Posted by Victor Mair
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69575&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=persian-language-in-the-indian-subcontinent
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69575
That's the title of a valuable Wikipedia article. I have no idea who wrote it, but I'm very glad to have access to this comprehensive article, since it touches on so many topics that concern my ongoing research.
Here are some highlights:
Before British colonisation, the Persian language was the lingua franca of the Indian subcontinent and a widely used official language in the northern India. The language was brought into South Asia by various Turkics and Afghans and was preserved and patronized by local Indian dynasties from the 11th century, such as Ghaznavids, Sayyid dynasty, Tughlaq dynasty, Khilji dynasty, Mughal dynasty, Gujarat sultanate, and Bengal sultanate. Initially it was used by Muslim dynasties of India but later started being used by non-Muslim empires too. For example, the Sikh Empire, Persian held official status in the court and the administration within these empires. It largely replaced Sanskrit as the language of politics, literature, education, and social status in the subcontinent.
The spread of Persian closely followed the political and religious growth of Islam in the Indian subcontinent. However Persian historically played the role of an overarching, often non-sectarian language connecting the diverse people of the region. It also helped construct a Persian identity, incorporating the Indian subcontinent into the transnational world of Greater Iran, or Ajam. Persian's historical role and functions in the subcontinent have caused the language to be compared to English in the modern-day region.
Persian began to decline with the gradual deterioration of the Mughal Empire. Urdu and English replaced Persian as British authority grew in the Indian subcontinent. Persian lost its official status in the East India Company in 1837, and fell out of currency in the subsequent British Raj.
Persian's linguistic legacy in the region is apparent through its impact on the Indo-Aryan languages. It played a formative role in the emergence of Hindustani, and had a relatively strong influence on Punjabi, Sindhi, Bengali, Gujarati, and Kashmiri. Other languages like Marathi, Rajasthani, and Odia also have a considerable amount of loan words from Persian.
Literature
A large corpus of Persian literature was produced by inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. Prior to the 19th century, the region produced more Persian literature than Iran. This consisted of several types of works: poetry (such as rubaʿi, qasidah), panegyrics (often in praise of patron kings), epics, histories, biographies, and scientific treatises. These were written by members of all faiths, not just Muslims. Persian also was used for religious expression in the subcontinent, the most prominent example of which is Sufi literature.
This extended presence and interaction with native elements led to the Persian prose and poetry of the region developing a distinct, Indian touch, referred to as sabk-e-Hindi (Indian style) among other names. It was characterised by an ornate, flowery poetic style, and the presence of Indian vocabulary, phrases, and themes. For example, the monsoon season was romanticised in Indo-Persian poetry, something that had no parallel in the native Irani style. Due to these differences, Iranian poets considered the style "alien" and often expressed a derisive attitude towards sabk-e-Hindi. Notable practitioners of sabk-e-Hindi were Urfi Shirazi, Faizi, Sa'ib, and Bedil.[54][53]
Translations from other literary languages greatly contributed to the Indo-Persian literary corpus. Arabic works made their way into Persian (e.g. Chach Nama). Turkic, the older language of Islamic nobility, also saw translations (such as that of Chagatai Turkic "Baburnama" into Persian). A vast number of Sanskrit works were rendered into Persian, especially under Akbar, in order to transfer indigenous knowledge; these included religious texts such as the Mahabharata (Razmnama), Ramayana and the four Vedas, but also more technical works on topics like medicine and astronomy, such as Zij-e-Mohammed-Shahi. This provided Hindus access to ancient texts that previously only Sanskritised, higher castes could read.
