His works include: in Sanskrit, _Atmabodha_ (1852), _Sankhyapravachana_ (1856), _Saryasiddhanta_ (1859), _Vasavadattu_ (1859), _Sankhyasara_ (1862) and _Dasarupa_ (1865); in Hindi, Ballantynes' _Hindi Grammar_ (1868) and a _Reader_ (1870); on English philology, _Recent Exemplifications of False Philology_ (1872), attacking Richard Grant White, _Modern English_ (1873), "On English Adjectives in -able, with Special Reference to Reliable" (_Am. Jour. Philology_, 1877), _Doctor Indoctus_ (1880). Entry: HALL
By this time the worship of Krishna as the lover of Radha _(Radha-ballabh)_ had been systematized, and a local habitation found for it at Gokul, opposite Mathura on the Jumna, some 30 m. upstream from Agra, Akbar's capital, by Vallabhacharya, a Tailinga Brahman from Madras. Born in 1478, in 1497 he chose the land of Braj as his headquarters, thence making missionary tours throughout India. He wrote chiefly, if not entirely, in Sanskrit; but among his immediate followers, and those of his son Bitthalnath (who succeeded his father on the latter's death in 1530), were some of the most eminent poets in Hindi. Four disciples of Vallabhacharya and four of Bitthalnath, who flourished between 1550 and 1570, are known as the _Asht Chhap_, or "Eight Seals," and are the acknowledged masters of the literature of Braj-bhasha, in which dialect they all wrote. Their names are Krishna-Das Pay-ahari, Sur Das (the Bhat), Parmanand Das, Kumbhan Das, Chaturbhuj Das, Chhit Swami, Nand Das and Gobind Das. Of these much the most celebrated, and the only one whose verses are still popular, is Sur Das. The son of Baba Ram Das, who was a singer at Akbar's court, Sur Das was descended, according to his own statement, from the bard of Prithwi-Raj, Chand Bardai. A tradition gives the date of his birth as 1483, and that of his death as 1573; but both seem to be placed too early, and in Abul-Fazl's _Ain-i Akbari_ he is mentioned as living when that work was completed (1596/7). He was blind, and entirely devoted to the worship of Krishna, to whose address he composed a great number of hymns (_bhajans_), which have been collected in a compilation entitled the _Sur Sagar_, said to contain 60,000 verses; this work is very highly esteemed as the high-water mark of Braj devotional poetry, and has been repeatedly printed in India. Other compositions by him were a translation in verse of the _Bhagavata Purana_, and a poem dealing with the famous story of Nala and Damayanti; of the latter no copies are now known to exist. Entry: 2
4. _Modern Period._--While such, in outline, is the history of the literary schools of the Deccan, Delhi and Lucknow, a fourth, that of the Fort William College at Calcutta, was being formed, and was destined to give no less an impulse to the cultivation of Urdu prose than had a hundred years before been given to that of poetry by Wali. At the commencement of the 19th century Dr John Gilchrist was the head of this institution, and his efforts were directed towards getting together a body of literature suitable as text-books for the study of the Urdu language by the European officers of the administration. To his exertions we owe the elaboration of the vernacular as an official speech, and the possibility of substituting it for the previously current Persian as the language of the courts and the government. He gathered together at Calcutta the most eminent vernacular scholars of the time, and their works, due to his initiative, are still notable as specimens of elegant and serviceable prose composition, not only in Urdu, but also in Hindi. The chief authors of this school are Haidari (Sayyid Muhammad Haidar-bakhsh), Husaini (Mir Bahadur 'Ali), Mir Amman Lutf, Hafizuddin Ahmad, Sher 'Ali Afsos, Nihal Chand of Lahore, Kazim 'Ali Jawan, Lallu Lal Kavi, Mazhar 'Ali Wila and Ikram 'Ali. Entry: 4
Omitting a few fragments of more ancient bards given by compilers of accounts of Hindi literature, the earliest author of whom any portion has as yet been published in the original text is Chand Bardai, the court bard of Prithwi-Raj, the last Hindu sovereign of Delhi. His poem, entitled _Prithi-Raj Rasau_ (or _Raysa_), is a vast chronicle in 69 books or cantos, comprising a general history of the period when he wrote. Of this a small portion has been printed, partly under the editorship of the late Mr John Beames and partly under that of Dr Rudolf Hoernle, by the Asiatic Society of Bengal; but the excessively difficult nature of the task prevented both scholars from making much progress.