Indo Aryan Languages

"While we battle each other on the streets on whether Sanskrit should be revived in the school curricula or not, top notch western universities have been busy churning one esoteric dissertation after another on Panini's Ashtadhyay and comparing Bhartihari's and Patanjali's grammatical logic."

"Bhojpuri is the practical langauage of an energetic race which is ever ready to accommodate itself to circumstances, and which has made its Influence felt all over India."

"Bhojpuri has not only stayed alive, in the whole world, and I am saying this in the most considered way, in the whole world Bhojpuri is the most rapidly developing language. It has music, cinema, philosophy. In the oral tradition of Bhojpuri, there is so much wisdom. Bhojpuri people are enterprising and the Bhojpuri language is even getting them employment these days."

"The Bhojpuri speaking country is inhabited by a people curiously different from others who speak Bihari langauages. They form a fighting nation of Hindostan. An alert and active nationality with few scruples and considerable abilities. Dearly loving, a fight for fighting's sake, they have spread all over Aryan India, each man ready to carve his fortune out of any opportunity which may present itself to him."

"The Bengali and the Bhojpuri are two of the great civilisers of Hindostan, the former with his pen and the latter with his Cudgel."

"“All the Dravidian languages known to us fairly bristle with loans from Sanskrit and the Aryan vernaculars. Dravidian literature in South India came into existence under the impulse and influence of Sanskrit literature and speech. Wherever there is a correspondence in the vocabularies of Sanskrit and Dravidian, there is a presumption, to be removed only by specific argument, that Sanskrit has been the lender, Dravidian the borrower.” ....“If a word can be explained easily from material extant in Sanskrit itself, there is little chance for such a hypothesis”."

"“not a single case in which a communis opinio has been found confirming the foreign origin of a Rgvedic (and probably Vedic in general) word”.... [there is] “not a single bit of uncontroversial evidence on the actual spread of Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic in prehistoric times, so that any statement on Dravidian and Austric in Rgvedic times is nothing but speculation”. ...“Many of the arguments for (or against) such foreign origin are often not the results of impartial and thorough research, but rather of (often wistful) statements of faith.”"

"There was a branch of Indo-Aryan which, like the parent Indo-European, had retained the distinction between r and l, [and that this branch entered India] before the migrations of the standard Indo-Aryan branch... Where did they come from? Did they reach India via Iran? If so, did they leave any trace of themselves in Iran? Were the speakers of the r-and-l dialect of pre-Vedic Indo-Aryan a totally different branch from the Indo- Iranian? These are difficult questions. [...] Anyway, one would still have to assume the entry of r-and-l dialects of Indo-Aryan into India before the arrival of the Ṛgvedic Aryans to account for the fact that r-and-l dialects in India were more easterly in relation to the Ṛgvedic dialect."

"“All these linguists are operating on the assumption, based on other criteria, that the Aryans ‘must have’ invaded India where there could not have been a ‘linguistic vacuum’”... “they are not internally consistent, since the opinions of the principal linguists in this area have differed quite considerably. This problematizes the value of this method as a significant determinant in the Indo-Aryan debate…”.... “the theory of Aryan migrations must be established without doubt on other grounds for research into pre-Aryan linguistic substrata to become meaningful. However, the ‘evidence’ of a linguistic substratum in Indo-Aryan, in and of itself, due to its inconclusive nature, cannot be presented in isolation as decisive proof in support of the theory of Aryan invasions or migrations into the Indian subcontinent.”"

"[K.R. Norman, in his study of the variations between the OIA (Old Indo-Aryan: Vedic and Classical Sanskrit) and MIA (Middle Indo-Aryan: Prakrits), finds MIA dialects contain many forms] which are clearly of IA, or even IE, origin, but have no attested Skt equivalent, e.g. suffixes not, or only rarely, found in Skt, or those words which show a different grade of root from that found in Skt, but can be shown not to be MIA innovations, because the formation could only have evolved in a pre-MIA phonetic form, or because a direct equivalent is found in an IE language other than Skt... the forms in that category go back to 'lost' OIA dialects... I know of no attempt to make a complete and comprehensive collection of the evidence for this interesting category of forms in MIA, and it remains scattered through the pages of Indological writings. I believe that, until such a collection is made, the amount of material available will be underestimated."

