1867.] On the Arabic Element in Official Hindustani. 151 



ous civilization and progress dawned on her, she was unprepared to 

 meet it. Her religion, laws, customs and language shrivelled up at 

 once, and slunk into holes and corners, and the statues of her gods 

 which had loomed grand and terrible in the twilight of Brahminism, 

 looked poor, feeble scarecrows in the full blaze of el Islam. The conquer- 

 ors were but little disposed to adopt the language of the conquered race, 

 but even had they been so, that language afforded them no materials 

 in which to clothe their ideas. Necessity stept in to aid inclination, 

 and the result was a language full of imported words. 



"But," it may be urged, " no one objects to a certain number of 

 Arabic and Persian words ; many of them are necessary, some even 

 indispensable, to the people : all we object to is the indiscriminate 

 introduction of words which are not necessary, and for which the early 

 Mahomedan invaders are not responsible." I might answer this, by 

 asking the Hindi school to tell me how they know at what date any 

 given word first made its appearance in India ? On what grounds do 

 they assert that the simpler and shorter Arabic words were introduced 

 first, and the longer and more complicated ones later ? There exists 

 no regular Urdu literature by which we can, as in English, mark the 

 exact epoch of the introduction of a word. And this brings me to 

 my second argument, that, namely, derived from the constitution of 

 native society, during all the years in which the Urdu language has 

 been growing, up to the present time. 



The conquerors were essentially one nation, though composed of 

 very mixed elements. If they had adopted the language of the con- 

 quered, in a few generations they would have become scarcely in- 

 telligible to one another. In the present day an inhabitant of the 

 Punjab just manages to make himself intelligible to a man of Patna 

 by virtue of those few words which are now common to all Indian 

 dialects, namely those of Persian origin, and the Hindi verbs and 

 particles which have, thanks to the Mahomedans, become familiar all 

 over the country. At the time of the first invasions hond was not 

 used over a wider area than bhd, pas than bhire, uskd than oherd or 

 wdkd. As the country was split up into a number of petty kingdoms, 

 so was the language into a mass of dialects. Hindi was not one but 

 many, and so it is to this day. The service which the Mahomedans 

 rendered to India, consisted in their taking one of these many dialects 