Influence on subcontinental languages
As a prestige language and lingua franca over a period of 800 years in the Indian subcontinent, Classical Persian exerted a vast influence over numerous Indic languages, which includes non-Indo-Aryan languages. Generally speaking, the degree of impact is seen to increase the more one moves towards the north-west of the subcontinent, i.e. the Indo-Iranian frontier. For example, the Indo-Aryan languages have the most impact from Persian; this ranges from a high appearance in Punjabi, Sindhi, Kashmiri, and Gujarati, to more moderate representation in Bengali and Marathi. The largest foreign element in the Indo-Aryan languages is Persian. Conversely, the Dravidian languages have seen a low level of influence from Persian. They still feature loans from the language, some of which are direct, and some through Deccani (the southern variety of Hindustani), due to the Islamic rulers of the Deccan.
Hindustani is a notable exception to this geographic trend. It is an Indo-Aryan lingua franca spoken widely across the Hindi Belt and Pakistan, best described as an amalgamation of a Khariboli linguistic base with Persian elements. It has two formal registers, the Persianised Urdu (which uses the Perso-Arabic alphabet) and the de-Persianised, Sanskritised Hindi (which uses Devanagari). Even in its vernacular form, Hindustani contains the most Persian influence of all the Indo-Aryan languages, and many Persian words are used commonly in speech by those identifying as "Hindi" and "Urdu" speakers alike. These words have been assimilated into the language to the extent they are not recognised as "foreign" influences. This is due to the fact that Hindustani's emergence was characterised by a Persianisation process, through patronage at Islamic courts over the centuries. Hindustani's Persian register Urdu in particular has an even greater degree of influence, going as far as to admit fully Persian phrases such as "makānāt barā-ē farōḵht" (houses for sale). It freely uses its historical Persian elements, and looks towards the language for neologisms. This is especially true in Pakistan (see #Contemporary).
The following Persian features are hence shared by many Indic languages but vary in the manner described above, with Hindustani and particularly its register Urdu bearing Persian's mark the most. It is also worth noting that due to the politicisation of language in the subcontinent, Persian features make an even stronger appearance among the Muslim speakers of the above languages.
There are separate sections on vocabulary (loanwords [with a long list of examples], indirect loans, and compounds), phonology, grammar, and writing systems.
This is not to complain, but missing from the references is this important volume edited by two of my colleagues at Penn:
Brian Spooner and William L. Hanaway, ed., Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
Table of Contents
The last chapter in the book, “Persian Scribes (munshi) and Chinese Literati (ru): The Power and Prestige of Fine Writing (adab/wenzhang)”, by VHM, of which the final paragraph reads:
Persian as a lingua franca spread not only through much of the Islamic world, but even as far as China during the thirteenth century, when Iran was loosely incorporated into the Mongol Empire. David Morgan shows how Persian became for a time the most important foreign language in China, where it was used in commercial exchanges with Muslim merchants profiting from the Pax Mongolica. But it was the Muslim realms in India that most fully adopted the Persian language and culture. The high point was reached in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the generous patronage offered by the wealthy Indian courts, and especially the Mughal court, attracted many poets from Iran. Muhammad Aslam Syed traces the decline of Persian in Muslim India and the rise of Urdu, a related vernacular language, to the second half of the eighteenth century. He associates it with the “humiliating” sack of Delhi by the Iranian ruler, Nadir Shah, in 1739, and the rise of a “new nobility” of poets who were merchants and shopkeepers and were uncomfortable with Persian as the language of the “old nobility”. The final blow to the status of Persian in India came in 1835 when the East India Company replaced it with English as the official language and in 1837 with Urdu as the language of the law courts. But for many, the loss of Persian was a cause for lament. Syed quotes the Indian poet Ghalib (1797-1869), who is regarded as the greatest Urdu poet, but who also composed poems in Persian: “If you want to see all the colours of life, read my Persian poetry, my Urdu diwan does not have all those colours. Persian is the mirror (of life) and Urdu is just like rust on that mirror (with which you start but when it is clean, it is Persian)”.
Spooner and Hanaway spent a couple of decades doing the research that resulted in this significant volume. Their contribution is both lasting and substantial.
Selected readings
[Thanks to Sunny Jhutti]
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69575&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=persian-language-in-the-indian-subcontinent
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