[3] Chand, who came of a family of bards, was a native of Lahore, which had for nearly 170 years (since 1023) been under Muslim rule when he flourished, and the language of the poem exhibits a considerable leaven of Persian words. In its present form the work is a redaction made by Amar Singh of Mewar, about the beginning of the 17th century, and therefore more than 400 years after Chand's death, with his patron Prithwi-Raj, in 1193. There is, therefore, considerable reason to doubt whether we have in it much of Chand's composition in its original shape; and the nature of the incidents described enhances this doubt. The detailed dates contained in the Chronicle have been shown by Kabiraj Syamal Das[4] to be in every case about ninety years astray. It tells of repeated conflicts between the hero Prithwi-Raj and Sultan Shihabuddin, of Ghor (Muhammad Ghori), in which the latter always, except in the last great battle, comes off the worst, is taken prisoner and is released on payment of a ransom; these seem to be entirely unhistorical, our contemporary Persian authorities knowing of only one encounter (that of Tirauri (Tirawari) near Thenesar, fought in 1191) in which the Sultan was defeated, and even then he escaped uncaptured to Lahore. The Mongols (Book XV.) are brought on the stage more than thirty years before they actually set foot in India, and are related to have been vanquished by the redoubtable Prithwi-Raj. It is evident that such a record cannot possibly be, in its entirety, a contemporary chronicle; but nevertheless it appears to contain a considerable element which, from its language, may belong to Chand's own age, and represents the earliest surviving document in Hindi. "Though we may not possess the actual text of Chand, we have certainly in his writings some of the oldest known specimens of Gaudian literature, abounding in pure Apabhramsa Sauraseni Prakrit forms" (Grierson). Entry: 1
The other class of composition which is characteristic of the period of early Hindi, the literature of the _Bhagats_, or Vaishnava saints, who propagated the doctrine of _bhakti_, or faith in Vishnu, as the popular religion of Hindostan, has exercised a much more powerful influence both upon the national speech and upon the themes chosen for poetic treatment. It is also, as a body of literature, of high intrinsic interest for its form and content. Nearly the whole of subsequent poetical composition in Hindi is impressed with one or other type of Vaishnava doctrine, which, like Buddhism many centuries before, was essentially a reaction against Brahmanical influence and the chains of caste, a claim for the rights of humanity in face of the monopoly which the "twice-born" asserted of learning, of worship, of righteousness. A large proportion of the writers were non-Brahmans, and many of them of the lowest castes. As Siva was the popular deity of the Brahmans, so was Vishnu of the people; and while the literature of the Saivas and Saktas[6] is almost entirely in Sanskrit, and exercised little or no influence on the popular mind in northern India, that of the Vaishnavas is largely in Hindi, and in itself constitutes the great bulk of what has been written in that language. Entry: 1
Urdu, as a literary language, differs from Hindi rather in its form than in its substance. The grammar, and to a large extent the vocabulary, of both are the same. The really vital point of difference, that in which Hindi and Urdu are incommensurable, is the _prosody_. Hardly one of the metres taken over by Urdu poets from Persian agrees with those used in Hindi. In the latter language it is the rule to give the short _a_ inherent in every consonant or _nexus_ of consonants its full value in scansion (though in prose it is no longer heard), except occasionally at the metrical pause; in Urdu this is never done, the words being scanned generally as pronounced in prose, with a few exceptions which need not be mentioned here. The great majority of Hindi metres are scanned by the number of _matras_ or syllabic instants--the value in time of a short syllable--of which the lines consist; in Urdu, as in Persian, the metre follows a special order of long and short syllables. Entry: 3
The court of Bijapur was no less distinguished in literature. Ibrahim 'Adil Shah (1579-1626) was the author of a work in verse on music entitled the _Nau-ras_ or "Nine Savours," which, however, appears to have been in Hindi rather than Urdu; the three prefaces (_dibajas_) to this poem were rendered into Persian prose by Maula Zuhuri, and, under the name of the _Sih nasr-i Zuhuri_, are well-known models of style. A successor of this prince, 'Ali 'Adil Shah, had as his court poet a Brahman known poetically as Nusrati, who in 1657 composed a _masnavi_ of some repute entitled the _Gulshan-i 'Ishq_, or "Rose-garden of Love," a romance relating the history of Prince Manohar and Madmalati,--like the _Kamrup_, an Indian theme. The same poet is author of an extremely long _masnavi_ entitled the _'Ali-nama_, celebrating the monarch under whom he lived. Entry: 3
