JOURNAL

ОР THE

ASIATIC SOCIETY.

No. V. 1864.

On the Origin of the Hindví Language and its Relation to the Urdu Dialect.-By Bábu RA'JENDRALA'LA MITRA. Corresponding Member of the German and the American Oriental Societies.

[Read 12 August, 1864.-Revised 10th October, 1864.]

The history of our vernacular dialects, like that of our social and political condition during the Hindu period, remains yet to be written. It is not remarkable, therefore, that considerable difference of opinion should exist as to their origin. Our Sanskritists take every thing to be Sanskritic. Those of our philologers who have devoted much of their time to the dialects of the south of India, cannot, from habit and long association, look at an Indian dialect from other than a Turanian stand-point. And most of our Persian and Arabic scholars, in the same way, observe every thing through a Semitic medium. Hence it is that the Hindví has been sometimes called a Sanskritic, sometimes a Turanian, and sometimes a Semitic dialect. The balance of opinion, however, now preponderates in favour of the theory which assigns to it a Sanskrita origin. It has been shewn that the affinity of its roots is unmistakeably Aryan, that its phonology and laws of permutation are peculiarly Sanskritic, and that the number of Sanskrita vocables traceable in it, amount, at the lowest computation, to 90 per cent. The discussion on the subject has, how. ever, not yet been brought to a close. Even at the last meeting of this Society, my learned and respected friend, Capt. Lees, in his valua ble essay on the Romanising of Indian Alphabets, stated that the Hindustáni had not an alphabet of its own, and was therefore a fit

dialect to be written down in the Roman characters. It may not be uninteresting therefore to enquire what is the origin of the Hindví, the parent of the Hindustani, and how far is it removed from the original Sanskrita to be disentitled to the use of the Nágarí alphabet as its natural symbolical representative; although in making the enquiry, I shall necessarily be obliged to run over ground which has already been very carefully traversed by some of the most distinguished philologers of the day, and to repeat much that is generally well known and admitted.

The Hindví is by far the most important of all the vernacular dialects of India. It is the language of the most civilised portion of the Hindu race, from the eastern boundary of Behar to the foot of the Solimáni Range, and from the Vindhya to the Terai. The Gúrkhas have carried it to Kemaoon and Nepal, and as a lingua franca it is intelligible everywhere from the Kohistan of Peshawar to Assam, and from Kashmir to Cape Comorin. Its history is traceable for a thousand years, and its literary treasures are richer and more extensive than of any other modern Indian dialect, the Telegoo excepted. No doubt it has not always been the same, nor is it exactly alike every where over the vast tract of country in which it prevails. For a living language growing with the progress of time, and diversely influenced in different places by various physical, political and ethnic causes, such a thing would be impossible. But there is sufficient similitude between the language of the Prithviraya-Ráso, the most ancient Hindví work extant, and the Hindví of our day, and between the several dialects of Hindví, Hindustani, Braja Bháshá, and Ráñgri into which the modern Hindví is divided, to shew that they are all essentially one-dialectic varieties of the same language-branches of the same stem, and not issues from different trunks.

The Prithviraya-Ráso was written nearly nine hundred years ago, and yet the difference between its language and that of the Premaságar one of the most modern books in the Hindví, is not even so great as -certainly not greater than-that between the languages of Chaucer and of the Times newspaper, and whatever that is, it is due more to the use of obsolete and uncouth words than to any marked formal peculiarities. Chand, the author of the Prithviraya-Ráso, has been very aptly described by the learned de Tassy as the Homer of the Rájputs.

* Chand, qu' on a nommé l' Homère des Rajpouts, est certainement le plus populaire des poétes Hindví. De Tassy's Rudiments de la Langue hindví, p. 7.

He was a minstrel in the court of Prithvíráj, the valiant knight of Kanouj, and appealed to the people in language suited to their capacity. It will be no presumption then to take the language of his epic as the vernacular of the then flourishing kingdom of Kanouj and of Northern India generally. How long before the time of Chand, that language was the vernacular of India, it is impossible now to determine, for from the time of Vikramaditya the great to that of Prithvíráj, we have no reliable information of any kind regarding the vernaculars. The literary work of every-day life was in those days transacted in the Sanskrita, and the language of familiar intercourse was never thought worthy of record.

Passing over per saltum the gap between the time of Prithvíráj and Vikrama, we find in the first century B. C., a number of dialects bearing the names of some of the principal provinces of India, such as Behar, Mahratta, &c. These were undoubtedly the vernaculars of those provinces at the time, for they could not otherwise have taken their local designations, nor assumed the position they held in the dramatic literature of the time of Vikramaditya. Their mutual differences were but slight, not much more prominent than what may be noticed in the English as spoken in London, Wales and Yorkshire; and they were all known by the common name of the Prákrita. Professor Wilson, it is true, was of opinion that the Prákrita could not have been a spoken dialect, but his arguments have been so fully met and so frequently refuted by Max Müller, Sykes, Weber, Lassen and a host of other distinguished scholars, that I need not dwell upon them here.

