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| The Hindu Phenomenon |
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A UNIQUE PHENOMENON |
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| Professor
Chatterjee writes: "Still, Deccan Hindustani for two
centuries did not cut itself off from ordinary Hindu speech, and the
vocabulary of king Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, the poet-king of
Golconda (d.1611), and that of other Sufi poets contemporaneous with
and posterior to him, had a good percentage of pure Hindi and
Sanskrit words. The Persianising writers of Delhi, Lucknow, Lahore
and Hyderabad-Deccan in the 18th and 19th centuries worked a
revolution in the spirit of Urdu, which may as a result be properly
described as the Mohammedan form of Hindi." (See
Indo-Aryan and Hindi.)19
The foundations of two cultures and
of partition had thus been laid. Persianized Urdu was to play the
role of producing a rival cultural matrix which Persian itself could
not have done. But as it happened, the retreat of Muslim power in
the world as a whole and in India had begun by then. Great Urdu
poets came after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 and the beginning of
the takeover of India by the British East India Company after the
battle of Plassey in 1757. The great Ghalib was to seek a stipend
from the Company. This retreat was not to be reversed. In India, as
we shall see, it was to pave way for the re-emergence of Hindus and
Hindu civilization. This was, of course, not to be a revival which
history does not permit. It was to be a return of the Hindu spirit
in new forms, necessitated by the impact and dominance of the West,
which still continues.
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