Naseeruddin Hashmi (1895-1964) was a research scholar who specialised in Deccan’s vernacular of Urdu, also known as Dakkani, and the region’s culture and history.
His book Deccan Mein Urdu (Urdu in Deccan) gained great popularity when it was first published in 1922. The book had 180 pages but Hashmi Sahib kept revising it and adding new material, hence, when the sixth edition appeared from Lucknow in 1964, just before the author’s death, it had swelled to over 1,000 pages. The book kept running into reprints and impressions and different publishers printed many editions, both authorised and otherwise.
The book proved to be a precursor for more research on the Urdu language, its origin and development in different parts and provinces of India. After the publication and huge popularity of Deccan mein Urdu, a large number of articles and books began appearing on Urdu’s origin — vis-à-vis its place of birth — and the services rendered by people of different regions for its promotion.
This was because besides a theory about Urdu’s origin, Deccan mein Urdu had another aspect: it enlisted brief sketches of writers and poets who contributed to the promotion of Urdu in Deccan, along with a sample of their works and critical evaluation.
Though the more popular, and somewhat debatable, portion of the book is that premises that Urdu was born in Deccan, it is very brief, while the rest of the book discusses the poets and Urdu literature’s different eras in Deccan.
The researches and books published after Deccan mein Urdu either tried to prove that a specific region or a province was the cradle of Urdu or emphasised the contribution of the inhabitants of those areas for its popularity and promotion.
These works discussed Urdu’s development and related issues, such as Urdu in Punjab, Delhi, Sindh, Bengal, Mysore, Madras, Kashmir, ‘Sarhad’ (then NWFP and now KP), Silhet, and so on.
The book also gave rise to another trend — the role of different communities, ethnicities or faiths in Urdu’s promotion, for example, non-Muslim poets, Urdu and Hindus, Urdu and Christians, Sindhi poets, Punjabi poets, women poets, the role of Pathans in the formation of Urdu and its promotion. This went on for about a year till a student from Khairpur’s Shah Abdul Latif University was awarded a PhD on his work on the topic of Urdu in Balochistan and the services rendered by the Baloch people for Urdu. Khatir Ghaznavi (1925-2010), a poet, teacher and research scholar, penned a dissertation titled Urdu ka maakhaz: Hindko (Urdu’s source: Hindko) (published by the National Language Authority, Islamabad, 2003). Even Hafiz Mahmood Sherani’s historic work on Urdu’s origin and its roots in Punjab — Punjab mein Urdu (1928) — appeared after Deccan mein Urdu.
In the book, Hashmi Sahib said that Urdu was born in Deccan because when Arabs landed on the southern shores of India and settled there, the two cultures and languages intermingled and helped shape Urdu, as Arabic words began to infiltrate local dialects. Though Hashmi Sahib amended his views in late editions and admitted that Urdu was not born in Deccan, in the early version he had opined that Deccan was the region where Urdu was born. But within a decade or so, the surmise presented in the book was rejected by the linguists, especially after the publication of Punjab mein Urdu and Mohiuddin Qadri Zor’s Hindustani lisaniyaat (Hindustani linguistics), it was realised that the question of Urdu’s origin was purely a linguistic one and should be seen as such.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when linguistic studies were given more serious thought by the scholars, the flawed theories about Urdu’s origin —that it was either a ‘camp-language’ (lashkari zaban) or was born as a hybrid of two languages — were dismissed and proven wrong.
But Naseeruddin Hashmi established a tradition that still goes on and his book opened the doors for linguistic discussions in Urdu. His other works include Salaateen-e-Dakan ki Hindustani shaeri (1932), Europe mein Dakani makhtootaat (1932), Madras mein Urdu (1938), Khawateen-i-Dakan ki Urdu khidmaat (1940), Dakani Hindu aur Urdu (1956), Dakani culture (1963) and bibliographies of manuscripts, in addition to a large number of research articles.
Naseeruddin Hashmi died in Hyderabad Deccan on Sept 26, 1964.
