18G6.J Objections to the modem style of official Hindustani. 175 



as I cannot speak positively with regard to so voluminous a poem, 

 there may probably be a few others. But it appears to have been 

 considered bad taste rather than otherwise in a professedly vernacular 

 composition, to introduce many words of Persian or Arabic origin. 

 At the beginning of the present century the proportion of foreign and 

 native words had come to be about equal, in works composed by 

 Mahommedan writers in a popular style. A new principle then came 

 into operation, which checked the natural progress of development, 

 and threatens to rob India of all it has hitherto acquired in the way 

 of literature. The change to which I allude was the abolition of 

 Persian as the language of the law-courts. Till that time official and 

 popular language had been content to remain apart ; now they were 

 to coalesce. We all know what has been the result of this well-inten- 

 tioned order : the amla had written nothing but Persian all their 

 lives, and in fact could not trust themselves to write anything else ; 

 they acquiesced in the Government demand so far as to introduce the 

 Hindustani inflexions into their pleadings, but the phraseology was 

 preserved intact. This is the fortuitous origin of that wonderful 

 jargon, which is now not satisfied with ruling the law-courts, but 

 requires to be acknowledged as the standard of good taste throughout 

 the whole of Hindustan ; which has retained the verbosity of Persian, 

 while sacrificing the elegance and simplicity of its grammatical con- 

 struction, and has introduced the complex inversions of Hindi syntax, 

 while discarding the terseness and vigour of its terminology. By all 

 means let the language of the country be Urdu, that is to say the 

 Urdu of thirty or forty years ago, having for its basis Hindi with a free 

 admixture of all foreign words, for that is the form into which it had 

 spontaneously developed, and eclecticism may be tolerated or even 

 admired, while syncretism in art must be synonymous with failure. 



2. Not to dwell further on its artificial origin, this Urdu dialect 

 can never advance to the dignity of an independent language ; and 

 yet certainly India is too considerable a country to acquiesce quietly 

 in the position of being, for literary purposes, merely a province of 

 Persia. The great ambition of eveiy Munshi now-a-days is to 

 eliminate from his composition every Hindi word, no matter how far- 

 fetched its Persian substitute may be. With regard to other languages 

 he is not so particular, and will introduce English phrases with great 



