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, kimal and nirakJi, mdl, saudd, and sauddgar, 

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

 Persian. Sarah, hail, 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 



i 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 



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



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



iskd, ushd ; 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 uodkd 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, Gorackpur, 



Benares, Shahabad, Sarun and Tirhut, 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. u Okerd dwdre 



gdrdhd sunilin, sagare log dhdwalan, tan ddi sau jana j anvil an, ghare 



•' samdgelan, sagard dhan, chipd, lota, dhdn, clidwal sdthi lut lelan, dheri 



toralan, phin niksalan, dm mushdl bhig del an t te bhdgalan, t'hom a* 



I P'shddwa chahet gelin, t'ehlio chor pakardil gel. n 



19 