To these great masters succeeded a period of artifice and reflection, when many works were composed dealing with the rules of poetry and the analysis and the appropriate language of sentiment. Of their writers the most famous is Kesab Das, a Brahman of Bundelkhand, who flourished during the latter part of Akbar's reign and the beginning of that of Jahangir. His works are the _Rasik-priya_, on composition (1591), the _Kavi-priya_, on the laws of poetry (1601), a highly esteemed poem dedicated to Parbin Rai Paturi, a celebrated courtesan of Orchha in Bundelkhand, the _Ramachandrika_, dealing with the history of Rama, (1610), and the _Vigyan-gita_ (1610). The fruit of this elaboration of the poetic art reached its highest perfection in BIHARI LAL, whose _Sat-sai_, or "seven centuries" (1662), is the most remarkable example in Hindi of the rhetorical style in poetry (see separate article). Entry: 2
The letters _u_ and _i_, even when not _u_-matra or _i_-matra, often change a preceding long _a_ to _å_, which is usually written _o_, and _a_ respectively. Thus _rawukh_, they have lost, is pronounced _råwukh_, and, in the native character, is written _rowukh_. Similarly _malis_ becomes _malis_ (_mölis_). The diphthong _ai_ is pronounced _ö_ when it commences a word; thus, _aith_, eight, is pronounced _öth_. When _i_ and _u_ commence a word they are pronounced _yi_ and _wu_ respectively. With one important exception, common to all Pisaca languages, Kashmiri employs every consonant found in the Sanskrit alphabet. The exception is the series of aspirated consonants, _gh_, _jh_, _dh_, _dh_ and _bh_, which are wanting in Ksh., the corresponding unaspirated consonants being substituted for them. Thus, Skr. _ghotakas_, but Ksh. _gur
The most noticeable authors in Hindi since the middle of the 19th century have been Babu Harishchandra and Raja Siva Prasad, both of Benares. The former, during his short life (1850-1885), was an enthusiastic cultivator of the old poetic art, using the dialects just mentioned. He published in the _Sundari Tilak_ an anthology of the best Hindi poetry, and in the _Kabi-bachan-Sudha_ ("ambrosia of the words of poets") and the magazine called _Harishchandrika_ a quantity of old texts, with much added matter. He also wrote a volume of biographies of famous men, European and Indian, and many critical studies, historical and literary. In history especially he cleared up many problems, and traced the lines for further investigation. In his _Kashmir Kusum_, or history of Kashmir, a list is given of about a hundred works by him. He was also the real founder of the modern Hindi drama; he wrote plays himself, and inspired others. Raja Siva Prasad (1823-1895) served for many years in the educational department, and published a number of works intended for use in schools, which have greatly contributed to the formation of a sound vernacular form of Hindi, not excessively Sanskritized, and not rejecting current Persian forms. The society at Benares called the _Nagari Pracharini Sabha_ ("Society for promoting the use of the Nagari character") has, since the death of Harishchandra, been active in procuring the publication of works in Hindi, and has issued many useful books, besides conducting a systematic search for old MSS. Entry: 4
Sri Lallu Lal was a Brahman, whose family, originally of Gujarat, had long been settled in northern India. What was done by the other Fort William authors for Urdu prose was done by Lallu Lal almost alone for Hindi. He may indeed without exaggeration be said to have created "High Hindi" as a literary language. His _Prem Sagar_ and _Rajniti_, the former a version in pure Hindi of the 10th chapter of the _Bhagavata Purana_, detailing the history of Krishna, and founded on a previous Braj-bhasha version by Chaturbhuj Misr, and the latter an adaptation in Braj-bhasha prose of the _Hitopadesa_ and part of the _Pancha-tantra_, are unquestionably the most important works in Hindi prose. The _Prem Sagar_ was begun in 1804 and ended in 1810; it enjoys immense popularity in northern India, has been frequently reproduced in a lithographed form, and has several times been printed. The _Rajniti_ was composed in 1809; it is much admired for its sententious brevity and the purity of its language. Besides these two works, Lallu Lal was the author of a collection of a hundred anecdotes in Hindi and Urdu entitled _Lataif-i Hindi_, an anthology of Hindi verse called the _Sabha-bilas_, a _Sat-sai_ in the style of Bihari-Lal called _Sapta-satika_ and several other works. He and Jawan worked together at the _Singhasan Battisi_ (1801), a redaction in mixed Urdu and Hindi (Devanagari character) of a famous collection of legends relating the prowess of King Vikramaditya; and he also aided the latter author in the production of the _Sakuntala Natak_. Mazhar 'Ali Wila was his collaborator in the _Baital Pachisi_, a collection of stories similar in many respects to the _Singhasan Battisi_, and also in mixed Urdu-Hindi; and he aided Wila in the preparation in Urdu of the _Story of Madhonal_, a romance originally composed in Braj-bhasha by Moti Ram. Entry: 4
