Progress Of Indic Languages Vs English - 2

[Bharatvarsh]

I was going through "Siva Chhatrapati" by Surendranath Sen, at the end he discusses Persian influence on Marathi.

According to him, at Shivajis birth (1627 or 1629) the language used in Marathi letters was highly persianised, in one of his letters Shivaji himself was supposed to have used at least 31 Farsi words, but all this began to change under his reign and there was a concious effort to replace Persian words with Sanskrit alternatives. To this effect he quotes Mr. Rajwade who collected stats regarding this showing:



Date of letters  Persian word  Marathi  Total  Percentage of Marathi words
1628                202               34         236               14.4

1677                51                 84         135               62.2

1728                8                   119       127               96.3



So when commies and assorted idiots claim that the Shudh Hindi movement or Sanskritisation of other languages is a modern "communal" phenomenon they are lying through their teeth.

Shivaji specifically had a dictionary prepared to replace Persian terms with Sanskrit in his administration called Rajavyavaharkosha.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The Dakhani language then became an aspect of a dominant urban elite, and was perceived as such. Thus the famous Marathi  bhakta poet, Tukaram, in depicting the modern age of decay (kaliyuga), points to the use of avindhavani – “the speech of those who have unpierced ears,” i.e., Muslims – by even Brahmans as one of its features.25 In the 1650s, Jayarama Pindye claimed to compose freely in twelve languages including daksinatya yavani.26 Yavana was by then a common term for Muslim, and Jayarama clearly recognized that the southern or daksinatya yavanas had a language distinct from Persian, which he simply termed yavani.
The Dakhani language thus became expressive of a regional religious identity. The sixteenth-century bhakta poet Eknath’s “Hindu-Turk samvad” illustrates among other things the power-relation involved. The “Turk” is actually a Muslim who gets into a wrangle with a Brah-man. The Muslim speaks something close to Dakhani with many Arabic loan-words, while the Brahman does not choose to display his knowledge of Sanskrit al-though he quotes a Sanskrit sloka). He uses a Marathi very close to Eknath’s own but shares significant vo-cabulary with his antagonist. For example, after the “Turk” has used the Bali-Vamana legend to attack Hindu belief, the Brahman replies, “Bali khudaca khasa banda” (Bali was a favored slave of the Lord). The case-marker is Marathi but three out of four words are Per-sian. He then goes on to assimilate the story of Adam and Eve with that of Rama and Sita, Ravana being iden-tified with Satan.27

So Dakhani, like Urdu in north India, was a language of the urban centers and the elite. It was perhaps an er-rant aspiration to urbanity that led Tukaram’s sinful kali-yugina Brahman to pop a pan-vida into his mouth and then use avindha speech.28

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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Languages were marked by a tension between hybridiza-tion and identity. The resulting mixed idiom, with an interesting infusion of Sanskrit tatsamas (loan words) is found, for example, in Sivaji's letter to Dadaji Naras Prabhu, deshpande of the Rohida valley, where the major appeal is to a territorial rootedness in the valley as well as putative wider subcontinental identity (again, Perso-Arabic is highlighted):
shahasi bemangiri tumhi va amhi karit nahi Srirohides-vara tumce khoriyatil adi kuladeva tumca dongarmatha patharavar sendrilagat svayambhu ahe tyani amhas yas dilhe va pudhe sarva manoratha Hindvi svarajya karun puravinar ahe tyas bavas haval hou naye khamakha sangava.33
[You and I are not being disloyal to the Shah. Sriro-hidesvara, the original presiding deity of your valley, exists in self-created form next to the sendri tree on the plateau at the crest of your mountain: he has given me success and will in future fulfill the desire of creating a Hindavi kingdom. So say to the Bava (ad-dressee's father): “Do not be unnecessarily down-cast.”]
But while such local knowledge and identity could be valuable to the head of a small principality, a subconti-nental imperial system could benefit from a high lan-guage that favored no specific ethnicity – the role played by Persian in the Mughal Empire. In later years, Sivaji and his son and successor Sambhaji seem to have con-sidered the possibility of Sanskrit playing such a role. Thus the Rajavyavaharakosa – a thesaurus of official us-age – was prepared shortly after Sivaji's coronation as Chatrapati. This has sometimes been presented as an effort at the triumphant return of Sanskrit with the end of Muslim rule. S. B. Varnekar, for example, claims that the author was commissioned to write this text in order to save the language of the gods (devabhasa).34 The text itself is much more modest: “Having completely up-rooted the barbarians (mleccha), by the best of kings a learned man was appointed ... to replace the overvalued Yavana words (atyartham yavanavacanair) with educated speech (vibudhabhasam).”35 There is, for a period, a sig-nificant change in register in official documents, with a new prominence given to Sanskritic terminology, even though Marathi remained the official language. I shall return to this theme later in this essay.

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