A section from the journey

A New Tongue

Languages, like music, are made when worlds meet. In this age the Persian of the court mixed with the everyday speech of northern India, and a new shared tongue began to grow. In time it would branch into what we call Hindi and Urdu. Meanwhile the warm regional speech of the people, languages like Brajbhasha and Awadhi, carried the songs of the bhakti saints into every village heart.

Listen to the way people talk in a busy market. Words from everywhere mix together: a word for a spice, a word for cloth, a word for a price, borrowed from whoever brought the goods. A marketplace is where a new language is often quietly born.

That is much how it happened in this age. At the court and in the army camps, people spoke Persian, the grand language of administration and poetry. In the towns and bazaars of the north, around Delhi, people spoke their own everyday tongue. Day after day, in the ordinary business of living together, the two began to blend.

From that blending a new shared speech slowly grew. People sometimes called it , the tongue of Hind, of this land. It kept the bones of the local language and took in many words from Persian and, through it, from Arabic. It was nobody's pure invention. It simply grew, the way a path is worn by many feet.

Over the centuries that grew into two close sisters. One we now call Hindi. The other we now call Urdu. They share a grammar and much of their daily heart, so two friends speaking simply can understand each other with ease. They came to be written in different scripts, and to reach for grander words from different wells. But under the surface they are kin, born of this same long meeting.

Yet the language of the court was never the only voice singing in this age. The deepest songs were carried by the warm speech of the people, the regional tongues that mothers used and children first learned. And it is here that the bhakti saints did their most lasting work.

Think of two of those tongues. There is , the sweet speech of the Braj country where Krishna is said to have played as a child. In it the blind poet Surdas sang of the baby Krishna with such tenderness that the songs are loved to this day.

And there is , the speech of the land of Rama. In it the poet Tulsidas retold the whole Ramayana, around the year 1574, as the , the lake of Rama's deeds. He set the great story into the language of the fields and homes, so that any villager, with no Sanskrit at all, could hold Rama in the heart. It became, for millions, the most beloved book of all.

See the two movements together, then. In the streets, a new shared tongue rose from the meeting of peoples. And in the temples and homes, the old devotion poured itself into the languages people already loved. Both were ways of carrying the heart further than it had reached before. The court spoke its blended speech; the saints sang in the mother tongue; and the land grew richer in words for both the world and for God.

Think of a word you use every day that came from somewhere far away, carried to you by people you will never meet. Our very speech is a record of every meeting our ancestors lived. What does it feel like to know that the words in your mouth are themselves a kind of shared history?