The comments have turned into a meditation over whether Urdu ends up as one more dialect of Hindi. I think the fight is about something bigger. Partition took one Muslim political world and cut it into three. Seventy-nine years on, one of the three sets the culture for all of them, and it is the one that took the language.
By reference Muslims I do not mean the most devout or the richest. I mean the group whose speech, dramas, music and religious manner supply the default picture of a South Asian Muslim outside its own borders.
Three blocs, one language
Pakistan has ~230 million Muslims, India ~200 million, Bangladesh ~150 million. In 1971, when the second partition finished the job, the three stood almost level at about 60 million each. Pakistan has pulled ahead since by having more children. Nobody planned any of it. The Muslim League asked for a homeland for the Muslims of India, got two-thirds of them inside one country, and lost half of those within a generation.
The three blocs were never one culture. A Bengali cultivator, a Punjabi Jat, a Sindhi tenant and a Lucknow ashraf household shared a mosque and not much else. What they shared at the top was one political world and one elite language. That language was Urdu, and Urdu was not Pakistani. It grew up in Delhi and matured in Lucknow. Ghalib is buried in Delhi and Mir in Lucknow. Aligarh taught it. The Punjab, which became Pakistan’s heart, spoke something else entirely, as I argued in my last post.
Pakistan made it the state language anyway. In March 1948 Jinnah stood in Dhaka and told the Bengalis they could keep Bengali for their province, but that the state would speak Urdu and only Urdu. Few in either wing spoke it at home then. The 2023 census puts it at 9.25% of Pakistanis now. The Punjabis, Sindhis, Pashtuns and Baloch learnt it at school. On 21 February 1952 police shot Bengali students in Dhaka for objecting, and the road to 1971 opened from there. The Bengalis kept their language. They still lost the argument about whose culture the Muslims of the subcontinent would run on.
So the language of the Indian Muslim elite now carries a Pakistani label. When a Hindu in Delhi hears Urdu, he hears Pakistan. When a Pakistani hears Urdu, he hears himself.
Why Urdu does not dissolve
The case for Urdu fading is simple. It is intelligible with Hindi. Bhojpuri is also close enough to Hindi that the boundary between language and dialect has long been politically contested. Yet Bhojpuri never acquired Urdu’s combination of script, literary prestige, religion and state power. On that logic Urdu shrinks into a Hindi dialect with some Persian vocabulary and a script nobody uses.
I don’t buy it, and the reason is religion rather than grammar. A Bhojpuri speaker has no reason to keep a separate script. An Indian Muslim does. Quranic literacy is not Urdu literacy, but it puts the alphabet in every practising child’s hands, and Devanagari cannot do that job. Some Indian Muslims now write Urdu in Devanagari, and it reads as Hindi with a Muslim accent. The Perso-Arabic letters carry a memory that the words alone do not.
Even the Indian Muslim who reads and writes Hindi for work keeps Urdu as the marker. He keeps it because Hindi is the language of the majority and Urdu is the language of being a minority with a past. Bhojpuri has no such job to do.
The mirror moved
Pakistan also lost its comparison group in 1947.
Before Partition the Muslims of the west measured themselves against Hindus and Sikhs, because Hindus and Sikhs ran the towns. Karachi had a Hindu majority in 1941. In Lahore the Hindu and Sikh minority owned most of the commerce. Across Sindh, trade sat with Hindu families. A Muslim in Lahore knew exactly who he was measuring himself against, and the measurement stung.
Within two years the mirror was gone through genocide and ethnic cleansing. A society that had defined itself against the Hindu trader had no Hindu trader to look at, so it found a new comparator, and the new comparator was the Muslim who stayed in India.
This explains a great deal of how Pakistanis talk. Every riot in Gujarat and every mosque turned into a court case is read in Lahore as proof that Partition was right. The Hindu has dropped out of the frame. The Indian Muslim has taken his place as the person the Pakistani needs to be doing better than.
The missing middle
Indian Islam has two poles that the rest of the country can see, and a middle it cannot. One pole is Deoband and the Tablighi Jamaat, both born within a hundred miles of Delhi and between them the two largest conservative movements in Sunni Islam. The other pole is the Bollywood Khans, three men born in 1965 who are among the most famous Muslims alive and whose Islam is mostly a surname.
The middle exists. By most counts Barelvis outnumber Deobandis and the shrines are full. Kerala, Hyderabad, Lucknow and Kashmir each have a Muslim middle class with its own manners. But each of those is regional. None of them is the Indian Muslim way of being modern and observant at once. Between the seminary and the film studio there is no national default, and an Indian Muslim who wants one has no template at home.
Pakistan built the template, almost by accident. Its middle class needed a way to be Muslim that worked with a job and a daughter at university. It settled on an Islam that fasts in Ramadan and watches television the rest of the year. Nobody wrote it down. It is simply how the Pakistani middle class lives, in Karachi and in Bradford. And because the state spoke Urdu and the state was Muslim, the template was national from the start, which is the one thing that eluded Indian Muslims.
The public face
Britain is where this shows. British Islam has several blocs. The Sylhetis of east London and the Gujaratis of Leicester keep their own mosques and their own marriages, and nobody in Tower Hamlets is turning Pakistani. But look at who speaks for British Islam. London elected Sadiq Khan three times. Scotland had Humza Yousaf as First Minister. Sajid Javid ran the Treasury. Shabana Mahmood was the first Muslim Lord Chancellor and now runs the Home Office. All four are Pakistani by descent. Khan’s grandparents left Lucknow for Pakistan at Partition, which makes him a Lucknow Muslim who became a Pakistani who became the face of British Islam. When a British newspaper wants a Muslim voice, it rings a Pakistani.
Culture runs the same way, and the flow is outward. Coke Studio Pakistan started in 2008 and its Indian copy never caught on. This month Pasoori became the first Pakistani music video to pass a billion views on YouTube. Nine in ten of those views came from outside Pakistan, and in 2022 Google ranked it the second most searched song in the world. Bollywood remade it the next year with Arijit Singh, and the copy was panned. In 2014 Zee launched Zindagi to show Pakistani dramas to Indian viewers, and Fawad Khan was a Bollywood lead by the end of the year, until Uri shut the door in 2016. Riz Ahmed became the first Muslim nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. Kumail Nanjiani wrote himself an Oscar nomination with The Big Sick. When the English-speaking world pictures a South Asian Muslim, it pictures a Pakistani.
Spiritual logic
Partition wrecked the economics. India’s income per head is now well above Pakistan’s. Bangladesh has passed Pakistan too, which was not the plan when Dhaka was the junior partner. The Pakistani state has failed at much of what a state is for, and nothing below excuses that.
But Pakistan was never built on an economic logic. Faisal Devji called it Muslim Zion, and the comparison holds. Israel and Pakistan were argued into existence within nine months of each other, both as homelands for a faith, both against the advice of people who had done the sums. A country like that asks to be judged on a second measure as well, and the measure is cultural sovereignty: does the culture of the state belong to the people it was built for, and does it travel?
