[Sarai Newsletter] Screening of Urdu Hai Jiska Naam

[The Sarai Programme]

Wednesday, March 30, 2005, 3:30 pm
Sarai-CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi -54

Urdu Hai Jiska Naam, 120 minutes
A film on the history of Urdu
Directed by Subhash Kapoor

Introduced and discussed by Sohail Hashmi, who conceptualised, researched for 
and scripted the film.

The film begins with the shift from Sanskrit to popular Apabhransha languages 
including Shaurseni that had by the 10th Century AD spread from the West 
Coast of the sub-continent to the East and gave birth to Gujarati, Sindhi, 
Punjabi, Braj, Avadhi, Maghdi, Maithli, Bangla and Khari Boli, among others.

The arrival of the Sufis, Central Asian armies and large number of traders 
brought in new technologies, new crafts,new languages and scripts from the 
11th century and all these began to combine with their South Asian 
counterparts to create new vocabularies of Music, Attire, Architecture and 
creative expression. All this took place at the shrines of the Sufis, in army 
camps, in the bazars and the sarais. The film goes on to trace these many 
strains through the centuries and across Delhi, Gulbarga, Gujarat, Avadh and 
Bengal.

By the time John Borthwick Gilchrist set up the Fort Williams College in the 
1820s at Calcutta, Urdu had grown to become a language that was "spoken and 
understood from Gujarat to the Bengal" and it was on Gilchrist's 
recommendation that the East India Company gave up their dependence on 
Persian and replaced with Urdu.

The rest is more familiar but by no means less exciting history of a language 
gone out of favour in recent decades.

-- 
Ranita Chatterjee
The Sarai Programme
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
Tel:  (+91) 11 23960040
       (+91) 11 23942199, ext 307
Fax: (+91) 11 23943450
www.sarai.net