"Sanskrit, the faithful guardian of old Indo-European forms, exhibits these remarkable [PIE inflection] properties better than any other member of the Aryan line of speech."

"[the Dravidian derivations ... on Sanskrit words [are not ] “self-evident” [but] “a matter of probability and to a certain extent of faith”."

"[it is] “always possible, eg. to counter a suggestion of borrowing from one of the indigenous language families by suggesting that there has been borrowing in the other direction”. .... [these derivations are] “in fact all merely ‘suggestions’. Unfortunately, all areal etymologies are in the last analysis unprovable, are ‘acts of faith’.” ... [the external (to India) origin of the Indoaryans (and Indo-Europeans) is] “our linguistic doctrine which has been held now for more than a century and a half”."

"Another point is that there may be a covert petitio principii at work here. Many assertions on what can or cannot be done in Indo-Aryan are based on the assumption that Vedic Sanskrit is more or less the mother of the whole IA group, it being the language of the entry point whence the Aryan tribes populated a large part of India. Thus, Witzel is sure that Kosala must be a loan (from Tibeto-Burman) because the sequence -os- is “not allowed in Sanskrit”."

"MIA and NIA languages are not, strictly speaking, derived from the language of the Rigveda or from Classical Sanskrit […] these Aryans of the eastern tracts seem to be different from the Midland or Vedic Aryans in many respects―in religious observances, in many practices, in dialect […] these Aryans were distinct from those other Aryans of the West among whom the Vedic culture grew up, distinct in dialect, in religion and in practices... The morphology of Vedic […] retains most faithfully the inflections of primitive Indo-European."

"Vedic (and Avestan) had "three genders, three numbers and eight cases, the fullest representation of the Indo-European system" (LOCKWOOD 1972:215).... "Greek and Sanskrit […] there are so few completely regular verbs in these languages. It is the irregular and defective verb which best reflects the prehistoric background" (LOCKWOOD 1972:109)."

"There has been a certain amount of controversy concerning the question of non-Aryan loan-words in Sanskrit, and some scholars (P. Thieme, H.W. Bailey) have adopted a sceptical position in this respect. Alternate Indo-European etymologies have been offered for words for which a Dravidian or Munda etymology had previously been proposed, in some cases successfully (…)but more dubious in other cases."

"Islamism immediately revived the lost cause of Urdu behind the smoke-screen of this Communist campaign against Hindi. It lauded loudly when progressive Urdu poets like Firaq Gorakhpuri lampooned Hindi in a language which was largely unprintable. Simultaneously, Islamism started parading Urdu as the great language of culture and refinement which will be lost to India for good if Urdu was allowed to go under. No Communist came forward to examine this “culture and refinement as a legacy of decadent Muslim courts and a frivolous Muslim aristocracy. No Communist questioned the heavy Persianisation and Arabicisation of Urdu which made it incomprehensible even to educated people, leave alone the man in Chandni Chowk. The recognition of Urdu as a second language has today become a sine qua non of Secularism."

"The very word Urdu came into being as the original Lashkari dialect, in other words, the language of the army."

"Let me make it very clear to you, it is no doubt that the state language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan. Without state language, no nation can remain tied up solidly together and function. Look at the history of every government judgement substitute language. Therefore, so far as the State language is concerned, Pakistan's state language shall be Urdu."

"Urdu literary culture from the late eighteenth century on- ward does place an unfortunate stress, which is also entirely disproportion- ate to their value, on “purism,” “language reform,” “purging the language of undesirable usages,” and—worst of all—privileging all Persian-Arabic over all Urdu. Urdu is the only language whose writers have prided themselves on “deleting” or “excising” words and phrases from their active vocabulary. Instead of taking pride in the enlargement of vocabulary, they took joy in limiting the horizon of language, to the extent of banishing many words used even by literate speakers or their own ustads."

"Although Urdu in form of Zuban-I Urdu-yi Mu'lla was already in use during the reign of Emperor Shajahan and referred to as Lashkari Zaban, Muhammed Shah made it popular among his people, declaring it to be his Court Language. In his respect, Lashkari or Urdu replaced Farsi or Persian, which was being used and understood by fewer and fewer individuals."

