The Origin and Development of Urdu

The development of Urdu as a distinct literary language is one of the most consequential linguistic events of the Mughal period, and the language has become one of the major literary and cultural idioms of South Asia. Urdu, sometimes called Hindi, Hindustani, Rekhta, Zaban-i-Urdu, Zaban-i-Hind, or Muwallad Hindvi in the early modern period, emerged from the prolonged contact of Persian, Arabic, Turki, and the Indo-Aryan vernaculars of North India, particularly the Khari Boli of Delhi, the Braj Bhasha of the Braj region, the Awadhi of eastern Uttar Pradesh, and the Dehlavi of the imperial capital. The earliest documented Urdu poetry is generally assigned to the Deccan courts of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, particularly to the literary circles of the Bahmani and Adil Shahi sultanates, and the tradition was carried north during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Urdu literary tradition had reached its mature form in the ghazal of the great Delhi and Lucknow schools, and the great Urdu poets of the late Mughal period — Mir Taqi Mir, Mirza Muhammad Rafi Sauda, Momin Khan Momin, Asadullah Khan Ghalib, Nazir Akbarabadi, Ibrahim Zauq, Bahadur Shah Zafar, and many others — produced a body of poetry that is among the most distinguished of the wider Persianate world. The prehistory of the language in the Indo-Aryan vernaculars, the role of the Mughal court in its development, the influence of Persian, Arabic, and Turki, the role of the Sufi shrines in its dissemination, the principal poets of the tradition, and the standardisation of Urdu in the modern period are treated in detail below.

The Pre-Urdu Languages of North India

The Urdu language did not arise in a vacuum. It emerged from a complex linguistic situation in which several Indo-Aryan vernaculars of North India were in contact with Persian, Arabic, and Turki through the institutions of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and the various regional courts. The principal Indo-Aryan vernaculars that contributed to the development of Urdu include:

Khari Boli (or Khariboli), the speech of the Delhi region and the western Uttar Pradesh, the principal base of the Urdu literary language. The Khari Boli of Delhi, sometimes called Dehlavi or Madhyam, was the lingua franca of the Gangetic plain and the language of the imperial capital, and it was the principal Indo-Aryan substrate of the Urdu literary tradition.
Braj Bhasha, the language of the Braj region (the area around Mathura, Vrindavan, and Agra), one of the major literary languages of medieval North India and the language of the Krishna devotional tradition. The Braj Bhasha was a major literary language in the Mughal period, and it contributed a substantial vocabulary and a number of grammatical features to the developing Urdu literary language. The Braj Bhasha poets, including Surdas, Tulsidas, and a substantial body of Vaishnava devotional poets, were patronised at the Mughal court, and the Braj Bhasha was one of the languages of the imperial mushaira.
Awadhi, the language of eastern Uttar Pradesh, the principal literary language of the Awadh region and the language of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas and a substantial body of bhakti literature. The Awadhi contributed vocabulary and grammatical features to the developing Urdu literary language, particularly in the Awadh branch of the tradition.
Deccani (or Dakhini), the language of the Deccan, the principal Indo-Aryan vernacular of the Muslim courts of the Bahmani, Adil Shahi, Nizam Shahi, and Qutb Shahi sultanates. The Deccani of the Bahmani and Adil Shahi courts was a major literary language in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and it was the language of the earliest documented Urdu poetry.
Hindavi (or Hindi, Rekhta, Muwallad), the broader designation for the Indo-Aryan vernaculars of North India as they were spoken in the Muslim courts of the Delhi Sultanate and the early Mughal period. The Hindavi of the Sultanate period was the immediate ancestor of the Urdu literary language, and the Hindavi poetry of Amir Khusrau, of the Chishti Sufi tradition, and of the early Sultanate court is among the earliest documentation of the language.

The encounter of these Indo-Aryan vernaculars with the Persian, Arabic, and Turki of the Muslim courts produced a recognisably new linguistic register by the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and the Hindavi of the Sultanate period was progressively replaced by the Rekhta of the Mughal period, and the Rekhta was progressively replaced by the Urdu of the late Mughal period.

