“Language is not religion. Language does not even represent religion. Language belongs to a community,” ruled Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia in a recent landmark Supreme Court judgment. It went on to call Urdu “the finest specimen of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, or the Hindustani tehzeeb”. One must thank the apex court for reminding us that India has always been a deeply multilingual nation. Each region had a language, each language had its own tradition of oral literature and dialects that fed into the pool. Until the 18th century, Urdu and Hindi were among the various names used for a common spoken tongue in the northern plains, from the borders of Punjab to the principality of Awadh.

The name Urdu means an army camp in Turkic. The language initially grew among the residents of an area where Persian-speaking army personnel were stationed as far back as the 14th century. It was created as they interacted with local citizens speaking a mix of north Indian dialects, which Amir Khusro also termed Hindavi. He used it copiously in many of his poems and songs, mixing various dialects spoken in Braj, Awadh, and also the Khadi Boli of what is now western UP.

Urdu mutated as it moved from Delhi to Awadh. Among the Urdu cognoscenti, it was a subject of debate whether the standardised form of Urdu was the one spoken in the camp area in Delhi or the Awadh durbar. It was assumed that Hindavi was a........

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