"Urdu begins, as matter of commonsense have begun, as soon as the Ghaznavi armies got to Lahore in 1027 -and Lahore was nowhere near the area of Khari (and still less of Braj and Adhvani)"

"Urdu is a common denominator. It is the national language (national language of Pakistan). People in all the provinces of Pakistan speak Urdu."

"After he (Abdul Haq) migrated to Pakistan, he said, at a meeting in Karachi held to celebrate the 92nd birth anniversary of Ghalib on 15 February 1961, something quite different —as this short extract from the press report appearing in the official fortnightly bulletin of the Anjuman Taraqqui-e-Urdu (Pakistan) shows: In his presidential speech Baba-e-Urdu [Abdul Haq) expressing his unhappiness over the disregard shown to Urdu in Pakistan said that Pakistan was not created by Jinnah, nor was it created by Iqbal; it was Urdu that created Pakistan. The fundamental reason for the discord between the Hindus and the Muslims was the Urdu language. The entire two-nation theory and all other differences of this nature issued solely from Urdu. Therefore, Pakistan owes a debt of gratitude to Urdu. Coming from the father of the Urdu Movement this was a stunning revelation."

"A word from Urdu will be seen intruding into Hindi like a crow among swans, at one place, while at another, a Hindi word in the midst of Urdu will ruin the flavor like salt in a sweet dish."

"In this catalogue of new demands there are some which on the face of them are extravagant and impossible, if not irresponsible. As an instance, one may refer to the demand for fifty-fifty and the demand for the recognition of Urdu as the national language of India. ... Their claim for the recognition of Urdu as the national language of India is equally extravagant. Urdu is not only not spoken all, over India but is not even the language of all the Musalmans of India. Of the 68 millions of Muslims, only 28 millions speak Urdu. The proposal of making Urdu the national language means that the language of 28 millions of Muslims is to be imposed particularly upon 40 millions of Musalmans or generally upon 322 millions of Indians."

"“The poets of Delhi, proud of the ‘pure’ Urdu of the imperial camp… rejected the Dakani principle and practice of borrowing extensively from the Indian languages, especially if these borrowings were related to Hindu religion, culture and world-view… In this process imagery was drawn exclusively from Persian precedents, i.e., from the unseen and unexperienced sights, sounds and smells of Persia and Central Asia, rejecting totally the Indian sights, sounds and sensuous experience as materials regarded not sublime enough for poetic expression… It was a desperate unconscious clinging to the origins of the symbols of Muslim India’s cultural experience which had begun abroad, and an instinctive fear of being submerged into the Hindu cultural milieu. These modes of aesthetic appreciation, rooted so deeply in the essence of universal Islamic culture, remained more or less incomprehensible to the Hindu mind."

"“Throughout the whole range of Urdu literature in its first phase… the atmosphere of this literature is provokingly un-Indian - it is that of Persia. Early Urdu poets never so much as mention the great physical features of India - its Himalayas, its rivers like the Ganges, the Jamuna, the Sindhu, the Godavari, etc; but of course mountains and streams of Persia, and rivers of Central Asia are always there. Indian flowers, Indian plants are unknown; only Persian flowers and plants which the poet could see only in a garden. There was a deliberate shutting of the eye to everything Indian, to everything not mentioned or treated in Persian poetry… A language and literature which came to base itself upon an ideology which denied on the Indian soil the very existence of India and Indian culture, could not but be met with a challenge from some of the Indian adherents of their national culture; and that challenge was in the form of highly Sanskritized Hindi’.”"

"In actual life, it is impossible to separate us into two nations. We are not two nations. Every Moslem will have a Hindu name if he goes back far enough in his family history. Every Moslem is merely a Hindu who has accepted Islam. That does not create nationality. … We in India have a common culture. In the North, Hindi and Urdu are understood by both Hindus and Moslems. In Madras, Hindus and Moslems speak Tamil, and in Bengal, they both speak Bengali and neither Hindi nor Urdu. When communal riots take place, they are always provoked by incidents over cows and by religious processions. That means that it is our superstitions that create the trouble and not our separate nationalities."