The question, then, is not When did Persian first become intermixed with Hindi in the literary speech?--for this process began with the first entry of Muslim conquerors into India, and continued for centuries before a line of Urdu verse was composed; nor When was the Persian character first employed to write Hindi?--for the written form is but a subordinate matter; as already mentioned, the MSS. of Malik Muhammad's purely Hindi poem, the _Padmawat_, are ordinarily found to be written in the Persian character; and copies lithographed in Devanagari of the popular compositions of the Urdu poet Nazir are commonly procurable in the bazars. We must ask When was the first verse composed in Hindi, whether with or without foreign admixture, according to the forms of Persian prosody, and not in those of the indigenous metrical system? Then, and not till then, did Urdu poetry come into being. This appears to have happened, as already mentioned, about the end of the 16th century. Meantime the vernacular speech had been gradually permeated with Persian words and phrases. The impulse which Akbar's interest in his Hindu subjects had given to the translation of Sanskrit works into Persian had brought the indigenous and the foreign literatures into contact. The current language of the neighbourhood of the capital, the Hindi spoken about Delhi and thence northwards to the Himalaya, was naturally the form of the vernacular which was most subject to foreign influences; and with the extension of Mogul territory by the conquests in the south of Akbar and his successors, this idiom was carried abroad by their armies, and was adopted by the Musalman kingdoms of the Deccan as their court language some time before their overthrow by the campaigns of Aurangzeb. Entry: 3
CHAND BARDAI (fl. c. 1200), Hindu poet, was a native of Lahore, but lived at the court of Prithwi Raja (Prithiraj), the last Hindu sovereign of Delhi. His _Prithiraj Rasau_, a poem of some 100,000 stanzas, chronicling his master's deeds and the contemporary history of his part of India, is valuable not only as historical material but as the earliest monument of the Western Hindi language, and the first of the long series of bardic chronicles for which Rajputana is celebrated. It is written in ballad form, and portions of it are still sung by itinerant bards throughout north-western India and Rajputana. Entry: CHAND
_Hindostani as a Lingua Franca._--It has often been said that Hindostani is a mongrel "pigeon" form of speech made up of contributions from the various languages which met in Delhi bazaar, but this theory has now been proved to be unfounded, owing to the discovery of the fact that it is an actual living dialect of Western Hindi, existing for centuries in its present habitat, and the direct descendant of Sauraseni Prakrit. It is not a typical dialect of that language, for, situated where it is, it represents Western Hindi merging into Panjabi (Braj Bhasha being admittedly the standard of the language), but to say that it is a mongrel tongue thrown together in the market is to reverse the order of events. It was the natural language of the people in the neighbourhood of Delhi, who formed the bulk of those who resorted to the bazaar, and hence it became the bazaar language. From here it became the _lingua franca_ of the Mogul camp and was carried everywhere in India by the lieutenants of the empire. It has several recognized varieties, amongst which we may mention Dakhini, Urdu, Rekhta and Hindi. Dakhini or "southern," is the form current in the south of India, and was the first to be employed for literature. It contains many archaic expressions now extinct in the standard dialect. Urdu, or _Urdu zaban_, "the language of the camp," is the name usually employed for Hindostani by natives, and is now the standard form of speech used by Mussulmans. All the early Hindostani literature was in poetry, and this literary form of speech was named "Rekhta," or "scattered," from the way in which words borrowed from Persian were "scattered" through it. The name is now reserved for the dialect used in poetry, Urdu being the dialect of prose and of conversation. The introduction of these borrowed words, which has been carried to even a greater extent in Urdu, was facilitated by the facts that the latter was by origin a "camp" language, and that Persian was the official language of the Mogul court. In this way Persian (and, with Persian, Arabic) words came into current use, and, though the language remained Indo-Aryan in its grammar and essential characteristics, it soon became unintelligible to any one who had not at least a moderate acquaintance with the vocabulary of Iran. This extreme Persianization of Urdu was due rather to Hindu than to Persian influence. Although Urdu literature was Mussulman in its origin, the Persian element was first introduced in excess by the pliant Hindu officials employed in the Mogul administration, and acquainted with Persian, rather than by Persians and Persianized Moguls, who for many centuries used only their own languages for literary purposes.