CONTRIBUTION OF TURKIC LANGUAGES IN THE EVOLUTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF HINDUSTANI LANGUAGES
K.Gajendra Singh
1. The term Hindustan has been used consciously so as to include Pakistan in it, by which name the Sub-continent was known before its partition in 1947. This paper concentrates mainly on languages as spoken by the masses, with their natural variations and not so much the written and the literary forms. We will consider the two major languages, Hindi and Urdu, which are widely spoken in Hindustan, although claims have been made that Urdu evolved out of Hindi and that Hindi is only Urdu written in Devanagari script. But the fact of the matter is that both Urdu and Hindi have evolved from the same colloquial base of Hindustani which was the lingua franca of Hindustan till its partition. As the well- known scholar and outspoken historian Khushwant Singh says, since then the Indians have made Hindi more Sanskritised and Pakistanis Urdu more Persianised, with the result that it is difficult for a common man to understand either Hindi or Urdu, specially their Radio and TV broadcasts. However, in spite of politically motivated and necessary corrective measures which new ruling elites usher in to change the complexion of the official language, if not the language itself, as has happened both in India as well as in Pakistan, the lingua-franca spoken by the common man in Hindustan, specially those who are illiterate or semi-literate has not changed that much since 1947. The best proof of this is the language employed in Hindustani films made in Bombay (India) which really represents the spoken language of the masses in most of India, and which also remains equally popular in Pakistan. Whenever the film language became too Sanskritised, the films have not been very popular. At the same time, when a film on 'Razia' (a Turkish Queen of Delhi) utilised too Persianised Urdu, its lack of popularity could in some ways be attributed to the difficulty of the masses in understanding it. Hindustani with its vast vocabulary, form and literary variety provides the lyric and dialogue writer all the richness, elegance and nuances to express himself. Incidentally, according to Encyclopedia Britannica (1990 Edition), more than 35 million Indians declared Urdu as their mother-tongue while in Pakistan the number was less than one- fifth i.e. 6.7 million. (The compilation is old and estimates conservative.) Various forms of Hindustani are spoken or understood by over 70% of Indian population. The Bombay films have played a major role in spreading Hindustani in non-Hindi/Urdu speaking areas of South India and North-East.
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