Haryanvi Language, Dialects and Literature: Exam Notes

Haryana is a small state with a surprising number of speech forms, because it sits where four language regions meet: the Hindi of the Delhi plain in the east, Punjabi in the north, Rajasthani in the south-west and Braj in the south-east. The speech of the central districts, which people call Haryanvi, is the one the state is named for in everyday use, but it is not a separate scheduled language. It is classed as a dialect of Western Hindi, is written in Devanagari and is returned under Hindi in the census. For an examination the chapter divides neatly into three parts: where Haryanvi stands in the family of languages, which dialect is spoken in which districts, and who the writers are.

Where Haryanvi stands

Haryanvi belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family and, within it, to the Central or Western Hindi group that descends from Shauraseni Apabhramsha. In the Linguistic Survey of India, George Abraham Grierson recorded the speech of this region under the name Bangaru, which is still the standard scholarly name for it, and it is also called Bangru, Jatu, Deswali and simply Hariyanvi. The official language of the state is Hindi, settled by the Haryana Official Language Act of 1969, and Punjabi was made the second official language of the state in 2010. Haryanvi itself has no separate official status and is not in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, a point an examiner likes to test as a statement to be judged true or false.

The dialects and their districts

The belt along the Yamuna, through Panipat and Karnal, is the old khadar or lowland country, and the speech there leans towards Kauravi, the Khari Boli of the upper Doab, which is the base of standard Hindi. A question that asks which dialect is spoken in a named district is therefore answered by placing the district on the map first and the dialect afterwards.

How Haryanvi sounds

The marks of Haryanvi are easy to list. The verb to be appears as sai where Hindi has hai, so that a sentence ends in a sound no Hindi speaker of Delhi would use. The pronouns are mhara and tera where standard Hindi has hamara and tumhara. The question word is ke rather than kya. Long vowels are shortened and consonants doubled, which is what gives the speech its clipped, emphatic rhythm, and the vocabulary is thick with words for cattle, fields, wells, kinship and weather, because that is the life it grew in. None of this is written down in a grammar that students must learn, but a paper may ask which of four given words or endings belongs to Haryanvi.

The literature: saints, Saang poets and modern writers

Haryana has no court literature of its own, and its written tradition begins with devotional poetry. By one tradition the poet Surdas was born at Sihi, a village in Faridabad district, and the state claims him on that ground. Sant Garib Das of Chhudani in Jhajjar district founded the Garibdasi sect in the eighteenth century and left a large body of verse collected as the Sat Granth. Swami Nischaldas of Kosli in Rewari district wrote Vichar Sagar, a work on Vedanta in Hindi prose that was widely read and praised in the nineteenth century. The second and larger stream is the Saang, the folk theatre of the state, which Pandit Deepchand gave its settled form and which Pandit Lakhmi Chand carried to its height; he is called the Surya Kavi and the Shakespeare of Haryana, and the state folk art award bears his name. Baje Bhagat, Pandit Mange Ram and Dhanpat Singh belong to the same line, and the sung verse form they used, the ragini, is the best known Haryanvi literary form. In modern Hindi, Chaudhary Bal Mukand Gupta of Gudiyani in Rewari district was a leading essayist and journalist of the early twentieth century, remembered for Shiv Shambhu ke Chitthe, and Vishnu Prabhakar, long settled at Hisar, wrote Awara Masiha, the biography of Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay. The state supports writing through its academies at Panchkula, the Sahitya Akademi for Hindi and Haryanvi, the Granth Akademi for books, and separate academies for Urdu and Sanskrit, which publish work and give annual awards.