148 On the Arabic Element in Official Hindustani. [No. 3, 



home to the feelings and the understanding of the highest and the 

 lowest. They possess a living power, universality and force of expres- 

 sion, which can never belong to the Arabic and Persian platitudes 

 that are thrust in their place." 



Now all this is very good and very eloquent, but it rests on false as- 

 sumptions. It assumes that what is true of some classes of the population 

 is true of the whole. It puts aside entirely all the rank and education 

 of the country — it puts the peasant on a pedestal, and requests us to 

 accept the barbarous and antiquated jargon that falls from his lips as 

 the model of our speech, and as the vehicle for the expression of 

 intricate philosophical argument, close legal reasoning, delicate and 

 refined discussion on art, science and politics. 



A second erroneous assumption is, that we have to thank our law 

 courts for the abundance of Persian and Arabic terms in use in Hin- 

 dustani. The fact, however is, that our native clerks use nine-tenths 

 of these words, simply because they have been used for five centuries 

 past as legal terms, and use has conferred on them a conventional 

 meaning, which no other words possess. The native press, in discuss- 

 ing matters of a purely unofficial character, uses the same phraseology. 

 The style of Abul Fazl and the Sih Nasr-i Zahuri is the model of all 

 native composition. And this arises not from pedantry or affectation ; 

 the reasons of it are to be sought, first, in the circumstances in which 

 the early Musulman invaders found themselves ; and, secondly, in the 

 constitution of native society from those times to this. 



Who, then, were the founders of the Urdu language? They 

 were a mass of Turks, Tartars, Persians, Arabs, and Syrians ; with 

 whom were amalgamated many of the middle and lower classes of 

 Hindus ; principally, perhaps, the adventurous trader, who goes any- 

 where to gain money, and the idle scum who are always attracted by 

 an army. If we further ask what were the materials from which this 

 heterogeneous mass could compound a lingua franca y we find, of 

 indigenous dialects, Sanskrit and Hindi ; of extraneous ones, Arabic 

 and Persian, and various Turkish dialects. They had to introduce 

 a new religion, a new government ; systems of policy and organization 

 new to India ; rules of etiquette ; the social habits and refinements of 

 a town life ; new articles of clothing, furniture and luxury ; philoso- 

 phical terms ; terms to express new processes in the mechanical arts. 



