Urdu speakers

[Samar Abbas]

On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, Raveen Satkurunathan wrote:
> Sameer Abbas' effort at deriving Urdu from Iranian, Turkish and Arab is
> on these same ideological lines.

  All that the opponents of a Ghaznavid origin of Urdu can do is shout
that it is an evil "Muslim" conspiracy, forgetting that the father of this
theory was Prof. Sachau, who was not a Muslim at all. See Prof. Ruth Laila
Schmidt's post Dec 1998 :
 "Sachau is of the opinion that the origin of Urdu or Hindustany must be
  sought in  the army of Mahmud."
 http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9812&L=indology&P=R6761

And that was in 1880, long before even the concept of Pakistan. This
Ghaznavid origin was widely accepted for 60 years, when suddenly, from
1947 onwards all kinds of hypotheses are officially sanctioned. So, Khari
Boli, Sindhu, Panchanadi, Rajasthani, Vracada, Braj or Haryani Prakrits
(and even Tamil and Marathi) suddenly appear as the mothers of Urdu. When
one Prakrit is debunked as a possible source, the stand is immediately
shifted to another Prakrit - as we have seen on this list.

 But now, we are seeing a shift from Khari Boli and Marathi to Tamil:

> What SA was alluding to was that half the population of present day
> Bangladesh are not native Bengalis (thus not "inferior" Dravids ...

  Ahh, now another theory: the Bengalis are all "Dravids". So now
we have a wonderful consensus, represented by three widely disparate
hyptheses: 1. the Mongol-Bengali theory (supported by the Mongoloid Shakti
cult of Bengal), 2. Aryan-Bengali theory and now 3. Negroid-Bengali
theory. What are the Bengali Muslims now to believe: are they Aryans or
Mongols or Negroes ?

> This is part of the revising of history, which is going on in Pakistan and
> Bangladesh by the likes of Jamat e Islami, and other collaborators of the
> genocide of the people of Bangladesh during the war for liberation in 1971.

  But Satkurnathan never displays such concerns when the victims of
genocide are Aryans: no condemnation of Dalit Maoist ethnic cleansing of
Brahmins and Rajputs in Bihar, no word about the violence against South
Indian Brahmins. All along the pet `Dalitstan' and `Dravidistan' theories
are repeated: all Indians are Dravidians, there are no `Aryans' left, all
Aryan languages are also derived from Dravidian, all `Aryans' are mulattos
- the offspring of Aryan soldiers raping Dravidian slave-women. He may
also like to clarify how Urdu is derived from Tamil or `Dravidian' ?

Samar