On that measure Pakistan succeeded early and has never stopped. The Muslims of India spent two centuries perfecting a high culture in Delhi and Lucknow. Pakistan put a flag on it and sold it back to them.
Well said.
Pakistan has also succeeded in the sense that it is a country in which Muslims are calling the shots. Had there been no Partition, it is unlikely that a “united” India would have had a Muslim PM, president or Army Chief.
Just as most Indian Hindus wouldn’t want to be a minority in a Muslim country, most Pakistani Muslims don’t want to be a minority in a Hindu-majority country. This may be considered unfortunate depending on one’s ideological lens, but it’s a reality.
I don’t think the average Pakistani really cares whether “Partition was right”. It is the State that cares because it is an ideological state. TNT is the justification for Pakistan’s existence. It is useful for the Pakistani state to point at the fate of Indian Muslims and bolster its own case that Pakistan was necessary. The Indian state similarly uses the fate of Pakistani Hindus for its own political purposes.
The only time the average Pakistani really thinks about whether Partition was right or not is during “Pak Studies” in which case there is an obviously correct answer.
Just as the average American doesn’t think the American Revolution was a mistake, the average Pakistani doesn’t think the existence of Pakistan is a mistake.
I dont think there is one muslim subcontinental culture.
That is the first issue in trying to answer the question.
Furthermore in east and northeast India the default image of a muslim is shaped by bengali muslims where bangladesh does play an outsized role in determining what is seen by other communities as default muslim culture.
Now in peninsular India, there are two things.
1. Perception among muslims about who is driving their culture-where i dont think any Indian muslim who speaks Urdu or related to communities that do, would agree with the assessment that pakistani have a huge role in determining muslim culture. This is still centered around the old Ashraf elite in and around delhi and western Uttar Pradesh, with other pasmanda communities trying to breach the glass ceiling like their OBC counterparts in hindu communities have.
2.Perception among non muslims- Here I think it is important to mention that these perceptions are not framed by any neutral investigation. Pakistan looms large because the primary concern is to prevent the TNT from ever splitting India again at the cost of huge number of lives.
Hence why the Barlevi are not as well known but the Tablighi and Deobandis are due the role of these groups in separating muslims from influences seen as ‘impure’, why Urdu is seen as pakistani language due to its role as a way to engineer separation. As well as why other common tendencies like seeing the mughals with rose tinted glasses and trying to follow Islamic doctrines seriously is seen as suspicious.
Long story short,there is no one muslim culture. And even within India the default muslim culture changes depending on what country the muslims in your neighborhood share the most similarities with.
Exactly. This post reads as some sort of attempted patronizing reassurance more than anything else.
Lets call a spade a frakking spade please.
In Dispora that South Asian Muslim culture is *extremely* shaped by Pakistanis.
For better or for what Pakistanis are the touchstone of South Asian Islam.
I thought the diaspora was a way of proving a larger point about islam in indian subcontinent not the main point.
But even in the diaspora is there even a south Asian islam? I think the pakistanis themselves want to associate with Arab world and not be south Asian right?
Plus the richest muslims in the subcontinent wete in pakistan who could go abroad before the Bangladeshis and indian muslims so there is bound to be over representstion borne out of well researched factors, it has been known that punjabis have been over represented in diaspora.
First of all, the ‘diaspora’ especially its UK version is its own little niche bubble. Pretending its the ‘touchstone of South Asian Islam’ is an ill-supported extrapolation.
Pakistanis everywhere like to vocally and vociferously deny their consumption of Indian media content. Meanwhile the daily conversation is littered with memes and references that do not make sense without a deep knowledge of bollywood. Just pick up any episode of the ‘Pakistan experience’ podcast.
Pasoori is the outlier not the mean. Shahrukh/Salman, A R Rahman, etc are far more prominent than the makers of Pasoori.
Mahira Khan recently made a public appearance wearing a saree. Indian songs blare at Pakistani weddings, which consistently demonstrate the modern Indian practice of family members performing in front of the attendees.
“South Asian Islam” may dominate in the bumpkin echo chamber, but as education and modernity inevitably percolates, the dominant cultural threads begin to reassert themselves.
It feels a bit overwhelming to comment on the intricacies of Pakistan & Islamicate.
I usually edit Kabir out when he speaks on India & Hinduism .
It feels like when white Americans pronounce on the Black experience. A hegemonic majority can never really understand its minority.
Yesterday on insta this rising British Asian comic (Muslim – and core British Asian is built on the Hindu-Muslim-Sikh division), although Sylethi, was giving very Pakistani vibes.
Pakistans are the natural spokespeople of sub-altern, non-elite, Islam.
Arabs, Turks & Persians (and their related kind Kurds & Berbers & Arabized Africans) are sine non qua of Desert, Elite, Islam.
Pakistanis are the vanguard of Monsoon, majority, Islam.
This isn’t a sop to K & Q but it would be unfair to not explore nuances
//Pakistans are the natural spokespeople of sub-altern, non-elite, Islam.//
//Pakistanis are the vanguard of Monsoon, majority, Islam.//
I have a huge doubt believing this.
One thing I did not mention is which diaspora are we talking about, since this whole argument is apparently based around how diasporic south asian muslims behave( for the sake of argument will exclude afghanis).
The diaspora muslim in the gulf is different from the diaspora muslim in the anglophone world who is different from the diaspora muslim in south east asia, or elsewhere.
In the gulf, it will be the malayali muslim or the beary who would be dominant representation of south asian islamic culture, in south east asia the bangladeshi or the gujarati khoja or bohra and I would bet in many places in the world, the khoja and bohras have an outsized role in representing south asian islamicate culture over the punjabi or sindhi muslim from pakistan.
Going back to Pakistan being representatives of monsoon islam,or being sub altern it is the bangladeshi who would be more representative of this culture because even with arabization they do hold onto unique monsoon based cultural traits. A close follower would be the malays or the javans, not the pakistani punjabi or sindhi who seem to be more outwardly looking.
I think you are allowing your UK diaspora lens to overstate the assertion.
If there is a BP post made staking a claim of cultural “reference” on behalf of Indians (not just Pakistani, but “south asian” as seen in your post title) why should an Indian be somehow be disbarred from participating in the conversation?
This is literally the kind of OTT performative wokism that only serves to muzzles criticism/alternate perspectives. I am not claiming to speak on non-subjective matters of religion where I’m not informed. If this were a discussion of religiosity and specific traditions within Islam that I am not informed on, then it’d be a valid ‘pushback’ on me. But this is an entirely subjective, if not speculative conversation on identity and its perception.
Exploring nuances is the point of the comment thread back and forth – I am more than happy to be countered, or corrected. But as a “South Asian” I have a stake in this conversation.
