In a blow against the British Empire, Khan suggests that London artificially divided India's Hindu and Muslim populations by splitting their one language in two, then burying the evidence in obscure scholarly works outside the public view. All language is political -- and so is the boundary between one language and another. The author analyzes the origins of Urdu, one of the earliest known languages, and propounds the iconoclastic views that Hindi came from pre-Aryan Dravidian and Austric-Munda, not from Aryan's Sanskrit (which, like the Indo-European languages, Greek and Latin, etc., are rooted in the Middle East/Mesopotamia, not in Europe). Hindi's script came from the Aramaic system, similar to Greek, and in the 1800s, the British initiated the divisive game of splitting one language in two, Hindi (for the Hindus) and Urdu (for the Muslims). These facts, he says, have been buried and nearly lost in turgid academic works. Khan bolsters his hypothesis with copious technical linguistic examples. This may spark a revolution in linguistic history! Urdu/Hindi: An Artificial Divide integrates the out of Africa linguistic evolution theory with the fossil linguistics of Middle East, and discards the theory that Sanskrit descended from a hypothetical proto-IndoEuropean language and by degeneration created dialects, Urdu/Hindi and others. It shows that several tribes from the Middle East created the hybrid by cumulative evolution. The oldest groups, Austric and Dravidian, starting 8000 B.C. provided the grammar/syntax plus about 60% of vocabulary, S.K.T. added 10% after 1500 B.C. and Arabic/Persian 20-30% after A.D. 800. The book reveals Mesopotamia as the linguistic melting pot of Sumerian, Babylonian, Elamite, Hittite-Hurrian-Mitanni, etc., with a common script and vocabularies shared mutually and passed on to I.E., S.K.T., D.R., Arabic and then to Hindi/Urdu; in fact the author locates oldest evidence of S.K.T. in Syria. The book also exposes the myths of a revealed S.K.T. or Hebrew and the fiction of linguistic races, i.e. Aryan, Semitic, etc. The book supports the one world concept and reveals the potential of Urdu/Hindi to unite all genetic elements, races and regions of the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent. This is important reading not only for those interested to understand the divisive exploitation of languages in British-led India's partition, but for those interested in: - The science and history of origin of Urdu/Hindi (and other languages) - The false claims of linguistic races and creation - History of Languages and Scripts - Language, Mythology and Racism - Ancient History and Fossil Languages - British Rule and India's Partition.

The lingua franca of the Indo-Pakistani people is one language, claims Khan, called Hindi when written in Nagari and Urdu when written in Arabic. He says it is not descended from Sanskrit, as conventionally believed, but is 10-12,000 years old and was influenced early by the Austric-Munda and Dravidian language families. Leaving aside any religious

This book sheds light on the complex relationship between Hindi and Urdu. Through a detailed reading of a representative set of 20th century short stories in both languages, the author leads the reader towards a clear definition of the differences between Hindi and Urdu. The full translations of the stories have been extensively annotated to point out the details in which the Hindi and Urdu versions differ. An overview of early and contemporary Hindi/Urdu and Hindustani grammars and language teaching textbooks demonstrates the problems of correctly naming and identifying the two languages. This book now offers a detailed and systematic database of syntactic, morphological and semantic differences between the selected Hindi and Urdu stories. A useful tool for all scholars of modern Hindi/Urdu fiction, (socio-)linguistics, history or social sciences.

This Book Fills A Gap In Our Understanding Of The Role That Language Has Played Int He History And Politics Of Modern Indai And Will Make Interesting Reading For Historians, Linguists, Cultural Studies Scholars As Well As General Readers.

This Volume Of Critical Essays On Indian Literature Cobers A Wide Range Of Genres Like Novel, Short Story And Poetry And Of Languages Like Hindi, English, Urdu, Bengali, Oriya, Kannada And Malayalam Besides English. Informed By A Deeo And Firsthand Awareness Of Indian Literary Trends And Texts As Well As Of Contemporary Literary Theory, These Essays Revaluate Concepts And Movements Like Modernism, Dalit Literature, Nativism And Feminism And Offer Close Readings Of The Texts Of A Number Of Indian Writers Including Premchand, Mirza Ghalib, Mahasweta Devi, Ramakanta Rath, Kamala Das, Chandrasekhara Kambar And Ayyappa Paniker. The Author'S Radical Democratic Attitude To Literature Is Evidenced By His Jusicious Is Evidenced By His Judicious Acceptance Of The Diversity Of Indian Literature And His Sympathetic Understanding Of Avant-Gardist And Subalyern Trends. His Perceptions Are Fresh, Position Well-Argued. Writen In A Lucid Jargon-Free Style, These Insightfuleassays, Including The Brief Editorial Reflections He Wrote For The Journal Indian Literature, Make An Indispensable And Fascinating Reading

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

Poetry of Belonging is an exploration of north-Indian Muslim identity through poetry at a time when the Indian nation state did not exist. Between 1850 and 1950, when precolonial forms of cultural traditions, such as the musha’irah, were undergoing massive transformations to remain relevant, certain Muslim ‘voices’ configured, negotiated, and articulated their imaginings of what it meant to be Muslim. Using poetry as an archive, the book traces the history of the musha’irah, the site of poetic performance, as a way of understanding public spaces through the changing economic, social, political, and technological contexts of the time. It seeks to locate the changing ideas of watan (homeland) and hubb-e watanī (patriotism) in order to offer new perspectives on how Muslim intellectuals, poets, political leaders, and journalists conceived of and expressed their relationship to India and to the transnational Muslim community. The volume aims to spark a renegotiation of identity and belonging, especially at a time when Muslim loyalty to India has yet again emerged as a politically polarizing question.