Thread by @bhAratenduH

Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was for “united India” as long as Hindus were to accept Muslim supremacy as it was during Sultanate. Why would Indian Muslims want a separate territory when they can get the whole India?

This “change” in SSAK came

1/n

https://twitter.com/irtikazr/status/1488603028861112322

when he saw no hope for Indian Muslims to be able to achieve that, noticing the rising tide of Hindu revival, with a sophisticated Svadeshi movement with Bengal.

The “change” was noted by many, such as by Lala Lajpat Rai, who expressed it in a series of open letters to SSAK

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SSAK and other Muslim elites detested works like “History of India as Told by its Own Historians” in 8 vols, which in 1867 made accessible to public the reasonable translations of original Persian-Arabic sources on Muslims rulers of India, laying bare for Hindu students the

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https://twitter.com/irtikazr/status/1488603033932115969

unvarnished history of the Islamic tyranny on Hindus.

The Indian Muslim elites never denounced the Islamic tyranny in India themselves - zealots were their heroes. But elites like SSAH of course saw the danger in Hindus studying the Islamic record made accessible by British

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Indeed SSAK often made flowery statements for Hindu consumption about how Hindu and Muslim unity was essential to India, while in his addresses to the Muslim audiences he was very virulent in his attitude.

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SSAK assessed that Indian Muslims were not strong enough to withstand the torrent of Svadeshi revival which had reached a great peak by 1880s and which would not accept the alien paramountcy of either Muslims or British. His reaction was natural- join hands with British.
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Protection of Urdu was a bogeyman SSAH raised to oppose Svadeshi Movement - Hindi revival was whose one fruit.

But first thing first. Urdu is not Hindi with “sprinkling” of Arabic-Persian. Sprinkling of loan words are present in any language and don’t make it a diff lang.

7/n

https://twitter.com/irtikazr/status/1488603045109936130

No - Urdu is not a “developed version of Hindi”, but a creole of Hindi as spoken by people of Arabi-Farsi culture.

Urdu is a creole of Indian Muslims.

A creole always remains a degenerate version of a base language not a “developed version”.

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https://twitter.com/irtikazr/status/1488603045109936130

Here is one Urdu sample writing of Sir Syed Ahmed himself.

Not a sprinkling of Arabic-Farsi words but a whole container full of them, which would be unintelligible to most Indians, who would consider themselves native Hindi speakers.

9/n

In an essay on Urdu, Sir Syed himself admits both- that Urdu developed but as a creole of Hindi by foreigners, and as the language of Indian Muslims.

It’s funny that speakers of a creole, say Bermudan English, demand that the proper English should not be allowed in courts.

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https://twitter.com/irtikazr/status/1488603045109936130

And if English speakers demand that proper English also be admitted, the Bermuda creole speakers consider it an attack on their religion!

Hindus did not target Urdu, they just refused to give up the base language of Hindi to be replaced by a Muslim creole.

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I talked about Sir Syed Ahmed in a larger context of Islamic reaction to the Indian political and social situation of his time in this video -

@omarali50 fyi