SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter offers an analysis of multilingualism and vernacularization in north Indian literary culture in the fifteenth century. Asking why there are few traces of Hindavi in Persian writings of the period, and similarly, little recognition of the large Hindavi Sufi corpus in Persian Sufi writings, the chapter problematizes questions of genre, translation, and recording; questions that cannot be understood through the histories of present-day Hindi and Urdu that have been split on community lines. Through an analysis of ‘Abd al-Quddus Gangohi’s Rushdnāma (ca. 1490), it points to the widespread oral practice of multilingualism that did not, however, often translate into textual traces. The chapter serves to pull together some of the dominant themes in the volume: of language use and the production of literature in the long fifteenth century.