The Role of the Mughal Court

The Mughal court played a central role in the development of Urdu as a literary language. The imperial household, the mansabdari nobility, the Sufi establishments, the madrasas, the kitab khana, and the bawarchi khana of the empire were all multilingual institutions, and the linguistic environment of the court brought together the Persian, Arabic, and Turki of the official sphere, the Braj Bhasha, Awadhi, Khari Boli, and Dehlavi of the Indo-Aryan substrate, and the regional languages of the various mansabdari households. The result was a linguistic register that combined the grammatical structure of the Indo-Aryan vernaculars with a substantial vocabulary of Persian, Arabic, and Turki origin, and that became the medium of the mushaira, the mehfil, the bazaar, the household, and the popular religious life of the empire.

The early development of Urdu as a literary language in the Mughal period is closely associated with the Sufi tradition, the court tradition, and the mehfil tradition of the imperial cities. The Sufi khanqahs of the Chishti, Naqshbandi, Qadiri, and Suhrawardi orders were major centres of linguistic interchange, and the qawwali, the marsiya, the noha, the manqabat, and the sama of the Sufi tradition were major vehicles of the developing Urdu literary language. The court mehfil of the imperial cities, the mushaira of the court, the durbar of the imperial household, and the majlis of the Shia and Sunni establishments were all major institutional settings in which the Urdu literary language was developed. The bazaar of the imperial cities, the caravanserai of the trade routes, the bazaar-i-mubarak of the imperial household, and the mela of the religious festivals were all major settings in which the Urdu language was used as the principal medium of commercial, social, and religious life.

The Mughal court itself was not initially a centre of Urdu literary patronage, since the official language of the court was Persian and the principal literary language was Persian. The development of Urdu as a literary language was therefore largely an extra-imperial phenomenon, taking place in the regional courts, the Sufi establishments, the urban mushaira tradition, and the wider society of the empire. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, Urdu had become a major literary language of the Mughal cities, and the mushaira tradition of the late Mughal period, particularly of the Delhi and Lucknow schools, was one of the principal centres of Urdu literary production.

The Influence of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish

The vocabulary and the literary conventions of the Urdu language were profoundly influenced by Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. The Persian influence on Urdu is the most pervasive, and the major part of the literary, administrative, and cultural vocabulary of the Urdu language is of Persian origin. The ghazal, the qasida, the masnavi, the rubai, the insha, the tazkira, the safar-nama, the marsiya, the qasida, the nazar, the khil’at, the dargah, the majlis, the mehfil, the mushaira, the mazar, the imam, the muhtasib, the qazi, the mulla, the pir, the murshid, the khanqah, the langar, the waqf, the sadaqa, the zakat, the fitra, the fiqh, the shariah, and a substantial part of the basic vocabulary of the Urdu language are all Persian or Arabic borrowings.

The Arabic influence on Urdu is more limited in vocabulary but substantial in the religious, juridical, and literary registers. The Arabic vocabulary of the Quran, the hadith, the fiqh, the tasawwuf, and the religious sciences was extensively borrowed into Urdu, and the Arabic script, the naskh, the nasta’liq, and the shikasta conventions of the mashq tradition are the principal calligraphic forms of the Urdu language. The Turkish influence on Urdu is more limited, but it is present in the vocabulary of the military, the court, the household, and the Central Asian traditions: the qizilbash, the beg, the begum, the khwaja sara, the kotwal, the darogha, the subedar, the faujdar, the mir bakhshi, the qush, the bawarchi, the farrash, the mahmaldar, and many other words of Central Asian origin entered the Urdu language through the Mughal household.

The Persian, Arabic, and Turkish borrowings in the Urdu language were not merely passive additions to the Indo-Aryan vocabulary; they were integrated into the grammatical structure of the language, and the rekhti (or rekhti) tradition of the Urdu poetry, the sabk-i-Hindi of the late Mughal period, and the sabk-i-Lakhnavi of the nineteenth century all represent sophisticated literary adaptations of the Persian and Arabic borrowings to the Indo-Aryan grammatical structure. The result was a recognisably new linguistic register, a lingua franca of the Muslim communities of the subcontinent, that combined the grammatical structure of the Indo-Aryan vernaculars with the literary, religious, and cultural vocabulary of the Persianate world.