My heritage is proud under a tri-color flag, not an exclusionary solo color one. I proudly claim Maulana Azad, Mohammed Rafi, Abul Kalam, the drunkard Salman Khan along with Mohammed Siraj.
We discuss, we probe, and we self-correct as needed in the process. Why does it feel that the looming ‘pressure’ of whinging from the usual suspects is starting to create pre-emptive and unnecessary gate-keeping in such conversations?
Nobody denies that Bollywood reigned supreme in Pakistan from 1980 to early 2010’s. When sattellite dishes & cable TV started becoming common in Pakistan in the early 90’s, the only TV media that people consumed were all Indian (Zee TV /Cinema, Star TV, Star Plus etc). Zee Cinema particularly showed almost all the Bollywood movies from the 70’s, 80s and early 90’s. Star Plus dominated TV serials in the early 2000’s. So India basically had a good quarter century of media dominance in Pakistan.
One of the reasons was because Hindi spoken on Indian TV was basically all Urdu which was familiar. Even many Doordarshan broadcasts from India had ‘saqeel Urdu’. Therefore it was pretty surprising to me that first time when I met Indians outside of India, none of them spoke like they did on Indian TV. The accent, the the mannerism, the pronounication, all seemed very foriegn and unlike what they show on Indian TV.
In any case, the Indian media dominance started to erode after Pakistan also joined the media game and Musharraf gave free license to open news and media channels in Pakistan in 2002. From here on in, the locust of Urdu media completely shifted from India to Pakistan in less than 10 years. In the 90’s youngesters watched MTV, in the 2000’s youngesters in Pakistan switched to Indus Music and other variants. Bollywood songs became less popular and local music scene started taking over people’s playlists. Younger generation is more invested in Pakistani serials than anything India is producing these days. There are also other distractions, internet and rise in consumption of English media. Urdu was basically replaced by subaltern dialects of Hindi in Bollywood which is also one of the reasons why it has rapidly declined in Pakistan. Just to compare, almost all kids watched Indian movies in the 90’s, but very few do now.
Citing wedding songs is not a good barometer, there are only a handful of wedding songs that keep repeating and India has been doing them for much longer. But this is not what most people are listening in their daily lives.
Indians are overstating the similarities, it was an illusion in the first place created by Muslim (and Muslimized Hindu) domination of Indian media but these people and their cultural viewpoint is now sidelined and marginalized in favor of a more Hindutva and a more subaltern culture which is alien to Pakistanis (and I would say alien to most others in the region as well)
My ancestral village in Bangladesh is Katiadi, which was a Hindu-dominated area in the largest district of pre-partition Bengal, Mymensingh. Because of my own tenuous links, I did not know until recently that two “Indian” icons – Satyajit Ray & Nirad Chaudhuri – are from the same village! Nirad Babu became quite the faux “Brown Sahib” – even though I doubt he had ever met a piece of toilet paper until he went to England at the ripe old age of 57! My paternal grandfather was the local Kazi, Hakim, Imam, Talukdar & Union Board President since the early 1900’s for over four decades. A man who had studied Persian and Arabic in Delhi and Baghdad, he was the temporal and spiritual boss of the area all rolled into one. The British made him a “Khan Sahib” in honor of his efforts to get the subsistence peasants to grow jute, and not just rice. The Brits needed jute for sandbags to prosecute WWI, but he saw it as an opportunity for the peasants to grow a cash crop, and the money would enable them to sends their sons to Dacca and Calcutta for higher education, which led to the growth of an educated Bengali Muslim middle class. In turn it became the backbone of the Bengal Muslim League. And as the Pakistani writer Shahid Jahid Burki told me in Virginia, there is no “West Pakistan” without East Bengal. Fast forward to 2026: virtually all the Hindus are gone, even though there was never a “riot” in the area, there are several mosques thereabouts, many members of local families work in Saudi Arabia and gulf states, but no one speaks a lick of Arabic – and forget about Urdu. They recite Quranic “suras” by rote during prayers, and that’s about it. Women are covered, girls are not, cows are eaten, pigs are not, and no alcohol, Alhamdullilah. That’s about the size of it.
Meanwhile, back in the States, where I’ve lived for for over 50 years (by way of Brandeis & Stanford), the world is not dissimilar: the Bangladeshi Muslim upscale crowd party rules: (some) women are covered, girls are not, cows are eaten, pigs are not, and definitely no booze! There might be a token Pakistani or two, but certainly no Bengali Hindus. And not a lick of Urdu. FOBANA, the Bangladeshi umbrella group in the US, just had their convention in Orlando, and not a Tagore song was sung. I longed to hear the soothing lyrics that my mother had learned as a teenager growing up in Brahmanpara in Alipore, Calcutta, in the 30’s – but Bangladeshi Muslims have moved on and left Tagore in the rear view mirror.
Those Pakistanis who think that Bangladeshis refused to accept Urdu as the state language because they were closet Hindus, are deluding themselves. Jinnah gave his “Urdu and Urdu alone” speech at Dhaka University in 1948, and the students forced him to leave before he could finish. Had he said “English and English alone” it would have been just fine, because all Pakistanis would be equally disadvantaged, but Urdu gave an unfair advantage to non-Bengalis. “Islamic identity” was not as much of an issue for the students and aspiring candidates for the salariat, as getting screwed in the CSS exam was.
An aside: when a Bangladeshi meets a Pakistani in America, he will invariably say: “Aap kaisa hai ?” But I’ve never heard a Pakistani say: “Apni kemon achen?” Perhaps Bangladeshis are a just a classier lot…..lol
Bangladesh should put in an application and join India.
There is no point in their independence once they decided they did not want to be part of Pakistan. They are landlocked on India on three sides, and most of their water comes from India. They also don’t have a real military to secure their sovereingty. They don’t have a diversified economy either. They play no role in geopolitics and they have not a lot of future scope in it either.They follow the culture set by the West Bengali Brahmins without much independent thought coming out from there w.r.t to Islam . So I don’t see why they even have independence, it appears to be just a remnant of the past world order than India did not absorb them in 1971.
The upcoming world will be harsh to weaker, smaller nation states, many won’t exist and join/get annexed by larger ones.
A lot of Bengali Islamists wanted to join Makkah Agreement after Saudis invited them, but it was good that Pakistan put a stop to it. There is no need to rekindle East Pakistan, that chapter was closed by none other than Bengalis themselves.
The reason why no Pakistani will greet you with ‘Apni kemon achen’ is because Pakistanis know they speak the lingua franca. Just like no Englishman or American will speak your language, we expect you to know the language that everybody else knows
Quite rich coming from the only nation where the rate of poverty has risen in the last decade. If the world is going to get harsher in the coming decades Pakistan should rightfully fear for its own existence as it has even less control on its peripheries than Bangladesh. At least Bangladesh doesn’t go looking for a fight on all fronts like Pakistan does. The reason Pakistan lost Bangladesh is because it never learnt courtesy enough to even try to say ‘Apni kemon achen’. Hell even Mumbaikars like me had enough courtesy to do ‘Kem Cho? Maja Ma’ with any Guju/Marwadi friends. These are the reasons why Urdu will never be a lingua franca because of the inability to integrate and an inclination to impose.
