Sufi Narratives Of Intimacy

[Octavis Uberstine]

Sufifigures such as Miranji Shams-ul Ishshaq, one of the towering poets of his time, had a large hand in the establishment of pre-modern Dakhni as a language. Dakhni, in its pre-modern form, was birthed after the Bahmani Sultanate was established in the Deccan in the 12th century, departing from the Delhi Sultanate due to on-going wars during that period. Persian was being used as the official court language and language spoken by the elites at that time. However, Sufis who came with these Persianate empires, wanted to bring Islamic tenets and reach into the heartlands and among the common folk, who spoke Sanskritic languages. They began establishing the vernacular language of Dakhni, which combined Persio-Arabic languages with a large range of Telugu and Kannada vocabulary.

It is important to note that the Dakhni spoken during the time of the Bahmani sultanate is different from contemporary Dakhni spoken today. The use of pre-modern Dakhni declined after the 18th century, with the decline of the Bahmani and Qutb Shahi empires. Contemporary Dakhni today is loosely associated with this premodern Dakhni, but draws largely on the tradition and spirit of creating vernacular tongues that speak to the hearts and culture of people in the Deccan.

While the official languages of Hyderabad changed over the centuries from Persian to Urdu to present-day English, Telugu and Hindi, Dakhni in its contemporary form is still persistently and affectionately used among people from Hyderabad to Karnataka and some parts of Maharashtra. All of these places were formerly a part of the Hyderabad-Deccan. Dakhni is still largely spoken today, even among the youth, which shows no sign of the language dying down. A college student in Hyderabad, whom I had taught Mandarin to, spoke Dakhni in her everyday tongue with the female domestic help in her house, even though she was Punjabi in ethnicity, but her family had settled in Hyderabad for a few generations. Schools also played a large role in familiarising the young with Dakhni, through socialisation with fellow Hyderabadi peers and classmates.

Speaking and representing the Dakhni tongue as a way of regional belonging and affection is evident in other sources such as films and modern-day rap songs. Films such as Hyderabad Blues and Hyderabad Nawabs feature the use of Dakhni in their dialogues. They bring up cackles of joy and laughter as viewers fondly identify these phrases with the words they speak every day. Sometimes thought to be crass, the language is affectionately represented through an unofficial medium like comedy films. Rappers such as Mo Boucher and Pasha Bhai rapping in Dakhni have been part of the proliferating local music scene in recent years.

Perhaps the persistence and proliferation of Dakhni as a form of cultural intimacy might be a reaction towards the broad sweep of nationalistic narratives that abruptly took over Hyderabad in 1948. In a short span of time, boundaries and territories were suddenly regrouped into linguistic regions, separating Hyderabad from the Deccan to merge with the eastern parts of the Telugu speaking regions in Andhra Pradesh. The artificiality of regrouping these regions without considering its linguistic and cultural contexts might have contributed to the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh in 2014. However, beyond these official state borders, memories of the Deccan and its Persianate histories are retained and proliferated through the everyday tongue of Dakhni today.

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