Rajasthani Language, Dialects and Literature: Exam Notes

Rajasthan state examinations devote a full set of questions to the language of the state, its dialects and its literature, and the questions are nearly always of the matching kind: dialect with district, book with author, style with class of poets. This chapter arranges those pairs. Rajasthani grew out of the Gurjar form of Apabhramsha and was known by older names such as Maru Bhasha and Maru Gurjar; the name Rajasthani itself was given currency by George Abraham Grierson in his Linguistic Survey of India in 1912. It is written in the Devanagari script, while the old mercantile shorthand of the traders was the Mahajani or Muria script.

The dialects and where they are spoken

Learn the dialects with their districts, because that is how they are asked.

Dingal and Pingal

Two literary styles divide old Rajasthani poetry. Dingal is the style built on Marwari, used by the Charan poets of western Rajasthan for heroic verse about war, honour and death in battle, and it is sung in a loud, rolling metre. Pingal is the style mixed with Brajbhasha, used by the Bhat poets of eastern Rajasthan, and it is softer and more courtly. The word Khyat is used for the chronicles of a ruling house, Vat and Vigat for narrative and record, and Veli for a long poem; Rasau or Raso is the name given to the martial epics.

The classics of Rajasthani literature

The oldest known work from the region is the Kuvalayamala, written in Prakrit by the Jain scholar Udyotan Suri at Jalore in 778. Among the Rasau works, the Prithviraj Raso of Chand Bardai tells the story of Prithviraj Chauhan and is the best known, though historians treat its facts with caution; the Beesaldev Raso of Narpati Nalha is another. Padmanabh wrote the Kanhadade Prabandh in 1455 on Kanhadadeva of Jalore and his resistance to Alauddin Khalji. Prithviraj Rathore, a prince of Bikaner known as Peethal, wrote the Veli Krisan Rukmani Ri, counted among the finest Dingal poems. Suryamal Mishran of the Bundi court wrote the Vansh Bhaskar and the Veer Satsai, works that stirred martial feeling in the nineteenth century.

For history the Khyats matter most. Muhnot Nainsi, the minister of Maharaja Jaswant Singh of Marwar, compiled the Nainsi Ri Khyat and the Marwar Ra Pargana Ri Vigat, a district by district record so detailed that he is called the Abul Fazl of Rajasthan and the first historian of Rajasthani. Dayaldas Ri Khyat records the house of Bikaner and Mundiyar Ri Khyat the Rathores.

Saints, poets and modern writers

The devotional tradition is large. Meera Bai's padas, sung all over India, belong to this soil; Dadu Dayal founded the Dadu Panth and his sayings were collected by his followers; Sant Pipa of Gagron, Jambhoji of the Bishnoi sect, Jasnath, Ramcharan and Sunderdas all left verse in the language of the people. In modern times Kanhaiyalal Sethia wrote Dharti Dhoran Ri and the famous poem on Rana Pratap and Prithviraj Rathore known as Pathal aur Pithal; Vijaydan Detha, whose Bataan Ri Phulwari gathered Rajasthani folk tales into volumes, gave Hindi cinema some of its best known stories; and Komal Kothari spent a lifetime recording the folk music and oral literature of the desert. The state supports the language through the Rajasthani Bhasha Sahitya evam Sanskriti Akademi at Bikaner, the Rajasthan Sahitya Akademi at Udaipur, and separate akademis for Sanskrit, Brajbhasha, Sindhi and Urdu at Jaipur. Rajasthani is not one of the languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, and the demand for its inclusion has been pressed for decades.

How to revise this topic

• Fix two districts to every dialect; the examiner usually names one district and asks for the dialect.
• Keep Dingal with the Charans and Marwari, and Pingal with the Bhats and Brajbhasha.
• Learn author and book as a pair, and add the century where you can: Padmanabh 1455, Muhnot Nainsi seventeenth century, Suryamal Mishran nineteenth century.