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



the belief of the Hindu, while for the new Muslim population, the 

 purely Muslim words were retained ; and as nothing was displaced to 

 make way for them, they were a clear gain to the language, enabling 

 it to keep pace with the new religious development of the nation at 

 large. Secondly, words relating to the government of the country. 

 The mass of little kingdoms each headed by its petty rdjd, a puppet 

 whose strings were pulled by his Brahmin ministers, was to give way 

 to the rule of one supreme " father-king," padshdh ;* who should 

 parcel out his dominions into satrapies or subds ; and these powerful 

 satraps again would divide their provinces into districts ; and the 

 rulers of districts would portion them out into counties, and so on. 

 Divisions of caste were to be ignored, all men were free and equal, on 

 condition of paying their taxes duly. The sovereign acknowledged 

 himself to be under no obligation towards his subjects. He was 

 an absolute despot whose business was to rule, as his people's was to 

 obey. He was, however, expected to be accessible to the meanest of 

 his subjects at certain times, and on the whole to do justice, though 

 after a somewhat random fashion. How utterly inapplicable to such 

 a system and to such a ruler would be the Sanskrit title of rdjd ; 

 what a crowd of ideas and memories of another order of things would 

 such a title bring with it. Would it not lower the great " father- 

 king" to the level of the petty knights he had just destroyed? But 

 the word rdjd, though inapplicable to the sovereign, was not discarded ; 

 it remained as the title of a high order of nobility, as it is to this day, 

 and the Persian terms indicative of sovereignty are therefore positive 

 additions to the language. 



It is unnecessary to go in detail through the long list of words 

 relating to government introduced by the invaders. It is evident 

 that a people's language can have no words for ideas or things which 

 do not exist in the country. Especially was this the case in India- 

 Excluded from all but the scantiest commerce with the outer world, 

 India had long believed herself to contain the whole of the inhabited 

 earth, or at least to be the centre and greatest part of it. Like China 

 in the present day, India thought herself " the central flowery land," 

 and had but dim notions of certain " outside barbarians" who led a 

 miserable life on the confines of space. When the new era of a vigor- 

 * I assume Padshdh to be " pidr-shah" father-king, like Atabeg or Abimelech. 