Two centuries before Vikramáditya, As'oka appealed to his people in favour of Buddhism in a language which has been called the Pàli. It was a form of Prákṛita standing midway between the language of Vararuchi's grammar and the Sanskrita of Pánini. Whether it was ever a vernacular of India has been doubted, and some have gone the length of calling it a "quasi religious" or a "sacred dialect." But "a careful examination of the As'oka edicts," to quote what I have elsewhere said, “clearly shews that it is a stage in the progress or growth of the Sanskrita in its onward course from the Vedic period to the vernaculars of our day, produced by a natural process of phonetic decay and dialectic regeneration, which can never be possible except in the case of a spoken dialect. Professor Max Müller, advert

ing to these changes, justly says, they take place gradually, but surely, and what is more important, they are completely beyond the reach or control of the free will of man.' No more could As'oka and his monks devise them for religious purposes, than change the direction of the monsoons or retard the progress of the tides. It is said that Marcellus, the grammarian, once addressed the emperor Tiberius, when he had made a mistake, saying, 'Cæsar, thou canst give the Roman citizenship to man, but not to words;' and mutatis mutandis, the remark applies with just as much force to As'oka as to Tiberius. There can be no doubt that As'oka was one of the mightiest sovereigns of India. His sway extended from Dhauli on the sea board of Orissa to Kapur-di-Giri in Afghanistan, and from Bakra in the north-east to Junagar in Guzerat. His clergy and missionaries numbered by millions; they had penetrated the farthest limits of Hindustan proper, and had most probably gone as far as Bamian on the borders of the Persian empire. Religious enthusiasm was at its height in his days, and he was the greatest enthusiast in the cause of the religion of his adoption. He devised his edicts to promote that religion; had them written in the same words for all parts of his kingdom; and used exactly the same form everywhere: but with all his imperial power and influence, he could not touch a single syllable of the grammar which prevailed in the different parts of his dominions. In the north-west, the three sibilants, the r above and below compound consonants, the neglect of the long and short vowels, and other dialectic peculiarities, rode rough-shod over the original as devised by him and his ministers and apostles in his palace, and recorded in Allahabad and Delhi; while at Dhauli nothing has been able to prevent the letter 7 entirely superseding the letter r of the edicts. Had the language under notice been a quasi religious," or a "sacred dialect," it would have been found identically the same in all parts of India, for the characters used in the Delhi, Allahabad, Dhauli and Junagar records are the same, and if uniformity had been sought, it could have been most easily secured. But popularity was evidently what was most desired, and therefore concessions were freely made in favour of the vernaculars of the different provinces at the expense of uniformity. Unless this be admitted, it would be impossible to explain why the word Rájá of Delhi, written in the same characters, should in Cuttack change into Lájá. Had the language been a sacred

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one, intended for the clergy only, no such concession would ever have been required. The Sanskrita of the Brahmanic priesthood is alike everywhere, and so is the Latin of the Roman Catholic clergy. It is the people whom As'oka wished to address, and accordingly adapted his language to the capacity and the idiom of his hearers." And if these arguments be admitted, and similar arguments have already led Dr. Max Müller, Mr. Muir and others to admit, that the Páli was the vernacular of India from Dhauli in Cuttack to Kapur-di-giri in the Yusafzai country in the time of As'oka, and for some time before and after it.

Ascending upwards to the time of the first great convocation of the Buddhist clergy, soon after the death of S'akya Siñha, we come across a kind of corrupt Sanskrita called the Gáthá, which was used for ballads and improvisations by the scalds and bards of that period. For reasons which I have already submitted to this Society in my paper on the Gáthá dialect, I take that language to be the first stage in the transition of the Sanskrita into the Prákrita, and the vernacular of Brahmanic India in the fifth and sixth centuries before the Christian era.* For the purposes of the present enquiry we need not proceed further. We have the Gáthá proceeding directly from the Sanskrita and forming the vernacular of India in the sixth century, B. C.; the Páli following it in the third, and the Prákrita in its different forms of Mágadhí, Saurasení, Mahráṭṭi, Pais'áchi, &c. in the first century of that era. How long the last flourished we know not, nor have we any information as to the transitions it underwent, or the dialect or dialects which succeeded it. But passing over a period of about a thousand years, we come to the Hindví in the tenth century, and the question hence arises, Is the Hindví a produce of the Prákṛita, or a different and distinct language which has succeeded it? Muir, De Tassy, and the German philologers generally, maintain the former position; while Crawford, Latham, Dr. Anderson of Bombay and others assume the latter. They all agree that no less than 90 per cent. of the vocables of the Hindví are Sanskrita; and if the affinity of its roots were alone to decide the question of its affiliation, there could be no doubt as to its claims to a Prákritic, and necessarily a Sanskritic origin. But, since a language is to be judged more by its formal than by

* Dr. J. Muir has adopted this opinion in his Sanskrit Extracts, Vol. II. p. 124 et seq.