Reading: A Selection from Qavāʿid-e Urdū (Urdu Grammar) (1914) by Maulavī ʿAbd ul-Ḥaqq
Perhaps no writer in the past hundred years has left as profound an impression on the study of the Urdu language than Maulavī ʿAbd ul-Ḥaqq (1870–1961), whom the Urdu world honors as Bābā-e Urdū (Father of Urdu). Educated at the colonial Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh, ʿAbd ul-Ḥaqq eventually became Secretary of the Anjuman-e Taraqqī-e Urdū (ATU) (Society for the Promotion of Urdu Literature). His own work as an academic journalist, educator, literary and cultural historian, and philologist remains immensely influential.
ʿAbd ul-Ḥaqq published Qavāʿid-e Urdu while the Director of Education in Aurangabad in the Deccan, and Secretary of the ATU. Never out of print, the book is arguably his most influential work in the field of Urdu philology. And although dated, the work remains an important resource for Urdu philologists. It is also an invaluable resource for the history of ideas about the definition, history, sociology of the Urdu language.
The following passage is excerpted from the introduction to the book. In it, ʿAbd ul-Ḥaqq discusses the identity of Urdu an Indic language. He relies heavily on the language of the Arabic rational sciences, from logical terms like ṣūrat (form, concept) to linguistic ones like fāʿilī (nominative) and mafʿūlī (accusative). He also draws on the technical vocabulary of contemporary philology and historical and comparative linguistics to describe classes of language change and families—for example, the distinction between ترکیبی [tarkībī] (inflectional, synthetic) and تفصیلی [tafṣīlī] (isolating, analytic) languages, the distinction between قدیم [qadīm] (classical) and جدید [jadīd] (modern) languages, and the principle that modern languages incline toward morphological simplification.
ʿAbd ul-Ḥaqq begins the present discussion by identifying Urdu as hindī-nazhād. Here and in what follows, he draws on the literal, modern, and pre-modern technical senses of the word hindī, and the phrase may be understood as “Indian-born” (hence “Indic”), “Hindi-born” (since he claims that modern Urdu is combination of Hindi, Persian, Arabic, and English), and “born of Indian vernaculars” (since he seems to use the term in its classical Persian sense as a catch-all for a range of [mostly North] Indian vernacular languages). ʿAbd ul-Ḥaqq seems to have used the word strategically here for its multivalence. He argues that Urdu is an Indic language, that it is closely related to classical Hindi, and that its linguistic identity is quite separate from the loanwords that make up the majority of its nouns and adjectives (be they from Arabic, Persian, or English).
As is the case elsewhere in the introduction, many of ʿAbd ul-Ḥaqq’s ideas are dated, and some are inaccurate. For example, the notion that languages have final (āḳhirī) and proper or decent (shāyistah, lit. “as it should be”) forms, though the meaning of both terms is ambiguous here, relies on outmoded conceptions of linguistic evolution and value. Likewise, although Braj Bhasha and Persian both played important roles in the formation of what we now recognize as Urdu, it is too simplistic to say that Urdu simply formed from the mixture (mel) of them. This would be to ignore the complex histories of interaction among languages that informed what is now widely recognized as early Urdu literature in the Deccan, the role that other North Indian languages played in the development of Urdu literature in North India in the late Mughal period, and the interactions between Urdu and other Indic and non-Indic languages throughout South Asia in the colonial period during which ʿAbd ul-Ḥaqq wrote.
Still, many of the topics that ʿAbd ul-Ḥaqq addresses here are as relevant now as they were then. Urdu’s identity as an Indian language continues to be of great political relevance in our time. ʿAbd ul-Ḥaqq’s aesthetic argument for Persian vocabulary provides an interesting counterpoint to the kinds of essentialist, communalist, and exclusivist definitions of Urdu that contrast it with Hindi. The relationship between Persian and Urdu has increasingly been of interest to scholars in the past couple of decades, and his brief remarks tell us a great deal about attitudes about the topic among Urdu thinkers around the turn of the twentieth century. To name just one more, the issue of English loanwords and the problems of language definition is one that one encounters nearly every day in Urdu, from conversations with friends to editorials in Urdu and Urdu-related newspapers.