The Role of the Sufi Shrines

The Sufi shrines of the Indian subcontinent played a central role in the development and dissemination of the Urdu language. The dargah of the great Sufi masters — of Khwaja Mu’in-ud-din Chishti of Ajmer, of Shaykh Salim Chishti of Fatehpur Sikri, of Nizam-ud-din Auliya of Delhi, of Moinuddin Chishti of Ajmer, of Shah Jalal of Sylhet, of Baha-ud-din Zakariya of Multan, of Farid-ud-din Ganj-i-Shakar of Pakpattan, of Baba Farid of the Punjab, of the Suhrawardi and Qadiri and Naqshbandi masters of the various cities — were major centres of the qawwali, the marsiya, the noha, the manqabat, the sama, the mehfil-e-sama, and the wider devotional tradition that produced much of the early Urdu poetry.

The qawwali tradition of the Sufi dargahs is particularly important for the development of Urdu as a literary language. The qawwali, the Sufi devotional song, was performed in the Sufi khanqahs of the principal cities of the empire, and the qawwali texts — the qawwali of Amir Khusrau, of the Chishti tradition, of the various Sufi masters — were among the earliest documents of the developing Urdu literary language. The marsiya, the Shia elegy commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Husain and his family at Karbala, was a major literary form of the Urdu tradition, and the marsiya of Mir Anis, of Mirza Dabeer, of Sauda, and of the Lucknow marsiya tradition is among the most accomplished Urdu poetry of the period. The noha and the soz, the Shia lamentations, were also major forms of the Shia Urdu literary tradition, and the muharram of Lucknow and the other Shia centres was a major setting of the Urdu literary life.

The Sufi shrines were also major centres of the dissemination of Urdu as a spoken language. The langar of the Sufi dargahs attracted pilgrims, scholars, and visitors from the wider Muslim community, and the urs festivals of the Sufi masters were major gatherings at which the Urdu language was used as a lingua franca of the wider Muslim community. The Sufi khanqahs of Delhi, Ajmer, Lucknow, Multan, Hyderabad, Bijapur, and the other principal cities of the empire were major institutional settings in which the Urdu language was used, taught, and transmitted.

The Principal Poets of the Urdu Tradition

Wali Deccani (1665–1735)

Wali Deccani (also called Wali Gujarati), originally from Bijapur, is generally considered the founder of the Urdu ghazal tradition. Wali’s ghazals, written in the Deccani dialect of the early Urdu literary language, established the principal conventions of the ghazal form, the principal themes of the Urdu love lyric, and the principal metres of the Urdu poetic tradition. Wali’s Kulliyat is a major document of the early Urdu literary language.

Mir Taqi Mir (c. 1724–1810)

Mir Taqi Mir, the leading poet of the Delhi school, is generally considered the greatest of the Urdu ghazal poets. Mir’s ghazals on the themes of love, loss, and the pain of separation (viraha) are among the most accomplished works of the Urdu literary tradition, and his Nikhat al-Khawatim, his Khazain al-Futuh, and his Kulliyat are major documents of the late Mughal Urdu literary tradition. Mir was associated with the court of the later Mughal emperors and with the mushaira tradition of Delhi, and his poetry has remained central to the Urdu literary tradition in the modern period.

Mirza Muhammad Rafi Sauda (1713–1781)

Mirza Muhammad Rafi Sauda, a contemporary of Mir, is generally considered the founder of the sabk-i-Hindi of the late Mughal Urdu poetry. Sauda’s qasidas, ghazals, and sabk of formal Urdu insha are major documents of the late Mughal Urdu literary tradition, and his satirical qasidas on the social and political life of the period are among the most accomplished works of the early Urdu literary tradition.

Momin Khan Momin (1800–1852)

Momin Khan Momin, a contemporary of Ghalib, is generally considered one of the most distinguished Urdu ghazal poets of the nineteenth century. Momin’s ghazals on the themes of love, separation, and the pain of longing are among the most accomplished works of the Urdu literary tradition, and his Kulliyat is a major document of the nineteenth-century Urdu literary tradition.

Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869)

Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib is generally considered the greatest of the Urdu poets, and his ghazals, qasidas, and Urdu and Persian letters are foundational texts of the Urdu literary tradition. Ghalib was associated with the court of the later Mughal emperors (particularly Bahadur Shah Zafar) and with the mushaira tradition of Delhi, and his poetry has remained central to the Urdu literary tradition in the modern period. Ghalib’s Urdu letters, the insha tradition, are major documents of the Urdu insha of the late Mughal period, and his Persian letters, the insha of the Persian tradition, are major documents of the late Mughal Persian insha.