[2] Prose Urdu literature took its origin in the English occupation of India and the need for text-books for the college of Fort William. It has had a prosperous career since the commencement of the 19th century, but some writers, especially those of Lucknow, have so overloaded it with Persian and Arabic that little of the original Indo-Aryan character remains, except, perhaps, an occasional pronoun or auxiliary verb. The Hindi form of Hindostani was invented simultaneously with Urdu prose by the teachers at Fort William. It was intended to be a Hindostani for the use of Hindus, and was derived from Urdu by ejecting all words of Persian or Arabic birth, and substituting for them words either borrowed from Sanskrit (_tatsamas_) or derived from the old primary Prakrit (_tadbhavas_) (see INDO-ARYAN LANGUAGES). Owing to the popularity of the first book written in it, and to its supplying the need for a _lingua franca_ which could be used by the most patriotic Hindus without offending their religious prejudices, it became widely adopted, and is now the recognized vehicle for writing prose by those inhabitants of northern India who do not employ Urdu. This Hindi, which is an altogether artificial product of the English, is hardly ever used for poetry. For this the indigenous dialects (usually Awadhi or Braj Bhasha) are nearly always employed by Hindus. Urdu, on the other hand, having had a natural growth, has a vigorous poetical literature. Modern Hindi prose is often disfigured by that too free borrowing of Sanskrit words instead of using home-born _tadbhavas_, which has been the ruin of Bengali, and it is rapidly becoming a Hindu counterpart of the Persianized Urdu, neither of which is intelligible except to persons of high education. Entry: HINDOSTANI
1. _Early Hindi._--Our knowledge of the ancient metrical chronicles of Rajputana is still very imperfect, and is chiefly derived from the monumental work of Colonel James Tod, called _The Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan_ (published in 1829-1832), which is founded on them. It is in the nature of compositions of this character to be subjected to perpetual revision and recasting; they are the production of the family bards of the dynasties whose fortunes they record, and from generation to generation they are added to, and their language constantly modified to make it intelligible to the people of the time. Round an original nucleus of historical fact a rich growth of legend accumulates; later redactors endeavour to systematize and to assign dates, but the result is not often such as to inspire confidence; and the mass has more the character of ballad literature than of serious history. The materials used by Tod are nearly all still unprinted; his manuscripts are now deposited in the library of the Royal Asiatic Society in London; and one of the tasks which, on linguistic and historical grounds, should first be undertaken by the investigator of early Hindi literature is the examination and sifting, and the publication in their original form, of these important texts. Entry: 1
Although the Vaishnava sects hitherto noticed, in their adoration of Vishnu and his incarnations, Krishna and Ramachandra, usually associate with these gods their wives, as their _saktis_, or female energies, the sexual element is, as a rule, only just allowed sufficient scope to enhance the emotional character of the rites of worship. In some of the later Vaishnava creeds, on the other hand, this element is far from being kept within the bounds of moderation and decency. The favourite object of adoration with adherents of these sects is Krishna with his mate--but not the devoted friend and counsellor of the Pandavas and deified hero of epic song, nor the ruler of Dvaraka and wedded lord of Rukmini, but the juvenile Krishna, Govinda or Bala Gopala, "the cowherd lad," the foster son of the cowherd Nanda of Gokula, taken up with his amorous sports with the _Gopis_, or wives of the cowherds of Vrindavana (Brindaban, near Mathura on the Yamuna), especially his favourite mistress Radha or Radhika. This episode in the legendary life of Krishna has every appearance of being a later accretion. After barely a few allusions to it in the epics, it bursts forth full-blown in the Harivansa, the Vishnu-purana, the Narada-Pancharatra and the Bhagavata-purana, the tenth canto of which, dealing with the life of Krishna, has become, through vernacular versions, especially the Hindi _Prem-sagar_, or "ocean of love," a favourite romance all over India, and has doubtless helped largely to popularize the cult of Krishna. Strange to say, however, no mention is as yet made by any of these works of Krishna's favourite Radha; it is only in another Purana--though scarcely deserving that designation--that she makes her appearance, viz. in the Brahma-vaivarta, in which Krishna's amours in Nanda's cow-station are dwelt upon in fulsome and wearisome detail; whilst the poet Jayadeva, in the 12th century, made her love for the gay and inconstant boy the theme of his beautiful, if highly voluptuous, lyrical drama, _Gita-govinda_. Entry: HINDUISM