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Seven centuries in which the soldier's Urdu of the Delhi camps became the southern poetry of the Deccan; in which Persian held the court and Telugu held the village; and in which all four — written, sung, whispered — made one civilisation.
Urdu carries the poetry; Dakhni carries the speech; Faarsi carried the chancery; Telugu carried the village. None of the four arrived on the plateau alone, and none of them lived alone here. A Hyderabadi farman of 1750 might be drafted in Persian, copied in Urdu, debated in Dakhni at the durbar and accounted for in Telugu at the village. The four tongues of the Deccan were not rivals; they were the four hands of a single literate civilisation.
Dakhni
The southern register of Urdu that took shape in the Deccan between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries — written by Sufis at Gulbarga before any northern vernacular was written down, given a full literary canon by Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, and still the everyday speech of old Hyderabad.
Read → II · Zubaan-i-UrduUrdu
A seven-century making — from the Khari Boli of the Delhi countryside that met the Persian of the conquerors, through Amir Khusrau's bilingual ghazal, through the southward journey to Bahmani Daulatabad and back to Delhi with Wali Deccani, into the classical century of Mir and Ghalib and the modern voice of Iqbal.
Read → III · Zubaan-i-FaarsiFaarsi (Persian)
Six centuries of high prose in the Deccan — from Mahmud Gawan's correspondence with the courts of Iran to the last Persian firman of the Nizams in 1885. The language in which the Deccan governed itself, kept its records, and signed its treaties.
Read → IV · Zubaan-i-TeluguTelugu
A Dravidian tongue with a documented life of more than two thousand years — the language of the villages around every sultanate's chancery, of two great courts of its own at Warangal and Vijayanagara, and of the largest single linguistic community in the modern Deccan.
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