Negotiating Languages

Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia

Walter N. Hakala

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231542128
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Prior to the nineteenth century, South Asian dictionaries, glossaries, and vocabularies reflected a hierarchical vision of nature and human society. By the turn of the twentieth century, the modern dictionary had democratized and politicized language. Compiled "scientifically" through "historical principles," the modern dictionary became a concrete symbol of a nation's arrival on the world stage.

Following this phenomenon from the late seventeenth century to the present, Negotiating Languages casts lexicographers as key figures in the political realignment of South Asia under British rule and in the years after independence. Their dictionaries document how a single, mutually intelligible language evolved into two competing registers—Urdu and Hindi—and became associated with contrasting religious and nationalist goals. Each chapter in this volume focuses on a key lexicographical work and its fateful political consequences. Recovering texts by overlooked and even denigrated authors, Negotiating Languages provides insight into the forces that turned intimate speech into a potent nationalist politics, intensifying the passions that partitioned the Indian subcontinent.

[1] A PLOT DISCOVERED

This is a very interesting and useful book, my son. I have studied it often, but I never could discover the plot.

— Mark Twain, on awarding Webster’s Dictionary to a grammar-school student

IN THE spring of 2008, I visited my favorite bookshop in Urdu Bazaar, a neighborhood in Old Delhi adjacent to the Jāmʿĕ Masjid, the massive Friday Mosque built in red sandstone during the reign of the Mughal emperor Shāh Jahān. I had come to India to work at various libraries and universities, gathering materials on the lexicographers who shaped the Urdu language from just one of many North Indian dialects into the national language of Pakistan. I was seeking to understand a constellation of genres that range from multilingual vocabularies in verse, to glossaries of terms drawn from classical Persian texts, to comprehensive dictionaries published in multiple volumes and, more recently, on the Internet. On an earlier visit, I had told the owner of the bookshop that I was looking for luġhāts and farhangs (two words that are frequently used in Urdu to mean a defining dictionary), telling him the older the book, the better.

On this particular visit, the owner of the shop produced a thin book published in Delhi during the summer of 1915, at the height of what the author, Munshī Ẓiyāʾ al-Dīn Aḥmad Barnī (1890–1969), in his introduction called the “European War.” While thumbing through the text—whose title, Aḳhbārī Luġhāt (maʿrūf bĕh Kalīd-i Aḳhbār-Bīnī), translates as A Newspaper Dictionary (also known as The Key to Newspaper Viewing)¹—I came across the following entry (translated here into English from the original Urdu):

Dīmākraisī (DEMOCRACY [in English]) This is a form of government in which all decisions (iḳhtiyārāt: ‘elections’, ‘powers’) are universally in the hands of the aggregate population (majmūʿī jumhūr) or in the hands of their appointed officers. This is the sort of government that is done for the people, by the people (logoṅ ke liye logoṅ ke żarīʿah). Executive decisions are in the hands of publicly elected individuals. The republic (jumhūriyat) is the most perfect (mukammal) kind of government. This government is instituted in France, America, Brazil, Switzerland, Mexico, Portugal, and China, etc. The basis for this sort of government has been established from the Islamic era. Both a republic and a nobility are parts of England’s government.²

There was a certain poignancy to this definition: beneath the author’s claim, written across the title page, to have gathered “all those [English] words in alphabetical order that are used in Urdu newspapers” and to have explained them “in easy, simple, and clear Urdu,” there was surely a story hidden within. Or, rather, it is hidden in plain view in the final pages of the book. “At the end of these pages,” so explains the author in his introduction, “I have given a concise sketch of the ‘Organization of the Government of England’ and ‘Organization of the Government of India [Hind]’ with this aim that the ordinary observer should become aware of . . . how England and Hindustan are governed.”³ His motive for compiling this work, he explains, stemmed from the feeling that “it is our duty to be more familiar with the form of governance of our country in comparison with other countries.”⁴

FIGURE 1.1 Sample pages from Aḳhbārī Luġhāt (1915)