Lol this is hilarious. What do you guys even want? Half the time it’s lamenting ”division of India” and half the time supporting it.
The only thing constitent is basically just being anti Pakistan.
Explain to me, what is even the point of Bangladesh? It’s like Kuwait or Bahrain. It just exists because of the post WW2 order.
It already is. Don’t blame me, I didn’t make it.
Im fine with everyone denying the reality.
“The only thing consistent is basically just being anti-Pakistan”–
Exactly.
“What is even the point of Bangladesh”– Bangladesh exists so that Bengali Muslims can be in the majority. Whatever problems East Pakistan had with West Pakistan, they never wanted to merge with West Bengal. That should tell you that Bangladeshis had no issues with the logic behind Partition (TNT).
“Bengali Muslims can be in the majority”.
Good to see you have recovered from all the toxicity and slowly getting back to being the Hindu hater that you are. By the way, pakistan was supposed to be the bin for all Hindu hating Muslims. You should ask, as a dual citizen of Pakistan, why the Bangladeshis couldn’t tolerate you chaps. The answer to us Hindus is obvious. But for your own sake, do introspect and ask.
Are you OK?
My comment really doesn’t call for this much vitriol.
East Pakistan seceded because the East Pakistanis felt that they were being treated as a colony. Urdu was imposed on them etc.
Yet never at any time did they propose merging with West Bengal. Clearly, they wanted a country for Bengali Muslims.
The division of British India is a horrible event, but the rest of us have moved on now. There’s a reason why we didn’t annex East Pakistan and made Bangladesh. The ability to maturely understand facts is lacking on your side but I shall take that opportunity to educate you because like 50% of your country you seem to be lacking as well.
Explain to me, what is the point of Pakistan? It claims to be the home land of Indian Muslims yet it has killed, and raped more muslims than any other regime on the subcontinent. It finds way to alienate Muslims even slightly different from the accepted varieties like the Ahmediya. On every indicator it fails to even have any ounce of sovereignty. It’s foreign policy involves kowtowing to any hegemon that gives it attention. There is rarely anything redeeming about its people and the people that have accomplished great things are demeaned (Abdus Salam). It has failed on any metric it would compare itself to India with and it will keep failing in the future. In comparison the Bangladesh seems like a tremendous success.
Admin note: Minor edits to language
Wow! This comment is full of degrading language.
Someone has really lost the plot.
Looks like you aren’t disagreeing on the factual content. Thanks for agreeing with me.
I didn’t even focus on the “factual content”.
I was so disgusted.
This kind of language is not acceptable for a website that has a mixed gender audience.
Perhaps you would be more disgusted with the actions of the soldiers and terrorists who committed such acts from your nation. But alas we can only hope for such a world.
There is no call for sexual language.
This is not your private boys’ club.
That was my very limited point.
The sexual language maintained gender neutrality so you can imagine Pakistan as any orientation you wish them to be while committing to those acts. This website is a public forum and I respect every gender’s right to be obscene while expressing their opinions.
Descriptions of sex acts are not appropriate on a public forum.
Anyway, I’m not going to litigate this further.
You simply expose your own social class.
I understand that in your backward feudal village you often say this to your slaves. But the rest of us aren’t barbarians who determine the veracity of arguments based on social class. Personally, I’m grateful that Pakistan is home to such imbeciles as you.
Jesus christ man, by this logic Pakistan should also join India or Iran or Saudi Arabia man.
I don’t approve of Q’s comment.
But why should Pakistan join India?
Pakistan is 97% Muslim. India is more than 80% Hindu.
What would be the logic of Pakistan joining India?
What is the logic of bangladesh not existing as a country?
It is the same with pakistan joining india, iran or Saudi Arabia, surprised you are outraged about India not iran or Saudi Arabia.
For the record, I have no issues with Bangladesh existing as a country. It’s a fact of life.
I am “outraged” about India because the whole basis for Pakistan’s existence is the TNT.
Why should a 97% Muslim population consent to being ruled by a majority Hindu population?
As for Iran and Saudi Arabia: Pakistan doesn’t border Saudi. Iran is a Shia country while Pakistan is a Sunni country. Both of these are non-starters.
I dont want to go over this again but no one is being ruled by anyone.
Furthermore, my comments are just a reply to Q.
//There is no point in their independence once they decided they did not want to be part of Pakistan. They are landlocked on India on three sides, and most of their water comes from India. They also don’t have a real military to secure their sovereingty. They don’t have a diversified economy either. They play no role in geopolitics and they have not a lot of future scope in it either.They follow the culture set by the West Bengali Brahmins without much independent thought coming out from there w.r.t to Islam . So I don’t see why they even have independence, it appears to be just a remnant of the past world order than India did not absorb them in 1971.//
Many of the same things can also be said about pakistan as well.
As I said, I don’t approve of Q’s comment.
I think respecting the territorial integrity of nation-states is not too much to ask for.
“No one is being ruled by anyone”– The entire point of Pakistan is that Muslims rule ourselves in the areas in which we were in the majority.
Thank you – what a wonderful high signal comment and I stand corrected.
Thank you. I chose to participate here because the input in general is thoughtful and well written. It is not my intention to “correct” you or anyone else, but I appreciate the gesture.
There is one typo in what I wrote: the Pakistani gentleman I cited is Shahid Javed Burki, former CSP & SVP of World Bank. He is also a cousin of the great cricketers Majid Khan and Imran Khan. CSP, or Civil Service of Pakistan, was Pakistan’s version of the elite ICS.
My cousin was KIA in the Bangladesh Liberation War in November, 1971. An Indian BSF officer died with him in the same battle. I wrote a memorial in his honor. It occurs to me that your readers might find it interesting. It conveys the complexity of the Bangladeshi Muslim relationship with India and Pakistan. To wit:
In Remembrance of Shaheed Lt. Ashfaqus Samad,
Bir Uttam (My Cousin Nishat Bhai):
A Tribute to A Family of Freedom Fighters
In 1971, my cousin Ashfaqus Samad (Nishat Bhai) was a student in the Statistics dept. of Dhaka University, having graduated from St. Gregory’s School and Notre Dame College. A talented student, he was considering options of graduate study at MIT and elsewhere. Pakistan Army’s genocidal crackdown started on the night of March 25th; on the 27th, he and his friends Badal, Bodi (Shaheed) and Masud left for Kishoreganj and met with EBR forces there. On April 4th, they returned with a few .303 rifles, some ammunition and 25 grenades, thus becoming the first guerrillas to organize armed resistance in Dhaka. The cache was initially stored at his home, and subsequently moved cross-town at great peril to his friend Towhid Samad’s Dhanmondi residence. Realizing that it was inadequate, he then went to Agartala, India, for further military training.
