Abstract
The language of rekhtī is colloquial Urdu emerging as a literary rival and complement both to Persian and Persianized Urdu. At this time, “Hindi” (the language of “Hind” as opposed to the language of Persia) was generally used to refer to the language we now call “Urdu.” Insha recounts how he once asked a poet called Maulvi Haidar Ali, who wrote in Persian, Arabic, and Hindi, to recite something. Saying that one’s command of one’s native language is always better than of foreign languages, therefore, he was most satisfied with his Hindi poetry, the Maulvi recited a religious ode (which we would term Urdu).1
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Muṅh lagāte hī khulā qufl dar basta dil
Thi zubān teň bhī kuchh zor hunar kī kunjī
At the mouth’s touch, the lock fastening the heart opened
Your tongue was a forceful key to accomplishment
—Inshā KtI (397: 381)
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Notes
Mir Insha Allah Khan Insha, Daryā-e Lat̤āfat, trans. into Urdu by Pandit Brijmohan Dattatreya “Kaifi” (Delhi: Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu, 1988), 75. Hereafter cited as D-eL.
Sa‘adat Yar Khan Rangin Dehlvi, Akhbar-i Rangin Ma‘ah Muqaddimah o Ta‘liqat, ed. S. Moinul Haq (Karachi: Pakistan Historical Society, 1962), 16.
Sibt-i Muhammad Naqvi, ed., Intikhab-i Rekhti (Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Akadmi, 1983), 8.
Sabir Ali Khan, Sa‘adat Yar Khan Rangin (Karachi: Anjuman-i Taraqqi-i Urdu, 1956), 404. Hereafter cited as SYKR. 10.
Insha Allah Khan, Lataif us-Sa‘adat, trans. Amina Khatoon (Bangalore: Kausar Press, 1955), 85–86.
See Ruth Vanita, “Gandhi’s Tiger: Multilingual Elites, the Battle for Minds, and English Romantic Literature in Colonial India,” Postcolonial Studies 5, no.1 (2002): 95–112.
Faruq Argali, Rekhti (New Delhi: Farid Book Depot, 2006), 115. Hereafter cited as R.
Sayy’id ‘Ali Haidar, ed., Majālis-i Rangīn (Patna: Idara Tahqiqat-e Arabi-o Farsi, 1990), 30, ākhāṣī.
John T. Platts, A Dictionary of Classical Urdu, Hindi and English (Delhi: Munshi-ram Manoharlal, 1997), 1113.
Nurul Hasan Hashmi, Dilli ka Dabistan-i Sha‘iri (Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Akadmi, 1992), 117.
Muzaffar Alam, “The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan,” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 131–98.
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© 2012 Ruth Vanita
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Vanita, R. (2012). Eloquent Parrots. In: Gender, Sex, and the City. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016560_3
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