STRANGE as it may sound, the earliest books on Urdu grammar were written by Europeans and the ones written by natives, some 100 years later, were not in Urdu but in Persian. It may not sound strange as much when compared to the English language: many of the earliest English grammars were written in Latin.
Natives do not need grammar to learn their own language, as they instinctively know it. It is the non-native speakers, such as foreigners or the fellow countrymen speaking other local languages, who need a grammar to master a language other than their own.
When Europeans first arrived in the subcontinent, they realised that they must learn the language that was spoken in the breadth and width of the subcontinent. And it was none other than the Urdu language, though they called it ‘Hindustani’ and it included both Urdu and Hindi. In fact, Urdu was given different names in different eras and it was called alternatively Hindustani, Indostan, Hindi and Hindavi. The name Urdu was not used specifically for the language before the end of the 18th century when Mus’hafi and some other poets referred to it as ‘Urdu’, though the language had become the lingua franca of the subcontinent from early to mid-16th century.
The earliest Urdu grammar was written in the Dutch language by Joan Joshua Ketelaar (also spelt Kettler) (1659-1718), a European born in German-speaking Poland. Ketelaar joined the Dutch East India Company and arrived in Surat, a port in Gujarat, in 1683. He had probably penned the grammar during his stay in Agra between 1696 and 1697. A friend of his copied it down in Lucknow in 1698 for his personal use. The manuscript, discovered in 1936 and now preserved at the Hague National Archive, is probably the same one copied down by the friend (for further information: http://bc.library.uu.nl/earliest-hindustani-grammar.html). Some scholars have mentioned Ketelaar’s grammar as Hindi grammar. But senior and reliable scholars such as Gopi Chand Narang have disagreed and have emphatically written that this so-called ‘Hindustani’ grammar is in fact ‘Urdu’ grammar. David Mills (1692-1756), a Dutch orientalist, partially translated Ketelaar’s Urdu grammar into Latin and published it from Leiden in 1743.
One of the earliest Urdu grammars was written by Benjamin Schulze (1689-1760), a missionary and orientalist. A German by origin, Schulze was sent to South India by the king of Denmark. He lived in India between 1726 and 1743 and established the first Christian mission in Madras (now Chennai). He wrote Grammatica Hundustanica in Latin in 1741, published from Germany in 1745. It was translated into English with some additions in 1761. Abul Lais Siddiqi had translated it into Urdu and it was published by Majlis-i-Taraqqi-i-Adab, Lahore, in 1977.
George Hadley (died 1798), a British army officer, had come to the subcontinent in 1763. He decided to learn Urdu, which the British often referred to, among other names, as Moors. But Hadley could not find any Urdu dictionary or book on Urdu grammar so he decided to take down notes on grammar of Urdu himself. His manuscript reached a London publisher through one of his friends and it was published from London in 1771. A year later, its revised edition appeared from London under the title Grammatical Remarks on the Practical and Vulgar Dialect of the Indostan Language, commonly called Moors, with a vocabulary English and Moors. It became very popular and was published several times.
Another important Urdu grammar was penned by John Borthwick Gilchrist (1759-1841), a surgeon who joined the East India Company and came to the subcontinent in 1782. In 1800, Gilchrist was made the head of Hindustani department at Fort William College, Calcutta (now Kolkata). He had written A grammar of the Hindustanee language, published from Calcutta in 1796.
Yet another important early Urdu grammar is: A grammar of the Hindustani language, by John Shakespeare, published from London, in 1813. By that time natives had realised the importance of grammar and had begun writing Urdu grammar. First Urdu grammar written by a native is Darya-i-latafat, but it was written in Persian. Penned by Insha Allah Khan Insha and Mirza Mohammad Hasan Qateel in 1807, it was published from Murshidabad in 1850. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan wrote Qavaid-i-sarf-o-nahv-i-zaban-i-Urdu in 1840. It is the first-ever Urdu grammar written in Urdu by a native. At that time, Sir Syed was a 23- year-old young man and it was his first book.
In the latter half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, a large number of books on Urdu grammar were written but it was the Europeans who began writing books on Urdu grammar and showed the way.
Published in Dawn, August 22nd, 2017
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