this time, the Rajput prince Sāvant Singh (1699–1764) wrote voluminous poetry on the motif of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa in Braj Bhasa, and also poems in Urdu with Persian words and imageries.2
“In northern India, the Avadhi language became a vital site of these linguistic transitions across Indic and Islamic theological visions… Conversely, some poets from Hindu religious backgrounds have made significant contributions to the poetic styles of ghazal and marsiya in Persian and Urdu.”
If the statement, “a Hindu poet writes Urdu poetry” has a strange ring, this could be because we are projecting into premodern pasts our contemporary correlation of language and religion (Hindi for Hindus versus Arabic, Persian, and Urdu for Muslims). However, till the middle of the nineteenth century, Persian was not just a “religious” language—it was the court language of the Mughal empire and thus also a means of employment for someone with the resources to learn it. In the middle of the seventeenth century, various administrative offices were occupied by Hindu clerks (munshī), and the exemplary writings in Persian of some Hindus were included in the syllabi for Persian at madrasas. The autobiography of Kartikeya Chandra Ray (1820–1885), a revenue officer, informs us that children started their lessons in Persian with the Pandnāma, followed by the Gulistān and the Būstān of Sa‘adī, before moving on to other texts such as Jāmī’s version of the narrative of Yusūf va Zulaykhā, and so on.3 However, the abolition of Persian as the official language of the courts in 1837 and the initial reluctance across some Muslim milieus to receive education in English were two variables on rapidly changing socioeconomic landscapes that facilitated the subsequent projection of the Hindi versus Urdu binary.
At the same time, the persistence of Persian in various styles of present-day Hindi cannot be ignored. Just as the declaration, “I am commencing the activity of composing an epistle” (rather than, “I am writing a letter”) may be regarded as quaintly Victorian, the replacement of the Perso-Arabic words kitāb (“book”), aslī (“original”), khās (“special”), and mashūr (“famous”) with their Sanskrit correlates pustaka, prākṛta, viśeṣa, and vikhyāta in an everyday conversation in Hindi may have a jarring effect. From a more theological perspective, the affective idioms of longing, loss, separation, despair, and hope continue to oscillate across Indic and Islamic worldviews. If, as Shakespeare reminds us, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, love too is equally lovable whether it is designated with the Indic pyār or the Perso-Arabic ‘ishq and muḥabbat—the producer of the Bollywood movie Pyaar Ishq Aur Mohabbat (2001) seems to be aware of this linguistic fluidity in speaking of love.
The eastern regions encompassed by the description “Bengal” too have been shaped by such sociolinguistic overlaps, adaptations, recalibrations, and contestations. In pre-Partition British India (1858–1947), a recurring debate related to the “proper” style of Bengali that should be used in everyday discourse and print. Should the forms of Bengali that are emerging during the course of the long nineteenth century be slanted more towards Sanskritic roots or more towards Perso-Arabic routes? Thus, the “Hindi-Urdu” dialectic in the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) becomes rearticulated through a “Bengali-Urdu” dialectic in Bengal (now West Bengal in India and Bangladesh).
“The eastern regions encompassed by the description ‘Bengal’ too have been shaped by such sociolinguistic overlaps, adaptations, recalibrations, and contestations.”
From some Muslim perspectives, generally associated with elite (ashraf) groups in cities such as Calcutta and Murshidabad, Bengali is too densely embedded in Hindu cosmologies to be suitable for use by Muslims—a Muslim should ideally acquire competence in Arabic and Persian, failing which they should at least pick up some familiarity with Urdu. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, nasīhat–nāmas (compilations of the basic teachings of Islam) are published in a style of Bengali which is heavily laden with Arabic, Persian, and Urdu words. The symbiotic tissue between Urdu as the language of the Muslim people (jāti) and social solidarity (jātīyatā) is highlighted in 1927 by Muhammad Reyājuddin:
“The Muslim jāti is being destroyed on account of Bangla [Bengali] being the mother-tongue of the Muslims of Bengal. For this reason, they have become devoid of jātīyatā, vigorless (nisteja), weak, and cowardly.”4
“From some Muslim perspectives, generally associated with elite (ashraf) groups in cities such as Calcutta and Murshidabad, Bengali is too densely embedded in Hindu cosmologies to be suitable for use by Muslims”
While such authors repudiated the Bengali language and literature published in it, non-ashraf Muslims criticised those who used only Urdu and Persian in their social exchanges and made no attempt to learn Bengali. The depth of this fault line is highlighted in an article published in 1900:
“Those [Muslims] who are scholars of Arabic and Persian learning would not even regard Bengali as a language. Let alone read Bengali newspapers, they disdain to converse in Bengali.”5
Hindu intellectuals too are deeply involved in these unfolding debates over the shape of the Bengali language. Some Hindu writers cultivate a highly Sanskritic style of sādhu bhāṣā (“chaste language”) in contrast to the Persianate form of Bengali which begins to be called Musalmānī Bangla (“Bengali for Muslims”). Between these “Persianists” and “Sanskritists”, however, we also find literary works on a Muslim via media which is not heavily imprinted with Perso-Arabic terms. Mir Mosharraf Hossain (1848–1911) wrote Biṣād Sindhu, which is a narrative of the martyrdom of Hasan and Husain at Karbala, and a play entitled Zamidār Darpaṇ (1873) which highlighted the plight of tenants. From the 1880s, we see several Bengali newspapers such as Islām Pracārak (1891), Hāfez (1892), Kohinūr (1898), Nūr-al-Imān (1900), and Āl-Eslām (1915) which seek to spread a better understanding of Islam, promote Muslim literature in Bengali, and energise Muslims to work towards social reconstruction.