After seeing sporadic action in the Saldanadi sector, in June he was selected for the First War Course of Bangladesh Army, to be trained by the Indian Army at Camp Murti, near the Indo-Bhutan border. Bearing ID No. S.S. 33, he was one of 61 Commissioned Officers, including Sheikh Kamal (eldest son of Sheikh Mujib), who graduated on October 9th, and one of only two of his batch to be killed in action (KIA) during the war. He was assigned to Sector 6 in Dinajpur and Rangpur, where he helped liberate several areas, notably Bhurungamari, the first upazila (sub-district) to be freed.
So thorough was the rout of the Pakistanis by allied forces that their new battalion commander in nearby Nageshwari, Lt. Col.(later Brig.) M.M. Sarfaraz Khan, reported: “Earlier, on 14th November, the enemy successfully attacked a company of 25 Punjab in Bhurangamari…..All the troops including the Company Commander were in poor state. Many of them were in a state of anguish…..I turned to look at the bleak situation and the demoralized soldiers who had recently faced bitter defeat.”
It is not widely appreciated that mid-November marked Indira Gandhi’s “Eid” gift to Bangladesh – prior to that Indian forces did not routinely cross the international boundary (IB), but thereafter joint Indo-Bangladesh forces launched relentless attacks along the entire border. The strategy was to soften up the Pakistanis and drive them into garrisons, which would later be besieged and bypassed on the road to Dhaka.
Nishat Bhai led a small force against the Pakistani stronghold in Raiganj, but in the course of battle they were unable to find cover against elevated enemy positions on the Fulkumar River bridge and adjacent buildings. He told his men to retreat and regroup, while he stayed back alone with a light machine gun to provide covering fire. He bought precious time for his troops, but he paid for it with his life. The Pakistanis targeted their fire on his gun position until he fell silent.
Moved by the ultimate sacrifice of their young leader, his men were determined to fulfill his mission and to recover his remains. A joint Indo-Bangladesh force launched a fearsome counter-attack, and after several hours of bitter fighting, 25 Punjab was driven all the way back to Nageshwari. Nishat Bhai and some other martyrs were buried near the Joymonirhat bazaar mosque after funeral prayers on free Bangladesh soil. It was Eid Day. The army of the state which had awarded his Fulbright Scholar mother the Tamgha-e-Quaid-e-Azam in 1970, would kill him in 1971. He was only 22.
U.S. Civil War historian Michael Musick wryly observed that “…..while all battles are fearsome things, not all battles are equal, particularly in their historiography.” Nishat Bhai’s younger brother Ishtiaq Aziz wrote that perhaps he died in “just another battle.” But was it? From my perch in faraway Florida, I have access to precious little primary sources which might be available locally. But this much is clear: perhaps because of their disastrous defeat a week earlier in Bhurungamari, the Pakistanis were spoiling for a rematch. Lt. (later Lt. Col.) K.J.S. Bakshi of 1 Field Company Engineers wrote in his book Untold Incidences of Operations 1971 Bangla Front: “Soon the enemy too reorganized itself and put up a very tough battle at Raiganj. They used intensive artillery to bombard our troops with plenty of air burst shells inflicting heavy casualties on our side.”
The Government of India posthumously awarded ‘Vir Chakra’ (VrC) to BSF Deputy Commandant (DC) Inderjit Singh Uppal and Lance Naik Mohini Ranjan Chakravarty for their heroic actions during the Battle of Raiganj. The BSF battle report is as follows: “ Two Coys of 78 Bn alongwith Mukti Fauz were asked to capture north bank of Phulkumari river near Raiganj. Both Companies i.e. A/C Coy lead by Sh Indrajeet Singh Uppal, Dy Comdt left their location Andharijhar Khamar at 0001 hrs on night 19/20 November 1971 and took opposition on the bank of Phulkumari river. The Companies fought their way upto the North bank against considerable small arms, 82 mm Mortar and 105 mm artillery fire. A fierce battle ensued between the Pakistan and the Indian forces. The enemy bunkers were very heavily fortified. The BSF, Rajput and the Mukti Fauj had a tough time to dislodge the enemy. It was in this battle that Deputy Commandant Indrajeet Singh Uppal came under enemy fire and breathed his last.” DC Uppal was the only BSF officer KIA in the Eastern Theater in 1971.
In the meantime, my Boro Mama (eldest maternal uncle), whose younger son Ishtiaq Aziz was fighting with Dhaka’s famous “Crack Platoon,” a daring guerrilla unit composed of college students, was picked up by the Pakistanis from his home on the fateful night in August, when many freedom fighters and their family members were arrested. Unable to capture any of his freedom fighter sons, the Pakistanis unleashed their fury on the father. Then a man in his 50’s, he was savagely beaten in the torture chamber at the old MP Hostel. The great Crack Platoon guerrilla, late Masud Sadique (Chullu), who was also arrested, has written that he was shocked one day to find my wounded uncle there, still urging the young fighters not to give up or divulge information about arms caches to the Pakistanis (“অস্ত্র কোথায় আছে তোরা বলিসনা, ওটা আমাদের মুক্তির জন্য লাগবে”).
Dr. Kamal Siddiqui CSP ‘68, then PS to Foreign Minister Khondokar Mushtaq, who later became my brother-in-law, was present in the room at the Bangladesh High Commission when the brief of Nishat Bhai’s martyrdom was presented to my Boro Mama, who had just arrived in Kolkata. Kamal Bhai said that he was frozen with shock, and he just sat there stoically as the tragic news sunk in. After the war, he would recover from his physical wounds – but he never recovered from the premature loss of his beloved first-born son, Nishat (which in Persian denotes the ‘Bringer of Happiness’). The bringer of happiness would bring happiness no more. May they both rest in peace.
Thanks for sharing.
Its …unfortunate to see the current day friction between Bangladeshi and Indian governments.
Thank you for sharing. This should be a post.
great suggestion – I have made it a post. Beautiful tribue
Thanks for sharing. Hope you keep participating in conversations. A Bangladeshi expat perspective is a welcome addition on BP!!
Thank you. You are welcome. Best regards.
Uh no. Partition took an Indian world and vivisected it in the name of an experimental basis on religion.
This attempt at fabricating a ‘nation’ out of diverse subcontinental humans caved in on itself once already a couple of decades into the experiment.
An outcome that is only just prevented from recursively repeating, because ‘nukes’.
Now culturally, things are a lot more …nebulous. But lets not pretend that the millions of south Indian muslims in Kerala, Tamil Nadu somehow feel more “Pakistani” than they do Indian. Merely liking a couple of songs on ‘Coke Studio’ is not some magical talisman of identity.
