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The phrase Zuban-i Urdū-yi Muʿallá ("The language of the exalted camp") written in Nastaʿlīq script. - Urdu religious prose goes back several centuries, while secular writing flourished from the 19th century onward. Modern Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and is also spoken by many millions of people in India.



  • “The poets of Delhi, proud of the ‘pure’ Urdu of the imperial camp… rejected the Dakani principle and practice of borrowing extensively from the Indian languages, especially if these borrowings were related to Hindu religion, culture and world-view… In this process imagery was drawn exclusively from Persian precedents, i.e., from the unseen and unexperienced sights, sounds and smells of Persia and Central Asia, rejecting totally the Indian sights, sounds and sensuous experience as materials regarded not sublime enough for poetic expression… It was a desperate unconscious clinging to the origins of the symbols of Muslim India’s cultural experience which had begun abroad, and an instinctive fear of being submerged into the Hindu cultural milieu. These modes of aesthetic appreciation, rooted so deeply in the essence of universal Islamic culture, remained more or less incomprehensible to the Hindu mind.
    • Sita Ram Goel, Hindu Society under Siege (1992)

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