These debates over what counts as “standard” Bengali raged throughout the 1920s and the 1930s in various literary circles, and erupted in a debate over the Bengali word for “blood” with two iconic participants—Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976). In their distinctive ways, they too traversed the via media: their poetry and prose writings are modulated by both Indic and Perso-Arabic inheritances.
Rabindranath was the first Asian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913): he initiated various literary styles in Bengali, and his voluminous compositions—encompassing poems, plays, novels, short stories, and analytical essays— range a continuum of sādhu bhāṣā and calita bhāṣā (“colloquial speech”). Through various sociohistorical twists and turns, two of his Bengali songs have been adopted as the national anthems of two South Asian nation-states—India and Bangladesh. Running through his extensive writings on Islam in Bengal is the leitmotif that human beings cannot be brought together simply through legal decrees and administrative regulations—true bonds of empathy are formed when we reach out to the hearts of others, feel their pain, and genuinely care for them. This vision of affective synthesis would animate Rabindranath’s university, Visva-Bharati, established in 1921 in Santiniketan. He started a Chair of Islamic Studies in 1927 and a Chair of Persian Studies in 1932 at Visva-Bharati, which admitted Muslim students from its inception.
Nazrul is today revered as the national poet of Bangladesh. His fiery consciousness as a “rebel poet” (bidrohī kabi) who opposed parochialisms shaped by religion, caste, and gender is expressed through numerous songs, poems, and newspaper editorials. His socio-religious visions do not allow modular characterisation as either “Hindu” or “Muslim”; for instance, he composed songs about both the Prophet Muhammad and the Hindu goddess (debī). Nazrul was arrested after the publication of his poem Ānandamaẏīr Āgaman (“The Advent of the Bliss-filled Mother”) which invokes the goddess Durgā to fight the tyrants who have arrived in the form of the British empire. A distinctive characteristic of these writings is the employment of idioms which were used in everyday conversation by Bengali Muslims.
In this regard, various authors have emphasized the close personal bond between Rabindranath and Nazrul. When Nazrul started the Dhumketu, a biweekly magazine, Rabindranath sent a message which was published in the first issue in August 1922:
“To Kazi Nazrul Islam
Come this way, o comet,
building a fiery bridge across the darkness,
On the castle spires of evil days
unfurl your flag of victory!
Let the auspicious mark of omens
be inscribed on the forehead of the night,
Startle and awaken those who are half-asleep.”6
The Dhumketu is published in a volatile context shaped by “communalism” which refers, in its South Asian sense, to the politicization of religious identity. In this context a question such as, “should we use a Sanskrit word or a Persian word to refer to “blood”?” is not merely a lexical exercise for comparative philologists but is loaded with numerous sociopolitical significations. In a letter to M.A. Azam in 1933, Rabindranath writes:
“Every language has a distinctive identity, and we have to follow it … Thousands and thousands of Persian and Arabic words have easily entered Bengali. There is no question of conflict or obstinacy here. But we must regard as a form of violence the attempt to introduce into Bengali those Persian and Arabic words which are not commonly used or which are perhaps limited to specific groups. The use of the word khun to mean “murder” is not incongruous and it has imperceptibly entered into everyday Bengali, but the use of the word khun to mean “blood” has not become accepted. It is pointless to dispute this matter.”7
While Rabindranath has no objection to the use of the word khun-khārābi for denoting “murder”, he opposes the use of the Persian word khun in place of the Sanskrit word rakta for referring to “blood”. It was assumed by some people, including Nazrul himself, that Rabindranath’s comments on the word khun were directed specifically at Nazrul.8 Thus, we find Nazrul writing that Rabindranath has charged him with using the word khun indiscriminately in his Bengali writings. He responds partly by saying that the use of Arabic and Persian words in Bengali poetry is not restricted to him; many other Bengali poets have done so, including Rabindranath himself. He further notes: “I have used the word khun in songs of national zeal or fiery poems. Where it is proper to say, “streams of rakta” I have not forcefully said, “streams of khun”.9
So, the key debate involves not the “communalist” point as to whether Bengali would become a Muslim language if words such as khun were frequently used but the “sociolinguistic” point that languages are living textures which alternately acquire and shed threads in the course of their evolution. In the poetic imaginations of both Rabindranath and Nazrul, “Bengali” is a breathing palimpsest of various types of conceptual idioms, ranging from colloquial expressions interspersed with Persian and Arabic words to devotional poetry where a gopī-like figure is ravaged by the pain of separation from the divine beloved.
