What will it take for the Dakhni language to step out of the shadow of Urdu?

Mistaken for a dialect of Urdu, Dakhni, an ancient language born in Deccan India, is now struggling to reestablish its identity over lack of state patronage and awareness

In 2014, director Habib Faisal’s Daawat-e-Ishq starring Parineeti Chopra, Aditya Roy Kapur and Anupam Kher introduced a largely Hindi-speaking audience to a tongue that sounded familiar, and yet, oddly different. “Booji! Koi toh bhi joothey bilu-film waale se kaisa shaadi kar liyu? Abhi ek intelligent husband maang reyo na, ab itta bi nai?” Chopra’s character—a young, lower-middle class woman from Hyderabad—asks her disgruntled father (Kher), when he expresses his displeasure at his daughter rejecting a marriage proposal from an eligible bachelor, whose only sins were that of being a seasoned liar, porn addict, and a dowry-seeker. The fate of the film aside, what Daawat-e-Ishq momentarily reintroduced to a Bollywood-obsessed nation that is acquainted with only a few known north Indian dialects of Hindi, is Dakhni—the language of the Deccan or ‘Dakshin,’ the literal south of India—one that has been hiding in plain sight for centuries.

Dakhni was born in the 1300s, when Muslim populations began moving to the Deccan from north India, following the Delhi Sultanate’s expansion across the country. Muhammad bin Tughluq, the Sultan of Delhi, had shifted his capital to Daulatabad in modern day Maharashtra in 1327 CE. However, even before this move, communities of Muslim speakers of north Indian dialects like Khadi Boli and Punjabi had already settled in these provinces. As a result, in the following centuries, the Dakhni vocabulary went on to adopt words from Marathi and Telugu, which were spoken locally across these regions. 

“It should be emphasised that while Dakhni was probably first used by Muslim speakers, it was very likely spoken by Hindus in the region as well. Today, the language is mostly associated with place (that is, the Deccan region) rather than religion,” says Zoë W. High, PhD candidate at the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilisations at the University of Chicago, whose research concerns the relationship between Dakhni and Persian languages; literary and consumption cultures; and intercultural and interreligious interactions in the Bijapur Sultanate during the reign of Ibrahim Adil Shah II (1585-1627 CE).

While Dakhni typically uses the Perso-Arabic script, it also contains heavy influences of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian. “As the language was not standardised, authors used it in different ways depending on the genre in which they were writing. It was also adopted by individuals from a variety of communities, including local Muslims in the Deccan, writers from northern India who came to the Deccan to seek patronage from the Deccani Sultans, people of east African descent from the habshi [or Siddi community in Karnataka], and bilingual poets proficient in literary Persian as well as Dakhni,” High says.

Hiding in plain sight

The rather curious feature of present-day Dakhni, however, is that it suffers from a severe case of being mislabelled as other languages, namely Hyderabadi Hindi, Hyderabadi Urdu, Bangalore Hindi, or Bangalore Urdu. This goes to show that it is essentially conflated with Urdu and Hindi when in reality, it is a language unto itself. “We aren’t trying to say that historically, Urdu speakers had an agenda against Dakhni to erase it, but the way it has evolved has led Dakhni to be hidden in plain sight where people speak it, but don’t even know they do so. Purists will often be found telling Dakhni speakers that they are using a bastardised or corrupt Urdu. Dakhni is now thought of as a dialect of Urdu, which is inaccurate. My point is, why is there a problem with just accepting that Dakhni is a language in its own right by Urdu speakers?” asks Yunus Lasania, a Hyderabad-based journalist who records the history and culture of his hometown, besides conducting heritage walks across the city. He is currently writing a book for HarperCollins India that deals with the city of Hyderabad.

Both Dakhni and Urdu emerged from the same “unformed language of Dehlavi,” a predecessor of modern Hindustani, and a contact dialect spoken around Delhi. So, consequently, Dakhni should also have been able to claim the same linguistic status as Urdu. “The first known work of poetry in Dakhni was Kadam Rao Padam Rao by Fakhruddin Nizami of Bidar written around 1420-30 CE. But during these decades, till at least the next 250 years, Urdu in Delhi did not have its own vocabulary with literature written in it, and that only came into being in the early 1700s. However, Dakhni literature already existed by then,” Lasania points out. Most Urdu users struggle to read Dakhni, unless they have some knowledge of Persian, or at least have a rudimentary acquaintance with the language, which makes Lasania wonder why Urdu speakers insist on Dakhni being reduced to a “weird, broken language”.

The institutional invisibility of Dakhni

Consider video of Danish Sait’s, for example, where the comic and actor is seen performing an improv in Dakhni at a comedy club in Bengaluru, his hometown. The video, however, has been titled “Bangalore Urdu Improv Comedy Scene”. This points to a larger handicap the language faces institutionally—that of not qualifying for the census, which records the demographic of a population belonging to a certain community in the country, which in this case is linguistic, and has become inaccessible simply because a majority of its speakers do not know its historically accurate name. As a result, there are no definitive numbers to estimate the size of the Dakhni-speaking population in the country today.

