FlyeDie, presumably not one of BB’s handles, has left an excellent high-signal comment on the Hindification of East India. It posits Prakrit as a Latin analogue that spurred the development of the various Indic languages, and reads modern Hindi as walking the same path.
A wider blog admin note. We have been encouraging the Saint and the Shah to litigate their ongoing duel through the mechanism of high-signal posts, and this is the spirit in which we offer FlyeDie’s theory.
As an aside, there is also a very good comment by Calvin on the segregated political nature of the Indian Muslim community, which we may return to separately.
Brown Pundits exists to advance the bounds of niche knowledge on the Subcontinent. Our specific role is to stimulate excellent conversations, or guftugū as nos ancêtres les Mughalois would have punned it, and the comment below is one such endeavour, the more valuable because so much of our past has been lost or distorted. We reproduce it unedited.
Okay, I think I am going on a weird comment streak and losing my mind. So, I have a weird tin foil theory; it is going to be long, and it is going to sound like bullshit, but please bear with me. Here is my tin foil hat theory: Hindi is the Prakrit of the modern age, and it is destined to follow the same path as Prakrit. To explain what I am trying to say, I am going to talk about my favorite book about Prakrit: “Language of the Snakes Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the Language Order of Premodern India” by Andrew Olett.
I am going to start this “theory” with a barely legible explanation of the book. Basically, the author talks about the development of the Prakrit language and its position within the linguistic hierarchy of ancient India. Specifically, he was looking at how it interacted with other languages like Sanskrit and vernacular languages like Dimgal. The story begins when Ashoka institutes Prakrit as a court language and uses it to communicate his messages, which made the language closely interrelated to royalty and power.After the fall of the Mauryan empire, Prakrit was eventually adopted by the Satavahana empire and was closely interlinked with the royal court to the extent that it was used in a propagandized manner to show the superiority of the king. In fact, out of all the Satvahanna inscriptions, almost the majority of them are primarily done in Prakrit as opposed to Sanskrit. In fact, what was quite fascinating about this choice comes from the fact that the foreign Scythian Western Satrap kingdom in Gujarat used Sanskrit as the primary court language of power. Even more unique is the fact that the mainly Sanskrit inscriptions from the Satvahanna came from the period of close ties with the Saka kingdom, hell, they even have Sanskrit-Prakrit hybrid inscriptions at one point. As I have indirectly pointed out, the Satvahannas and the Indo-Saka go to war, and you can guess who came out on top. Sakas defeated the Satvahannas and eventually kick-started what Sheldon Pollock would call “the Sanskrit Cosmopolis”, but that didn’t mean the Prakrit fully vanished.
In the next phase, a three-fold language system developed over time: Sanskrit as the language of the elite, Vernacular dialects of Prakrit (that became vernacular languages over time) became the language of the people, and Prakrit became the Language of specificity. In simple terms, Prakrit was seen as the softer language in contrast to Sanskrit, and it was used for specific forms of literature like Sattakas, alongside serving as the main language of specific religious groups like the Jains. Prakrit lived on as this in-between, never truly the elite language and never truly the people’s language.
Over time, the category of Prakrit started to become more of a name given to the “natural” language of the land and one defined by specific literary traditions as well as stylistic features. Mind Prakrit still had complete works on its lexicon and structure written about the language, but it became more about style and way of writing. Gradually, many vernacular languages like Dimgal started to imitate the features of Prakrit, its style of diction, and even the status as the “natural” or “people’s language” to the point that they started calling Dimgal “Prakrit”. What’s even more wild would be the fact that even Dravidian languages like Kannada were called “Prakrit”, not because it was Prakrit, but rather due to the fact that it imitates Prakritic features. Naturally, Prakrit was displaced overtime by the vernaculars and later languages like Hindavi.
Now, you might be wondering, how does it relate to Hindi? Well, I think (this is my opinion, and it can be wrong) that Hindi is going through the exact same process. It is not the language of the elite since English fills that role perfectly, and it was promoted by a foreign people, just like Sanskrit with the Sakas and Persian under the Turks. It’s not really the language of the land, that would be vernaculars like Bhojpuri or Tamil. I believe even the normal (lower-class, non-urban, etc.) people in the “Hindi” belt seem to blend Hindi into their traditional vernacular. For example, I remember this person from Patna on an online forum mentioned in his family and friend group, they speak Maghi blended with Hindi and English words. This is actually very similar to the tri-language fold mentioned by Dan-din and the early writer. Sanskrit (English in modern sense) is the elite rough language, Prakrit (Hindi) is the softer counterpart, and vernacular like Apabhramsa (Maghi) is a mix of the first two languages.
Hindi is a language of specificity, used in specific circumstances and places for specific purposes, like being a lingua franca or a film language, etc. It defined specific stylistic choices like being more Sanskritized than Urdu or occasionally blending English words, as was common between Sanskrit and Prakrit. People also seem to code-switch between English and Hindi quite often, as it is common with Prakrit. Just look at the Hybrid language of Satvahanna or the scene in the play Mrcchakatika where Vasantasena (the female lead) switches from Prakrit to Sanskrit to show a shift in tone of her speech. Hell, Prakrit wasn’t fully accepted in the South, where the dynamic mainly moved between Dravidian vernacular and Sanskrit, similar to Tamil and English dynamics.
Even the religious dynamic was there with Prakrit and Sanskrit; Jains explicitly favored Maharasthri Prakrit and Hindu writer favored Sanskrit for their theological writings, they did occasionally cross-pollinate nonetheless, similar to Urdu and Hindi. Most Hindi speaker don’t speak their pure form and use Urdu or regional words, similar to how Prakrit was never in a pure form. A good example is Palitta’s Tarangavati, which was originally in Prakrit with a bunch of regional vernacular thrown in, and it fell out of popularity since no one could understand the vernacular. Ironically, a later author wrote a summary under the name Tarangavatisara that removed the vernacular words but preserved the rest of the Prakrit words.
This might be the “future” of Hindi. It loses a sense of self and morphs into a specific set of conventions that is gradually subsumed by the regional vernacular who start calling themselves as “Hindi” like Dimgal calling itself “Prakrit”. I don’t think the Hindification or English domination narrative is as straight forward as we would like to believe and there might be an older trend just repeating itself as was the case Prakrit.
P.S. I believe a similar dynamic existed in the Medieval period with Persian taking the place of Sanskrit, Braj and Urdu being the middle language (Braj leaning more to the Hindu Rajput side and Urdu leaning more to Mughal side of things. The vernaculars like Bhojpuri being the language of the land.
God this was long and lacks consistency. My apologies again for the length.