There is more to it than Nukes. If Russia cannot take Ukraine, India cannot dismember Pakistan in a non-nuke fight with acceptable losses. Drubbing yes, invading and holding no.
Why the heck should India want to bother ‘dismembering’ Pakistan. Utter waste of time and resources.
Nukes are keeping Pakistan from splintering itself – something its really, really good at. Natural conclusion to the divisive regressive illogic of the TNT.
Excellent article, and i think you have summed up why Pakistan is more relevant that Bangladesh or India when it comes to Islamic culture in the region and abroad, despite having similar amounts of Muslims.
The Bengalis made a mistake which they seem to now be regretting, but they did not understand the cultural argument at all. Urdu was made Pakistan’s national language because Pakistan was created to protect Indo-Islamic culture from Hindutva hegemony and by the early 20th century, Urdu was associated with that Indo Islamic culture deeply.
The fact is that Urdu/Hindi/Hindustani is the only pan South Asian langauge that India has ever produced. EVER.
I always find it amusing that Indians continue to lament how British (who created India) also divided India. But the British also made Hindustani the pan-Indian language. And yet the same Indians want to destroy it in favor of their regional languges that are very limited in scope.
//The fact is that Urdu/Hindi/Hindustani is the only pan South Asian langauge that India has ever produced. EVER.//
Sanskrit and Pali: Are we a joke to you?
//Excellent article, and i think you have summed up why Pakistan is more relevant that Bangladesh or India when it comes to Islamic culture in the region and abroad, despite having similar amounts of Muslims.//
Except you are not, I dont think any Indian muslim is looking to Pakistan for guidance on cultural matters, and moreover than that the major revivalist movements, even those popular in Pakistan are from India. The tablighi jamat, the deoband school, even the jamat e islami are all Indian muslim creations. Even people like Zakir Naik are from India.
Other than preserving Urdu, what cultural products has Pakistan produced that Indian muslims and bangladeshi muslims engage in?
The original post mentions Coke Studio. Pakistani dramas are another example.
Here’s a recent article about Bangladesh’s Gen-Z and their love for Pakistani music:
https://www.dawn.com/news/2024732/soundscape-pakistani-music-and-bangladeshs-gen-z
This is good but saying that this is a reflection of dominance of Pakistani culture is like using Bollywood as a dominance of Indian culture in Pakistan and bangladesh.
Majority of ‘click traffic’ for coke studio beyond Pakistani borders is from subcontinental infidels, not subcontinental muslims.
Its funny how almost all Pak media content on YT is constructed, edited, headlined to primarily target Indians.
Further to this, my impression is that coke studio and pakistani dramas appeal to NW indians and specifically punjabi/sindhi hindus, not for their muslimness but because they are a modern elaboration of the culture of their roots. Muslims of the deccan peninsula are connecting directly to the gulf and other internationalist muslim paradigms. In Bengal and Assam I don’t even see the aspiration to know hindi (let alone urdu) in any capacity greater than simply transactional. We underestimate how deep these “regional” cultures run if we assume that they are looking to latch onto ephemeral cultural trends for their core identity. Bengali and Assamese muslims aren’t sufficiently alienated from their folk cultures for that.
The Pakistanis on this website are very desperate to erase Regional culture just as an instinct due to their own unitary state. Even now people from that side are insistent on erasing the impact these cultures have on the Subcontinent and instead wish to impose some kind of an Urdu hegemony. They would rather highlight the limited success of Urdu culture over the vast successes of majority of regional cultural media. The reality is Pasoori is 4 years old at this point and it a similar phenomenon hasn’t been replicated since. However, the extremely regional cinema of someone like SS Rajamouli has seen repeated successes, but that doesn’t indicate we are living in some kind of a rise of Telugu cultural hegemony.
Out of 1.5 billion Indians, only 3 million or so can speak Sanskrit and it is L1 for only 25,000 people. Pali even worse.
Sanskrit/ Pali are at the same level as Arabic in India. The amount of people speaking it are inconsequential but people pretend they are important. They were never mass languages.
Urdu/Hindi is the only real pan-Indian and pan-South Asian language.
This has flipped in the past couple of decades. Zakir Naik is probably the only Indian Muslim after 2005 that has made any impact in Pakistan or outside India for that matter. I don’t know many IMs but all the ones I know heavily follow Pakistani music, watch Pakistani serials, listen to people like Tariq Jamil or Tariq Masood, and even profess their love for politician IK
//I don’t know many IMs//
Aren’t you from the US? How could you speak for Indian muslims living in India in that case. Are these people individuals with ancestry from India whose grandparents moved shortly after independence or recent immigrants.
And Zakir Naik is one of the few muslim religious preachers who are widely known. Tablighi Jamat that is huge is from India, as is deobandi movement and barlevi movement as I mentioned. In field of arts, Irfan Khan comes to mind then there is Hasan Minhaj, I think one Indian Muslim jurist even wrote the new constitution of Sudan as well. If I search in business field many Indian muslims will also come up. So plenty of people who made an impact outside of India, though not in Pakistan.
You mentioned that besides hindi/Urdu no mass languages were ever produced.
Pali is a mass language spoken all over the subcontinent like Hindi and Urdu, same with Sanskrit that was in the status of English today, another elite language that has been produced within India. I forgot to mention Prakrit as well.
1) Neither Sanskrit nor Pali were ever mass languages. Sanskrit has been in India for 3500 years now and after 3500 years only 25,000 speakers speak it as L1 and less than 0.2% of Indians can even speak it in total. Nobody even speaks Pali today, and it was never a mass language either in medieval India. As I said, you could find more Arabic speakers in India than these languages.
2) Yes Deoband and Bareily is in India, but the Deobandi/Barelvi locus shifted to Pakistan in ’47. There are no Indian scholars outside of Zakir Naik that ever became famous in Pakistan, that is because Zakir Naik himself is not an trained aalim or a mufti and his rise to fame is mostly due to comparative religion and giving tableegh to non-muslims rather than laying down or interpreting Muslim law or advancing Islamic philosophy.
Tablighi Jamaat is also in Pakistan and all famous Tablighis in Urdu/Hindi media are Pakistanis now.
Yes I will give you Hasan Minhaj, Infact I should even mention Mehdi Hasan, but these guys are foriegners and belong to western (English) culture. The Khans in Bollywood are probably the last of the IMs coming out of India that had real cultural impact in Pakistan or globally.
Hindus like Jagjit Singh, Gulzar, Kapoors etc have done more to promote Indo Islamic culture than many IMs after 1947.
//Neither Sanskrit nor Pali were ever mass languages. Sanskrit has been in India for 3500 years now and after 3500 years only 25,000 speakers speak it as L1 and less than 0.2% of Indians can even speak it in total. Nobody even speaks Pali today, and it was never a mass language either in medieval India. As I said, you could find more Arabic speakers in India than these languages.//
Sanskrit has birthed and influenced countless language in south and south east asia. As has Pali, they dont have many speakers todsy because many people speak their children languages. You are plainly wrong about Sanskrit and Pali never being mass and influential languages.