When 25-year-old Mohammad Affan Pasha from Bengaluru released his first rap Eid ka Chand on Youtube in August 2020, he was surprised to learn that his mother tongue was not actually called Bangalore Urdu but had a distinct name and identity. “I remember when I was first taken to a school for admission as a kid, the form asked for my mother tongue. My entire family—my uncles, aunts—had accompanied my parents to the school, and none of them knew what my mother tongue was called, so after a long discussion, we just went with Urdu,” he laughs. Things, however, have changed ever since. Over the past three years, Pasha has gone on to release more such rap videos in Dakhni, a language he did not initially write poetry in, but did so in Hindi and English.

“Not very long ago, if I was speaking in Dakhni with a fellow Dakhni speaker, we would immediately switch to a ‘normal Hindi’ if we saw someone who does not understand Dakhni approaching us, in the fear of being ridiculed, or being told that our language is weird,” says Pasha. A big reason why he now openly embraces the legacy of his language and spreads awareness about it is to destigmatise it of the shame attached to it. “I don’t want generations after me to feel conscious about using their mother tongue,” he says, which Lasania echoes by adding that the seeming linguistic inferiority imposed on Dakhni is rather unnecessary. “This whole chatter about some languages sounding better than others—what does that even mean? For instance, are you implying that Urdu sounds better than Tamil or Dakhni, and those languages sound ugly? That’s quite silly,” he says.

This, however, proves to be a double-edged sword for the language and its speakers. The fact that Dakhni continues to largely fly under the radar without formal recognition even today means it is salvaged from persecution by the current dispensation at the Centre, a fate Urdu—whose speakers are mostly Muslim—has met with. But that also means that the language does not receive state patronage or institutional support. “There are universities and academic institutions across India, and not just in the Deccan or Karnataka, where Urdu is taught that have Dakhni as a subject. In Hyderabad’s Maulana Azad National Urdu University, and Bengaluru’s Karnataka Urdu Academy, there are departments that carry out research on Dakhni, but there are no separate or formal departments from where you can earn a graduate degree in the language,” says Zabiulla, Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of Urdu, Government First Grade College Chitaguppa, in Karnataka’s Bidar district. In 2018, he compiled and edited the book Daknī Kahāvatẽ—a collection of over 600 idioms and phrases used colloquially in the language, referring to local dishes, festivals, and Deccan life, among other themes.

Works of poetry in Dakhni—like Sameena Begum’s HyderabadiDholak ke Geet (2019)—have been published sporadically over the past few years. But modern works of serious prose writing are little to non-existent, with only the classics and works from the 14th to the 18th century still being taught and referred to as Dakhni literature. “This is because the number of people taking interest in the language have become lesser over the decades, even though there is some renewed interest now. However, that’s not enough. More work needs to be done on Dakhni, and not just in the Deccan, but across the country and abroad,” Zabiulla says.

The past and the present

The formation of the Bahmani Sultanate in 1347 CE, with Daulatabad as the capital, resulted in the rise of Persian as the court language in its Delhi and Deccan centres. However, through its 150 year-long reign, a Deccani influence in its religious preachings outside the court was observed. Sufi saints, like Shah Miranji, became instrumental in the proliferation of this language among the masses, as it was more accessible than Persian. However, in the early 1500s, the Bahmani Sultanate split into the Deccan Sultanates with Dakhni centres in Bijapur, under Ibrahim Adil Shah II, and Golconda, under Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah. The rulers themselves were personally invested in the language’s growth, and commissioned poets, writers and artistes to pen several books in it.

Nearly a century before Akbar’s rule, a Dakhni lexicon was formalised, and it continues to be referred to by the language’s enthusiasts to this day. However, it has barely been updated since. “Every language, and not just Dakhni, faces the threat of dying if the people speaking and writing it dwindles in number,” says Zabiulla.

Karthik Malli, a Bengaluru-based researcher and writer working on Indian languages and their history, does not entirely agree with this thought. “Languages do not die out just because they are not taught,” he says. Nevertheless, he does think that the “dilution of the language” in cities like Hyderabad and Aurangabad due to the heavy influence of north-Indian Urdu, is a matter of concern. Moreover, barring some academic writing on Dakhni in Urdu—which in itself limits its reach among the masses—not much else has been done formally to spread awareness on it. Although, Malli noticed that during the lockdown, “several Instagram creators started using Dakhni in their reels, and not even intentionally.” These videos would entail some people speaking in Dakhni and telling others that it is their mother tongue, while the rest would chime in saying that’s the language they converse in too, at home, but they never knew it was called Dakhni.

“I recently saw a video by Deccan Herald where they spoke about the Muslim cuisine of Bengaluru, and called it ‘Dakhni cuisine,’ which is really interesting because this self-identification of Dakhni as a community is extremely recent, at least in the mainstream,” he says, underlining the fact that while there is a long way to go for Dakhni, it continues to resiliently breathe under the domineering palimpsest of Urdu, waiting patiently for its moment to shine.

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