Bahadur Shah Zafar (1775–1862)

Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, was himself an accomplished Urdu poet, and the bahadur-shah-zafar tradition of Urdu poetry represents the final flowering of the Mughal literary inheritance. Zafar’s ghazals on the themes of loss, the fall of the dynasty, and the grief of the post-Mughal period are among the most poignant works of the late Mughal Urdu literary tradition, and his Kulliyat is a major document of the last flowering of the Mughal literary inheritance.

Allama Iqbal (1877–1938)

Sir Muhammad Iqbal, generally known as Allama Iqbal, is the most celebrated Urdu poet of the modern period, and his Bang-i-Dara, Bal-i-Jibril, Zarb-i-Kalim, Asrar-i-Khudi, Rumuz-i-Bekhudi, and Javid-nama are foundational texts of the modern Urdu literary tradition. Iqbal’s ghazals, nazms, and philosophical masnavis on the themes of Islamic revival, Muslim political identity, the reconstruction of the Muslim religious thought, and the wider themes of the early twentieth-century South Asian Muslim community are among the most influential works of the modern Urdu literary tradition. Iqbal’s Sare Jahan Se Achha, the famous tarana (anthem) of the South Asian Muslim community, is one of the best-known poems of the modern Urdu literary tradition.

The Standardisation of Urdu in Modern South Asia

The standardisation of Urdu as a literary and administrative language was a major project of the modern period, and it has been shaped by a number of distinct developments. In British India, the role of Urdu as the language of administration, education, and the courts was progressively reduced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as English was increasingly used as the language of higher administration and the regional languages were promoted as the languages of primary education. The Hindi-Urdu controversy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Urdu movement of the period, and the subsequent division of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 led to the development of Urdu as a distinct literary and national language of Pakistan and as a recognised minority language of India.

In modern Pakistan, Urdu has been adopted as the national language, and it has been the principal language of the literary, educational, and administrative life of the country. The Urdu Academy of Pakistan, the Anjuman Taraqqi-e-Urdu, and the various literary institutions of the country have played a major role in the standardisation of the language, and the mushaira tradition of Pakistan, the mushaira of Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, Peshawar, and Quetta, has remained a major institution of the cultural life of the country. In modern India, Urdu has been recognised as a scheduled language, and it has been the principal literary language of the Muslim community of the country, particularly of the Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Hyderabad, Kashmir, and the wider North Indian and Deccani Muslim community. The Urdu literary tradition of modern India has been maintained through the mushaira tradition, the literary magazines of Lucknow, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Patna, the Urdu Academy of Delhi, and the various literary institutions of the Muslim community of the country.

The standardisation of Urdu has been a major project of the modern period, and the principal elements of the standardisation include the development of a standard vocabulary, a standard grammar, a standard orthography, and a standard literary register. The standard Urdu vocabulary is based on the Khari Boli of Delhi and the Awadhi of Lucknow, with a substantial vocabulary of Persian, Arabic, and Turki origin. The standard Urdu grammar is based on the grammatical structure of the Indo-Aryan vernaculars, with a substantial grammatical borrowing from the Persian and Arabic traditions. The standard Urdu orthography is based on the nasta’liq script, with the addition of a number of letters for the Indo-Aryan phonemes. The standard Urdu literary register is based on the ghazal tradition of the late Mughal period, with the addition of the nazm, the qasida, the masnavi, the rubai, the marsiya, the noha, the soz, the qawwali, and the various other forms of the modern Urdu literary tradition.

Sources

Sheldon Pollock, ed., Literary Cultures in History (2003), ch. 8 (on Urdu).

For the broader context of the literary and linguistic tradition, see the Mughal literature and languages page. The Persian literary tradition of the imperial court, which provided the principal literary models for the developing Urdu tradition, is treated in Persian literature at the Mughal court. The official chronicles of the imperial court, including the Akbarnama and the Padshahnama, are treated in The Akbarnama and The Padshahnama. The development of the mushaira tradition and the gharana system of musical and literary lineages, which were major vehicles of the Urdu literary tradition, is treated in Mughal music and musicians. The political context of the development of Urdu in the modern period is treated in the decline of the Mughal Empire and the Mughal culture overview pages. The painting tradition of the imperial atelier, which often illustrated the Persian and Urdu manuscripts of the court, is treated on the Mughal art and miniature painting page.