12 Further Notes on the Prithirdj-rdyasa. [No. 1, 



whose power are all things." Alhan turned upon the king Mahil 

 with an angry glare in his eyes ; king Parmal smiled, while his 

 nobles grasped their bows. Not without calculation did Alhan re- 

 prove the king : fate has had its course, who now can undo it ? 



The only two Persian words in this passage are darbdr and hamdn. 

 They are rather frequent in the earlier part of the canto, which 

 contains the following : hukm, farmdn, tegli, bdgli, mudf, arz, 

 tamdshd. 



I cannot conclude this paper without one remark on a subject 

 which I have handled so often, that I fear it has become tedious. 

 I mean the comparative claims of Hindi and Urdu to be considered 

 the vernacular of modern India. When I wrote the above trans- 

 lations, I was in camp at a small town, or rather village, in the Main- 

 puri district. Finding my way through the text by no means clear, 

 I enquired if there was any Pandit in the place. It appeared that 

 there was none. But in the course of the morning, four shop-keepers 

 from the bazar came in to see me, who said they had a taste for 

 books. The passage was read aloud by one of the number, and 

 I found that all were able to follow the general meaning and, when 

 any difficulty occurred, could offer some suggestion, which, however 

 defective in accuracy of scholarship, was often conducive to the true 

 interpretation. I have thus been enabled to present the translation 

 in a more complete form than would, I believe, have been possible for 

 any single unaided European scholar. Not one of my four friends was 

 a professional Pandit, nor claimed acquaintance with any language 

 beyond his own mother-tongue ; and it must further be remembered, 

 that the Prithiraj-rayasa is a work of very considerable antiquity. 

 This little incident shews in the very strongest light, that Hindi is 

 still to the present day, and always has been, the real vernacular of 

 modern India, that is to say, the language ordinarily used by the 

 middle classes and best understood by them. Urdu, no doubt, is 

 largely spoken in the North- West Provinces, and has enriched collo- 

 quial speech with many words which it would now be pedantry to 

 condemn ; but precisely in the same way, English is largely spoken 

 in the neighbourhood of Calcutta, and has had a deep influence in the 

 formation of the modern Bengali idiom. Yet English still remains 

 a foreign language and so does Urdu. I confidently challenge my 