//Yes Deoband and Bareily is in India, but the Deobandi/Barelvi locus shifted to Pakistan in ’47. There are no Indian scholars outside of Zakir Naik that ever became famous in Pakistan, that is because Zakir Naik himself is not an trained aalim or a mufti and his rise to fame is mostly due to comparative religion and giving tableegh to non-muslims rather than laying down or interpreting Muslim law or advancing Islamic philosophy.
Tablighi Jamaat is also in Pakistan and all famous Tablighis in Urdu/Hindi media are Pakistanis now.//
Deoband is still in India, when the leader of the taliban comes to India he goes to deoband and barlevi,jamat e islami and tablighi are still.hugely influential among the muslims in India. Here also I dont think Pakistan is driving force unlike say bangladesh where it clearly is.
And we literally have people like Dr Faizan Mustafa who wrote the constitution of constitution of Eritrea as well as was involved in drafting the Asian human rights charter as well.
The Lulu group led by MA Yusuf ali comes to mind as well. I think they have about 30% of the middle east retail market under them?
Indian muslims have had a big impact globally just maybe not in Pakistan.
1) The Taliban all studied in Pakistan’s deobandi seminaries in KP and Karachi, and up until recently they took religious directions from Dar ul Uloom Karachi. The recent TB visit to India is just due to their anti Pak stance recently.
2) There is no evidence that Sanskrit or Pali were ever mass languages, unlike Latin or Arabic. Sanskrit birthed other langauges but retained exclusivity when Brahmins prevented and sometimes banned the Sudra from learning Sanskrit.
Pali is what the buddhist cannon ia written in and no doubt spread all across Eurasia on the back of buddhism
Sanskrit was what English is today, a global lingua franca that was spoken from present day Afghanistan to present day Indonesia by elites everywhere hinduism and buddhism spread
The ideology is still from India. Have the deobandis in pakistan split from Indian deobandis?
Actually, it’s somewhat more complicated than that. Technically, neither Pali nor Sanskrit are not real language in the modern sense. According to what was told to me by a linguist, Sanskrit originally came from the Proto-Indo-Aryan ancestral language spoken in the Vedic period. This original language developed multiple dialects, some of which were gradually used to codify the original Vedic texts, and gradually this language in the Vedas crystallized into the Vedic Sanskrit we know about today. At the same time, the dialects of Proto-Indo-Aryan developed into the later “Prakrit” languages of a later period. Similarly, Pali started as a variant of Middle Indic that was commonly spoken around the beginning of the First millennium and went through a process of crystallization over time.
The basic principle was that these represented original languages that were preserved in text, while they fell out of common parlance as they evolved into a new language or died out entirely. Additionally, technically speaking, many of the modern Indic languages aren’t descended from Sanskrit; rather, they were influenced by Sanskrit. Ancient India had a unique language order, with Sanskrit as the elite “coarse-sounding” language used for official functions; Prakrit was the “sweet-sounding” language often used for specific functions like poetry; and the vernacular languages (like Apastambha) were a mix between “Prakrit” (the variant used in court) and Classical (not Vedic) Sanskrit. Furthermore, classical Sanskrit actually borrows many linguistic features from Prakrit.
Generally speaking, ordinary people would be able to understand Sanskrit since their common vernacular forms of Prakrit have a degree of intelligibility with Classical Sanskrit used in court. Kinda like how I, a person who speaks Malayalam, can partially understand standardized Hindi since both languages have overlapping Sanskrit vocabulary. Similarly, a Bhojpuri speaker may understand Hindi or Urdu, since there is a great overlap due to shared vocabulary. However, it should be noted that in the southern regions, Sanskrit was often used to create entirely new macaronic/hybrid languages like Manipravalam (Tamil base with Sanskrit structural influences), which was more the dominant elite language.
Another important point of note that everyone misses stems from the fact that Classical Sanskrit became popular due to the influence of Iranian peoples, specifically, the Indo-Saka nobility of the Kardamaka dynasty, who ruled the Western Satrap kingdom. In fact, the Indic Satvahana dynasty favored Magadhi Prakrit, used in the courts of Ashoka, over all forms of Sanskrit, and the only times they ever used Sanskrit in their inscriptions happened only due to Indo-Saka influence. Over time, the Western Satraps and Satvahanna fought multiple wars that internally weakened the Satvahanna kingdom over time. Ironically, the triumph of the Indo-Sakas over the Satvahannas resulted in the propagation of Classical Sanskrit as the dominant language of the land.
It should be noted that Classical Sanskrit (unlike its Vedic counterpart) wasn’t really restricted to the common masses; rather, access to learning it was limited by economic status and social positioning. People from merchant backgrounds would have been able to learn this language, but it should be noted that the majority of the world during that time period (irrespective of country) wasn’t really literate in any language, much less in Sanskrit. In fact, popular religious movements like Tantra favored verbal communication over written text and often transmitted information orally from teacher to pupil, regardless of either party’s background.
A major element that restricted communication mostly stemmed less from the language of the text; rather, it stemmed from the secrecy associated with the work. For example, my Christian maternal family actually comes from a long lineage of Ayurvedic vaidyas; in fact (not to humble brag), one of my ancestors even gained the favor of the royal family of Poonjar, located in Kottayam, Kerala, due to this proficiency. However, they would never reveal the information hidden inside the text to anyone except those who come from the lineage, since there seems to have been a form of taboo associated with sharing the information with outsiders.
Many of the rituals were performed behind closed doors without anyone else’s purview out of fear that they would be cursed. In fact, one of my grandaunts once watched a Nasyam treatment (blowing herbal oil into the nostrils) given by my great-grandfather. Eventually, she fell into a well, and my great-grandfather thought he had been cursed, which caused him to stop teaching the information to the next generation, ending this tradition. So there is a certain degree of secrecy and, honestly, a degree of magic associated with many Sanskritic traditions that restrict their sharing of information. I remember an author translating the term for Physician in Sanskrit into socceror. This went into things like Tantra as well, since there was a lot of hidden information that could be transferred to people initiated in the tradition. It seems to be less about caste outright, but rather about lineage and initiations, which shaped information transfer in ancient India.
Mind you, a large portion of these practices significantly changed in the Medieval period. The raids of the 12th century disrupted many traditional networks and institutions in India, especially in the North. This gradually led to the expansion of newly emerging mercantile groups and the formation of newer religious sects with a looser interpretation of traditional theology. The two groups worked together, often breaking with preexisting tradition by favoring vernacular over elite languages like Sanskrit or Persian to such an extent that these elite languages ended up with an excess of vernacular words. These sects were more open about their theology and were more accepting of people from a wider background. This transition, in some essence solidifed the Hindu religion in the different regions, but that is a conversation for another time.