"It is equally important to know that Urdu poetry came under the influence of Persian poetry at a time when the latter had fallen into decadence. The result was that our poetry was tainted with narrowness and artificiality at the very outset of its career. ... Urdu poetry lacks freshness because, among other things presently to be discussed, it leaves out observation and borrows its imagery wholesale from Persia. From this it naturally follows that our medieval poetry, especially the gha^al^ has no local colour. In this respect, the contrast between Urdu poetry and Hindi and Punjabi and Sanskrit poetry is striking. The latter have grown out of the soil and absorbed its natural wealth and social background. And for this reason they make a deeper ap- peal to us than Urdu poetry. One of the most unfailing sources of aesthetic enjoyment in poetry lies in the idealization and recognition in it of things we see and love in life. It is not only that the sights and scenes we are familiar with come crowding to the mind when des- cribed in poetry and make the poetic experience richer and more significant. By far the greatest function of poetry, as I take it, is to send us back to life with an increased zest for it: it is a training for a fuller and more significant life. Your heart will not dance with the daffodils unless you have seen them disporting in the air, like Words- worth; and if you have seen them under the lead of the poet’s imagination, then your observation of them in future will acquire associations which it did not have before. In this respect the poverty of Urdu poetry is too palpable to require further comment."

"In fact this mixture of locals and foreigners gave birth to the language later known as "Urdu" in Lahore that was called Lashkari Zaban (language of the army) at that time."

"A universal language for India should be Hindi, with the option of writing in Persian or Nagari characters. In order that Hindus and Mahomedans may have closer relations, it is necessary to know both the characters. And, if we can do this, we can drive the English language out of the field in a short time. All this is necessary for us, slaves. Through our slavery the nation has been enslaved, and it will be free with our freedom."

"According to the Constitution, English should have been phased out by 1965; no outside power was involved when the Indian elite sabotaged this switch. This elite profited too much from the disenfranchisement of the Indian commoners by the dominance of English. Without saying it out loud, they thanked Macaulay for their linguistic privileges... “Decolonization” implies the belated phasing out of English, but this will involve the defeat not of some foreign colonizer but of the indigenous elite."

"“By annihilating native literature, by sweeping away from all sources of pride and pleasure in their own mental efforts, by rendering a whole people dependent upon a remote and unknown country for all their ideas and the words in which to clothe them, we should degrade their character, depress their energies and render them incapable of aspiring to any intellectual distinction.”"

"Right from his early days in the Andamans, Vinayak encouraged people to speak in Hindi....Till then, government records were maintained in Urdu, and even Hindi was written in the Persian script. Vinayak strongly advocated the implementation of the Devanagari script as it was the one in which the oldest language of the subcontinent, Sanskrit, was written."

"For the generation that had successfully concluded the freedom struggle and that laid down a language policy in the Constituent Assembly, it was obvious that free India’s link language could not be the colonial language. A vote was held to choose between Hindi and Sanskrit, which Hindi won with the narrowest of margins. This meant that Hindi would replace English for all official purposes by 1965. But when 1965 came, the memory of the freedom struggle and its nationalist fervour had dimmed sufficiently, while under Nehru the English-speaking elite had gained enough self-confidence to thwart the explicit choice of the Founding Fathers. Since then, English has completely elbowed out Hindi and the other vernaculars, to the extent that schools with the vernacular as medium of instruction are shunned and have come under pressure to switch over to English. A nation with a glorious literary tradition is now voluntarily turning into an underdeveloped country dependent on the former colonial language for all grown-up purposes, where virtually the whole next generation will be schooled through English as medium. [...] In language, the first choice made by the Constituent Assembly was anti-colonial, viz. for a replacement of the colonizer’s language with a native alternative. Yet, by the due date of 26 January 1965, it was decided to overrule the Constitution and perpetuate English as lingua franca. This was a choice made by Indians, not foisted on them by British colonialism nor by other outside factors like American imperialism. This choice reduced the vast majority of Indians to second-class status."

"Maybe it's the Hindi that has gotten in me Whatever's got into me, I don't mind"

"In actual life, it is impossible to separate us into two nations. We are not two nations. Every Moslem will have a Hindu name if he goes back far enough in his family history. Every Moslem is merely a Hindu who has accepted Islam. That does not create nationality. … We in India have a common culture. In the North, Hindi and Urdu are understood by both Hindus and Moslems. In Madras, Hindus and Moslems speak Tamil, and in Bengal, they both speak Bengali and neither Hindi nor Urdu. When communal riots take place, they are always provoked by incidents over cows and by religious processions. That means that it is our superstitions that create the trouble and not our separate nationalities."

