Tradition · literary language tradition
Dakhnī
Also known as Dakhnī — the Deccan’s own literary language
The language that grew in the Deccan out of Delhi's Hindavi mixed with Marathi, Telugu and Kannada, and became a court and Sufi literary medium two centuries before Urdu was written in the north — with a masnavi tradition, a divan literature, and sultans who wrote in it themselves.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 17.330, 76.830
Worth knowing
Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah's divan is the first collected volume of poetry in any form of Urdu, and Gesudaraz at Gulbarga was writing Dakhni prose in the early fifteenth century. Northern Urdu's later prestige buried the whole tradition so completely that the Deccan is now usually described as a province of Urdu literature rather than its origin.
Connections (3)
- Teaching lineageAmīr Khusrau
Dakhni descends from the Hindavi that Amir Khusrau was writing in at Delhi in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, carried south by the Chishti migration to Gulbarga and by Muhammad bin Tughlaq's forced removal of Delhi's population to Daulatabad in 1327. It then developed for two hundred years on its own, absorbing Marathi and Telugu, and was a written literary language with a divan tradition before northern Urdu was written at all.
- Craft tradition ofGulbarga / Kalaburagi
Gesudaraz came from Delhi to Gulbarga in 1398 and wrote in Dakhni prose — the Miraj al-Ashiqin is attributed to him — which makes the Chishti shrine the point at which the language enters writing. The pattern holds throughout: the Deccan's vernacular was carried first by Sufis addressing a local audience and only later by courts, which is why the earliest Dakhni texts are devotional and the earliest Dakhni poets are shaikhs.
- AnaloguePashto literature
Two vernaculars that became literatures under courts that did not speak them first. Dakhnī grew in the Deccan sultanates as a northern Indian speech transplanted south and fed with Persian, and produced a poetry that Delhi later condescended to. Pashto was made into a written literature in the seventeenth century in the space between the Mughals and the Safavids, by a tribal chief and a Sufi. Both were vehicles for people asserting that they were not provincial versions of Persian culture, and both are read now mainly by their own speakers.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Deccani language”. Ferishta, Tarikh-i Ferishta; Richard Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan (2005); George Michell and Mark Zebrowski, Architecture and Art of the Deccan Sultanates (1999).
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