“In the poetic imaginations of both Rabindranath and Nazrul, “Bengali” is a breathing palimpsest of various types of conceptual idioms, ranging from colloquial expressions interspersed with Persian and Arabic words to devotional poetry where a gopī-like figure is ravaged by the pain of separation from the divine beloved. “
Re-articulating the key motifs of Braj Bhasha devotional poetry, Nazrul expresses this lament in the persona of a gopī.
“I cannot live without you, Mādhab [Kṛṣṇa],
just as I cannot live without air—so intimate are you to me!
Without rainclouds the cātak birds would die,
Without water the lotuses would wither away,
In the pain of separation from you (birahe tomār)
I die agonisingly.”10
And here is Rabindranath echoing this theological vocabulary of the human self that withers away when afflicted with a sense of separation from the innermost self.
“I am eager to speak of the matter of my heart—
but nobody would listen to me!
The one to whom I surrendered body-mind-heart did not return
Does he wait for me?
Does he sing songs of separation (biraha)?
Hearing his flute-call
I once abandoned my own home.”
We might say that it is immaterial whether it is khun or rakta that flows through our veins, for what matters in such theo-poetic contexts is that the sentiment of the “desolate heart” can be conveyed fairly easily across a spectrum of Indic and Islamic religious and sociolinguistic matrices.
In conclusion, let me move from blood to water. I grew up in a multilingual and religiously diverse environment shaped by different variants of Assamese, an eastern iteration of Braj Bhasha, (Modern Standard) Bengali, Musalmānī Bangla, and (Modern Standard) Hindi. At some point, I began to observe that both Hindus and Muslims who speak Assamese generally use the word pāni for “water”; Muslims who speak Bengali too tend to employ pāni; Hindus who speak Bengali almost always favour the word jal, especially in literary contexts; finally, Hindi speakers with a penchant for Sanskrit would also go for jal. Often, I have found myself in sociolinguistic contexts where I have failed to carry out a “code-switch” promptly and used the wrong word. Yet, thankfully, in all these cases the thing itself—with the chemical formula H2O—has always been promptly offered.
Dr. Ankur Barua
After a B.Sc. in Physics from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, Ankur read Theology and Religious Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge. His primary research interests are Vedantic Hindu philosophical theology and Indo-Islamic styles of sociality.
Footnotes
- A. Behl and S. Weightman, Madhumālāti: An Indian Sufi Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). ↩︎
- H. Pauwels, “Literary Moments of Exchange in the 18th Century: The New Urdu Vogue Meets Krishna Bhakti,” in Indo-Muslim Cultures in Transition: Indo-Muslim Cultures In Transition, ed. A. Patel and K. Leonard (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp.61–85. ↩︎
- K. Ghani, “Vestige of a Dying Tradition: Persian Tract of Tuḥfat ul-Muwaḥḥidīn,” Studia Iranica 44 (2015), pp.56–57. ↩︎
- A. Irani, “Sacred Biography, Translation, and Conversion: The Nabīvaṃśa of Saiyad Sultān and the Making of Bengali Islam, 1600-present” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2011), pp.376–77. ↩︎
- K.A. Mannan, Ādhunik Bāṃlā Sāhitye Muslim Sādhanā (Dhaka: Student Ways, 1969), p.384. ↩︎
- A. Basu, Najrul-Jībanī (Calcutta: Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, 2000), p.88. ↩︎
- B. Iqbal, “Rabīndranāth o Musalmān Samāj,” in Rabīndra-bhābanāẏ Muslim Paṛaśi, ed. A. A. Choudhury (Dhaka: Nandanik, 2012), p.106. ↩︎
- Anisuzzaman, “Rabīndranāth o Musalmān-samāj: Ekti Bhūmikā,” in Rabīndra-bhābanāẏ Muslim Paṛaśi, ed. A. A. Choudhury (Dhaka: Nandanik, 2012), p.58. ↩︎
- A.A. Al-Aman (ed.), Najrul Racanā-Sambhār, Volume 3 (Calcutta: Haraf Publishers, 1978), pp.342–43. ↩︎
- K. Kazi, Kājī Najruler Gān (Calcutta: Sahitya Bharati Publications, 2005), p.548. ↩︎
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