"A word from Urdu will be seen intruding into Hindi like a crow among swans, at one place, while at another, a Hindi word in the midst of Urdu will ruin the flavor like salt in a sweet dish."

"In adopting the Hindi as the National tongue of Hindudom no humiliation or any invidious distinction is implied as regards other provincial tongues. We are all as attached to our provincial tongues as to Hindi and they will all grow and flourish in their respective spheres. In fact some of them are today more progressive and richer in literature. But nevertheless, taken all in all the Hindi can serve the purpose of a National Pan-Hindu language best. It must also be remembered that the Hindi is not made a National Language to order. The fact is that long before either the English or even the Moslems stepped in India the Hindi in its general form had already come to occupy the position of a National tongue throughout Hindustan. The Hindu pilgrim, the tradesman, the tourist, the soldier, the Pandit travelled up and down from Bengal to Sind and Kashmere to Rameshwar by making himself understood from locality to locality through Hindi. Just as the Sanskrit was the National Language of the Hindu intellectual world even so Hindi has been for at least a thousand years in the past the National Indian Tongue of the Hindu community..... "By Hindi we of course mean the pure "Sanskrit Nistha" Hindi, as we find it for example in the " Satyartha Prakash " written by Maharsi Dayananda Saraswati. How simple and untainted with a single unnecessary foreign word is that Hindi and how expressive withal ! It may be mentioned in passing that Swami Dayanandaji was about the first Hindu leader who gave conscious and definite expression to the view that Hindi should be the Pan-Hindu National language of India. ""

"Article 351 of Constitution of India reads “It shall be the duty of the Union to promote the spread of the Hindi language, to develop it so that it may serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India and to secure its enrichment by assimilating without interfering with its genius, the forms, style and expressions used in Hindustani and in the other languages of India specified in the Eighth Schedule, and by drawing, wherever necessary or desirable, for its vocabulary, primarily on Sanskrit and secondarily on other languages.""

"The official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari script... for a period of fifteen years from the commencement of this Constitution, the English language shall continue to be used for all the official purposes of the Union..."

"Modi script has only single “eekar I” and “ookar u”, which minimize grammatical mistakes."

"In recent years interest in Modi script has increased and researchers and enthusiasts are reinventing this cultural and historical heritage. There are many of Modi documents preserved not only in India but also in other Asian and European countries. While the majority of Modi documents are official records, land records and other administrative documents, the script is also used in education, journalism and other routine activities before the 1950s."

"The Modi letters are syllables as they cannot be drawn without the inherent vowel sign “Kana”."

"Modi script is a Brahmi based script used primarily for writing Marathi and in some cases other languages like Hindi, Gujarati, Konkani, Tamil and Telugu."

"From the 13th century until the mid-20th century, it was written with the Modi alphabet. Since 1950 it has been written with the Devnagri alphabet."

"Modi script derives from Nagari family of script. Importance of Modi is because it was the official script for all administrative purposes in the 16th century. When the Maratha dynasties came in power they adopted also continued it as official script through the 17th century and it remained so until the middle of the 20th century. Changing socio-political conditions gradually pushed Modi out of its official use and was replaced by the Devnagri script, known as Balbodh"

"Modi has undergone a series of changes and it reflects the socio-political and cultural changes that occurred in the period when Modi was prominently used. The earliest form is of the 12th century, known as "Adyakalin (आद्यकालीन)‟. It underwent a change during the 13th century and is known as “Yadavakalin (यादवकालीन)” followed by “Brahmhkalin (ब्रह्मकालीन)” of the 14th-16th century. The well-known “Chitnis” form developed during the “Shivakalin (शिवकालीन)” of the 17th century. In the 18th century the “Peshvekalin (पेशवेकालीन)”, style of Modi gained prominence and had variations like “Chitnisi, Bilavalkari, Mahadevapanti, and Ranadi”. The final stage of Modi is associated with English rule and is called “Anglakalin (आंग्लकालीन)”. These forms were used from 1818 until 1952."