Born into a prominent Delhi family of Urdu-language newspaper publishers, Munshī Ẓiyāʾ al-Dīn in 1915 was a vocal pan-Islamist and advocate for Home Rule. He would later work in the Oriental Translator’s Office in Bombay from 1918 to 1947 before finally settling in Pakistan.⁵ As is clear from his definition of democracy, Munshī Ẓiyāʾ al-Dīn’s Key is permeated with a sense of self-conscious distance, as though the author was all too aware that simply defining a term did not in and of itself guarantee full political participation and self-determination. He defines impīriʾyalizam (imperialism) as either “to completely conquer through domination or in an effort to situate colonists (nau-abādiyāṅ).”⁶ The distinction between the two was not lost on him or, he hoped, on his readers. By being selective in his definitions, he could bring emphasis to some matters while avoiding potential pitfalls as, for example, when in his definition of the American Declaration of Independence (Ĕʿlān-i Āzādī) he elides the armed conflict that preceded England’s acceptance of it:

Ĕʿlān-i Āzādī (Declaration of Independence) On 4 July 1776 delegates (delīgaiṭoṅ) of American colonists (nau-ābādiyoṅ) wrote a declaration of self-authority (ĕʿlān-i ḳhẉud muḳhtarī), of which this is a passage: “We, the Representatives (numāyande) of the united states (riyāsat-hāʾe muttaḥidah) who are gathered in this Congress (kāngres), appeal (apīl karte haiṅ) to the Supreme Jurist (aʿlā ḥākim) of the world for the validity (durustī) of our intentions and publish this declaration that the united states are free and independent (ḳhẉud muḳhtār). And the right of these [states] is that they ought to be independent.” England accepted this declaration.⁷

His definitions make reference to universals, such as when he implies that India, too, might make a similar appeal to a “Supreme Jurist” in framing her political aspirations. The very form his entries take, with prose definitions following headwords arranged alphabetically from first letter to last, was itself emblematic of the author’s—and by extension his readers’—mastery of a thoroughly modern and increasingly widespread mode of reference.

Our interactions with a dictionary can be both very intimate—as when we embarrassedly consult it when unfamiliar with a term that a public figure or acquaintance treats as common knowledge—and very collective. The zealous attorney who quotes a definition from the dictionary to clinch an argument is a figure familiar from many courtroom dramas. To argue against the definition given in the dictionary is to mark ourselves somehow as not belonging to the collectivity, as existing beyond the pale of a community of legitimate language users designated by the text. A dictionary, more than any other object, is the most concrete modern material artifact of a community that shares a common language. It now seems natural to us that all words should find a place in some sort of dictionary and that for every person there is some dictionary that best describes his or her mother tongue. We pity as primitive those peoples who, lacking dictionaries, are threatened with the extinction of their language and the assimilation of their culture into larger, more successful cultures with dictionaries. Those of us who live with dictionaries cannot imagine what it would be like not to have recourse to some dictionary, and we assume that those who do not possess—or, rather, are not themselves possessed by—dictionaries are doomed to disappear from history altogether.

Lydia Liu, in her classic study of the passage between China and the West of concepts that have been associated with modernity, describes the “thriving industry of bilingual dictionaries” in East Asia as dependent on the almost universal and perduring “illusion” of languages as commensurate entities composed of actually or potentially equivalent terms and ideas.⁸ Like Ernest Gellner and others, she argues that the analytical categories through which these grounds for equivalence are asserted are the products of the unequal power relationships enacted through the long history of European and Asian cultural encounters.⁹ Rather than taking these grounds for equivalence as a static quality inherent to language, Liu argues that this “hypothetical equivalence” is a process that is continually “established, maintained, or revised among languages so that meaning, which is always historical, can be made available or unavailable to the translator.”¹⁰ A history of inequity on a global scale always undergirds any individual act of asserting intercultural equivalences. As individual sites of contest, each semantic equation is also a narrative of the victories, capitulations, and, especially, adaptations that produced the conditions of their articulation: “In thinking about translatability between historical languages, one cannot but consider the actual power relations that dictate the degree and magnitude of sacrifice that one language must make in order to achieve some level of commensurality with the other.”¹¹ For Liu, the processes of cross-cultural comparison share the same illusory premise of all bilingual dictionaries, the notion that “a word in language A must equal a word or a phrase in language B; otherwise one of the languages is lacking.”¹²

