Language and Literature of Uttar Pradesh: Dialects, Writers

Uttar Pradesh is the heartland of Hindi, and most of what a student learns as the history of Hindi literature was written inside its borders. The state is the home of Khari Boli, from which standard Hindi grew, of Braj Bhasha and Awadhi, in which the greatest devotional poetry of north India was composed, and of Bhojpuri, spoken by crores of people in the eastern districts. For an examination the chapter divides into three parts: the official language position, the dialect map district by district, and the writers, from Kabir and Tulsidas to the Jnanpith winners of our own time.

Official language position

Hindi in the Devanagari script is the official language of Uttar Pradesh under the Uttar Pradesh Official Language Act, 1951. Urdu was given the status of the second official language of the state by an amendment in 1989, and the state runs a separate Urdu Academy for it. At the national level Article 343 of the Constitution makes Hindi in Devanagari the official language of the Union, a decision taken by the Constituent Assembly on 14 September 1949, which is why 14 September is observed as Hindi Diwas. Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, Bhojpuri and Awadhi questions are therefore all fair game: remember that Hindi and Urdu are in the Eighth Schedule, while Awadhi, Braj and Bhojpuri are returned under Hindi in the census and are classed as dialects, not scheduled languages.

The dialect map of Uttar Pradesh

All the speech forms of the state belong to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family. The western dialects descend from Shauraseni Apabhramsha and form the Western Hindi group; Awadhi and Bagheli descend from Ardhamagadhi Apabhramsha and form the Eastern Hindi group; Bhojpuri descends from Magadhi Apabhramsha and is classed with the Bihari group. George Abraham Grierson recorded all of them in the Linguistic Survey of India.

Standard Hindi is a refined form of Khari Boli; Braj and Awadhi, though they lost the role of literary languages to Khari Boli in the nineteenth century, carry the bulk of the bhakti poetry a paper will ask about.

Bhakti and Riti poets of the region

Kabir lived at Kashi, now Varanasi, and died at Maghar in the district named Sant Kabir Nagar after him. He is the chief poet of the nirgun branch of bhakti; his verses are collected as the Bijak in three parts, Sakhi, Sabad and Ramaini, and his mixed speech is called Sadhukkadi. Sant Ravidas, also of Varanasi, belongs to the same nirgun stream and his verses are included in the Guru Granth Sahib. In the sagun branch, Surdas wrote the Sursagar, Sur Saravali and Sahitya Lahari in Braj Bhasha and was the leading poet of the Ashtachhap of Vallabhacharya's Pushtimarg. Tulsidas composed the Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi, beginning it at Ayodhya in 1574, and also wrote the Vinay Patrika, Kavitavali, Gitavali and Hanuman Chalisa; he spent his last years at Varanasi. Malik Muhammad Jayasi of Jais in Amethi wrote the Padmavat in 1540, the finest Sufi premakhyan in Awadhi. Raskhan, born at Pihani in Hardoi, wrote Krishna bhakti verse in Braj and his samadhi stands at Mahavan near Gokul. In the Riti period Bhushan of Tikwapur in Kanpur district praised Shivaji and Chhatrasal in the Shivraj Bhushan and Shivabavani, while his brothers Chintamani and Matiram wrote on poetics, and Ghananand carried the riti-mukt love lyric.

Modern Hindi, from Bharatendu to the Jnanpith

Bharatendu Harishchandra of Varanasi, who lived from 1850 to 1885, is called the father of modern Hindi literature and of Hindi theatre; he edited Kavi Vachan Sudha and the Harishchandra Magazine and wrote the plays Andher Nagari and Bharat Durdasha. Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi of Daulatpur in Raebareli edited the journal Saraswati and established Khari Boli as the medium of poetry, so that the age is called the Dwivedi Yug. Acharya Ramchandra Shukla of Basti district wrote the Hindi Sahitya ka Itihas, the standard periodisation of Hindi literature. Munshi Premchand, born Dhanpat Rai at Lamhi near Varanasi, is the novel emperor of Hindi, author of Godan, Nirmala, Gaban, Rangbhoomi, Sevasadan and the story Kafan; his Urdu collection Soz-e-Watan was banned by the colonial government. Jaishankar Prasad of Varanasi wrote Kamayani and the plays Chandragupta and Skandagupta; with Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, whose family came from Garhakola in Unnao, and Mahadevi Verma, born at Farrukhabad in 1907, he forms the Chhayavad school. Later writers of the state carried off the Jnanpith: Firaq Gorakhpuri in 1969 for the Urdu collection Gul-e-Naghma, Agyeya in 1978, Mahadevi Verma in 1982 for Yama, Kunwar Narayan in 2005, Amarkant and Shrilal Shukla together in 2009, and Kedarnath Singh in 2013.

Urdu, Sanskrit and the state academies

Lucknow is one of the two great schools of Urdu poetry along with Delhi, and Agra gave Urdu Mir Taqi Mir and Nazeer Akbarabadi, while Mirza Ghalib was born there in 1797. Josh Malihabadi, Kaifi Azmi of Azamgarh, Majrooh Sultanpuri and Ismat Chughtai of Badaun all belong to the state. For Sanskrit, the Sampurnanand Sanskrit Vishwavidyalaya at Varanasi grew out of a Sanskrit college founded in 1791. The Nagari Pracharini Sabha was founded at Varanasi in 1893 to promote Devanagari, the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan at Prayagraj in 1910, and the state set up the Bharatendu Natya Akademi at Lucknow in 1975 and the Uttar Pradesh Hindi Sansthan in 1976, whose highest honour is the Bharat Bharati Samman.