//Technically, neither Pali nor Sanskrit are not real language in the modern sense.//
What do you mean that sanskrit and pali are not real languages in a modern sense?
Are you saying that since these were not spoken and are a remnant of time when they were codified the language used in buddhist cannons or vedas are not real languages?
From what you say, the sanskrit that was the elite language is classical sanskrit which is different from vedic sanskirt and this along with more commonly spoken prakrit is the real progenitor of many indo aryan language today with the balance in favor of prakrit?
Am I understanding correctly?
You are correct; there are just specific points that just needed some clarity. Firstly, what I meant by it wasn’t a real language was the fact that the languages weren’t spoken by a living community and that they represent a codified version of an older language that was no longer spoken as it evolved into later languages. A good comparison would be the Latin languages. Originally, there was a pre-classical form of archaic Latin spoken by the Latin tribes of Italy, which over time was codified into Classical Latin in order to be used for administrative purposes in the Roman state. However, the ordinary people spoke a version of Latin with its own unique dialects in different regions called Vulgar Latin, all of which would gradually evolve into the Romance languages.
At the same time, the Latin language was used in a ritualistic form in the later periods, even though it wasn’t a commonly spoken language anymore by the ordinary masses, who started speaking proto-Romanic languages. This form of Latin gradually absorbed a bunch of medieval-era words from Hebrew, Romance, and other languages, developing into the Medieval Latin that was used by the Church and other institutions.
Proto-Indo-Aryan is archaic Latin; Vedic Sanskrit is Classical Latin, while Classical Sanskrit is like Medieval Latin and the Prakrit language is Vulgar Latin. Prakrit is a sister language to Sanskrit in some sense since both descend from proto-Indo-Aryan; it’s a minor difference, but still. In the post-Vedic period, Prakrit became a lot more popular over time, especially after Ashoka made Prakrit (especially the Magadhi version) the state language. After Ashoka, Magadhi Prakrit became the common court language of successor states, until the Indo-Saka helped develop Classical Sanskrit by adding Magadhi Prakrit elements commonly used in royal contexts to Vedic Sanskrit. Throughout this time, the common people continued to speak in Prakrit, which was developing distinct dialects like Suraseni, Maharasthri, Magadhi, etc.
In the times after the Indo-Saka, Classical Sanskrit was used for administrative purposes, while standard Prakrit was used for specific purposes such as naturalistic poems that are exclusively written in Prakrit or dialogues by female characters or the religious literature of Jains. Think of it like this: people speak English in India, but no one really uses it as a primary language, and often people mix English words or outright sentences into their vernacular to produce Hinglish, Manglish, etc. This was probably how Sanskrit would be used in daily life, where people used some version of Prakrit with either Sanskrit words or sentences added in the middle.
The relationship between standard Prakrit and its dialects would be similar to the relationship between standard Hindi and other language/dialects like Urdu, Braj, Bhojpuri, etc. Some of these are considered to be Hindi, but they are essentially separate languages (Bhojpuri), while others are actual dialects (Braj potentially might be). Standard Hindi is used in newspapers, books, and other specific places, but ordinary people don’t speak standard Hindi; rather, they speak vernacular language/dialects, and they mix in Hindi and English words. Basically, how Prakrit would function and the grey area between Hindi dialects or seperate language exsists in the case of the Prakrit dialects vs. standard Prakrit.
Over time, the Dialects of Prakrit like Maharashtri, Apastamba, etc. are influenced by Sanskrit and other external languages, which results in them developing into later vernacular languages like Dimgal, Bengali, Odiya, etc. However, these new languages (which were completely different from standard Prakrit) started calling themselves Prakrit and displaced standard Prakrit’s position. The basic reason for this was the fact that the term Prakrit (literally meaning “Natural”) started to be seen as a designation for any common vernacular used by the people, as long as it met specific linguistic requirements. There was even a king who straight up claimed that Kannada was a “Prakrit” since it was the predominant vernacular. By the medieval period, Prakrit was seen as the language of the “snakes,” and only specialists actually knew how to read/write it in peninsular India.
I tried to give a broad explanation, but I hope this isn’t more confusing. It’s a complicated subject to explain. I would suggest the book “Language of the Snakes” by Andrew Ollett, since it does a better job of explaining the language order with better nuance than I can.
1) To say that classical Sanskrit and vedic Sanskrit evolved from pakrit is like saying queen’s English came out of cockney.
2) pakrit changed from generation to generation, also region to region. Hence Buddhist scholars started using classical Sanskrit.
3) classical Sanskrit codified by Panini has saved the language and old writings are intelligible even today. Even beginners read kalidasa.
I literally did not say that Sanskrit emerged from Prakrit; I stated that both Prakrit and Sanskrit emerged from Proto-Indo-Aryan, which was an ancestral language like Proto-Germanic. Prakrit and Sanskrit are sister languages, as opposed to Prakrit descending from Sanskrit. Also, I said that the Prakritic forms and structural elements influenced Vedic Sanskrit and developed it into Classical Sanskrit. I didn’t say Classical Sanskrit evolved from Prakrit. At least, I didn’t intend to say that.
I am not fully sure about your second point, since linguistic variation doesn’t automatically mean people were willing to embrace the language. The Jains, for example, retained the use of Maharashtri Prakrit and didn’t replace it with Sanskrit to the extent that a significant portion of Jain literature is primarily written in Prakrit. Sanskrit seems to have gained popularity due to its association with the royal court and elite culture, as the Sanskrit cosmopolis emerged in the first millennium. Even then, Buddhists, Jains, and Hindus all produced literature in Prakrit as well as Sanskrit.
As for your third point, Panini codified the basic structure of the Sanskrit language, but that didn’t translate into its popularity. The Indo-Sakas of the Western Kshatrapa kingdom were the first to commonly use the language in court inscriptions and established some of the stylistic features that would be commonly associated with later Sanskritic literary traditions like Kavya. If they hadn’t propagated it, then Prakrit would have been the major language of the land rather than Sanskrit, since the more local kingdoms favored Prakrit due to its association with courtly culture in the Mauryan period. Sanskrit might have remained a ritualistic language.
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1HsbUpsbT4/
A slightly different and interesting take.
This is very interesting.
How widely was classical Sanskrit what you compared to medieval Latin spoken?
This was the lingua franca for period of time if I am not mistaken right?
yes Sanskrit and Pali are the great languages of the Indian Subcontinent.
https://www.firstpost.com/world/jinnah-replaces-mujibur-rahman-in-dhaka-museum-sparking-row-over-bangladeshs-pakistan-legacy-14046128.html
renewed political debate has emerged in Bangladesh over the country’s troubled relationship with its Pakistan-era past.
The controversy emerged after
Muhammad Ali Jinnah was prominently featured at the renovated Dhaka University Central Students’ Union (DUCSU) museum, while several iconic photographs of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman have disappeared from the display.
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