1867.] On the Arabic Element in Official Hindustani. 153 



The language, to quote Dr. Fallon once more, " in which men buy 

 and sell and transact business" is not Hindi ; it is Urdu. If man and 

 ser and chitdnk are Hindi, kimat and nirakh, xndl, saudd, and sauddgar, 

 jins, rakm, bazar, and dukdn are Persian. If hat is Hindi, ganj is 

 Persian. Sarah, bail, and gdri are Hindi, but pul, sardi and manzil 

 are Persian. And so it runs through all the scenes of common Indian 

 life ; you hear everywhere simple Persian words as frequently as Hindi 

 in the mouths of all classes of the people. I appeal to the experience 

 of all who know well the rural districts of this country for confirma- 

 tion of this assertion. 



We may then safely state that to the higher classes throughout the 

 country, to the Mahomedan rustic, to the townsmen in all districts, 

 Urdu is as familiar and as well known ; nay, more familiar, than pure 

 unadulterated Hindi. It remains only to discuss the question as 

 regards the Hindu peasant. And it is in this connection that the 

 want of uniformity between the various Hindi dialects requires to be 

 brought out in a stronger light. Hindi is not one, but many. If we 

 follow the advice of our purists, and try to talk and write only pure 

 Hindi, we abandon the possibility of retaining one universally intelli- 

 gible language and fall back into a chaos of a dozen or more different 

 dialects. In advocating the use of Hindi in preference to Arabicized 

 Urdu, Dr. Fallon's school mean by Hindi those portions of Urdu 

 which are of Indian origin ; they mean the dialect which uses louh, yih, 

 iskd, uskd ; which says hond, hotd, hud, karnd, kiyd ; that dialect which 

 has been incorporated into Urdu : the Hindi, in short, of Delhi and 

 Muttra. But ten miles from Delhi itself I have heard wdkd for uskd, 

 ydkd for iskd. If we are to reject such forms as these and use only 

 the Delhi Hindi, we are quite as far from reaching the heads and 

 hearts of the mass of the population as ever. The great Bhojpuri 

 dialect, for instance, is spoken throghout eastern Oudh, G-orackpur, 

 Benares, Shahabad, Sarun and Tivhiit, and is more unlike the Delhi 

 Hindi than Dutch is unlike English. I would ask a Delhi or upper 

 Doab rustic to interpret the following from the evidence given in 

 court in a dacoity case by a peasant of Champaran. " Okerd dwdre 

 gdrdhd sunilin, sagare log dhdioalan, tan drii sau jana jamilan, ghare 

 samdgelan, sagard dhan, chipd, lota, dhdn, chdiual sdthi lut lelan, dheri 

 toralan, phin niksalan, dru rnushdl bhig, delan, te bhdgalan, t'hom a' 

 P'shddwa chuhet gelin } t'ekho chor pakardil gel" 

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