Recent scholarship on South Asia has complicated these formulations by revealing sustained forms of cultural exchange among the region’s multilingual communities during—but also well before—South Asia’s experiences of European imperialism. Sheldon Pollock’s pathbreaking work examines the cultural influence of a Sanskrit “cosmopolis” across much of Asia more than a thousand years prior to Vasco de Gama’s arrival on the western coast of India. The impact of Sanskrit literature upon a bewildering variety of South Asian, Central Asian, and Southeast Asian languages is only beginning to be documented.¹³ The success of this translatio studii (the transfer of knowledge from one person or culture to another) was not always accompanied by a parallel process of translatio imperii (the imposition or transfer of power from one entity to another):

There is little evidence that [Sanskrit] was ever used as the language of practical rule. . . . The work Sanskrit did do was beyond the quotidian and the instrumental; it was directed above all toward articulating a form of political consciousness and culture, politics not as transaction of material power . . . but as celebration of aesthetic power.¹⁴

The extent to which these inter- and intracultural transfers were carried out, even in the absence of marked differentials of political and military power, material resources, and technology, calls into question many of the assumptions regarding the uniqueness of modern European encounters with its “others.” Inspired in part by Pollock’s work, scholars of Persian have traced broadly analogous processes of cultural diffusion in South Asia through literature, works about literature, and state power.¹⁵ The imprint of cosmopolitan Asian literary cultures is apparent not just on the modern languages of South Asia—the so-called vernaculars—but also upon Arabic, Persian, and Chinese—all languages that Liu would consider to be both “historical” and decisively shaped by their extended encounters with European imperialism.¹⁶

The contemporary South Asian linguistic landscape is characterized by a process of what Pollock, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin, calls hyperglossia, “a relationship of extreme superposition (hyper-) between two languages that local actors knew to be entirely different.”¹⁷ In practice, this entailed the deployment by individuals of multiple more or less distinct means of expression in order to perform felicitously the variety of social interactions they encountered in their daily lives. An individual’s choice of one language or distinct style (or register) of a language over another often appears uneven: one’s use of a particular language or form of language was usually limited to certain activities, with that individual facing various obstacles to the acquisition of the means to perform additional linguistically delimited activities. Individuals who mastered multiple, and often linguistically quite disparate, registers also had the opportunity to gain entrance to and successfully function within a greater range of social situations. As much as dictionaries, grammars, and other didactic texts could legislate the boundaries between registers, by subjecting linguistic forms to systematization, these texts also provided the means by which individuals could gain access to new linguistic repertoires. They often permitted one generation to share knowledge with the next: a Central Asian physician émigré, to cite one example, prepared the Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī (An ode on Hindi terms), a Persian–Hindi medical vocabulary, for his sons in early sixteenth-century India. By identifying local analogues for the Central Asian medicinal plants with which he was familiar (sometimes on the basis of shared color or other properties), he had also found a practical means to sustain his family’s practice in the markedly different cultural and ecological climate of northern India.¹⁸

Lisa Mitchell has traced the nineteenth-century emergence in South India of a faith in the commensurability of language—the assumption, at least at a lexical level, “that a word in any language must have a ready equivalent in each and every other language.”¹⁹ She contends that prior to the nineteenth century, South Indians associated certain forms of knowledge with particular languages, or to phrase it more precisely, particular linguistic registers were appropriate for the performance of a very limited set of social actions. Mitchell documents how new forms of technology, when combined with disruptive intrusions of European forms of knowledge, governance, and modes of patronage, compelled South Indian intellectuals to consider for the first time the possibility of a single linguistic structure—a so-called mother tongue—as capable of fulfilling all the social functions that had previously been carried out by linguistically diverse registers and, increasingly, by English.²⁰ Dictionaries played a key role in these transformations. In their most schematic form, the materials examined in Negotiating Languages depict, first, how a language comes to be written down; then, second, how it comes to be made literary; and, finally, how it comes to be repositioned as the “mother tongue” of a community with political aspirations. For inasmuch as dictionaries may serve as guides to potentially unfamiliar communicative situations, they also permit a person or a people to stake their claim to a lexical realm by marking out the boundar...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dadication
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Chronology
• 1. A Plot Discovered
• 2. 1700: Between Microhistory and Macrostructures
• 3. 1800: Through the Veil of Poetry
• 4. 1900: Lexicography and the Self
• 5. 1900: Grasping at Straws
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List