Given its Urdu/Hindi underpinnings, to trace the origin of this tongue, one would have to trace the coming of Hindawi (Hindi’s earlier name of sorts)/Urdu to peninsular India. It is the first language of many (not all) Muslims in the region and co-exists with standard Hindi/Urdu as well as the region’s other vernaculars.

In Telangana and Andhra, it borrows Telugu words in Karnataka, Kannada words in Maharashtra from Marathi, and so on. While Urdu/Hindi forms the base of this language, in terms of its vocabulary, it draws from its northern progenitors and also from the languages of the peninsula. To put it simply, Dakhani is the language of the Deccan, a version of Urdu/Hindi spoken across a swathe of peninsular India-Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and in small pockets in Kerala. They were, in a sense, following in the footsteps of Josh Malihabadi, the Urdu poet who lived in Hyderabad for a while and dismissed its tongue as nothing more than a humorous diversion which brooked no comparison with the Urdu spoken in and around Josh’s native Awadh. The Progressive Writers’ Movement in the 1940s had also refused to consider Dakhani Urdu as a language worthy of attention and had neglected to pay attention to writings emerging from this milieu. As Syed Akbar Hyder says in his paper “Urdu’s Progressive Wit: Sulaiman Khatib, Sarvar ‘Danda’ and the Subaltern Satirists Who Spoke Up', something similar had happened a couple of decades previously as well. It wasn’t the first time that northern Urdu purists were behaving in this fashion.

Urdu poem in hindi language