“Err… Trivandrum. Pettah.”
“No. Where are you REALLY from? Where is your native place?”
“Trivandrum only…”
“Chumma. (you’re lying) Don’t show jaada (attitude) okay? Idiot.” And he walks away.
When I was a kid, many new friendships were aborted this way. It got slightly better as I grew older: most people were more polite than the kid in the playground and went on to become good acquintances. As my distant cousin Salar, @smbijili, puts it, we Dakhnis spend a lot of time explaining where we are from.
I am a Dakhni. I speak the Dakhni language. Till the #BeingDakhni hashtag happened a week ago from today (storified here), I thought we were simply Urdu-speaking-south-Indians. Salar proposed the hashtag, and it provoked me into thinking a bit about my linguistic and cultural roots. As in all #hashtags on Twitter, there was momentary fun, but I made a mental note that I would, soon, sit down and learn what it meant to be Dakhni.
- Dakhni is a dialect of Urdu. Fact: Dakhni seems to have developed alongside Urdu.
- Dakhni happened when Urdu speakers traveled and settled down south: Fact: Dakhni seems to have followed the same process as Urdu. It seems have interacted with many more languages than Urdu did, to attain its present form
- There was a single point of origin: Fact: There are multiple theories, all of them seem right.
- Dakhni is spoken exclusively by Muslims: Fact: many non Muslims, particularly lower class and lower caste, speak Dakhni, if not as a native language. In Andhra Pradesh and Hyderabad, and across Karnataka as well.
- Dakhni is Urdu, corrupted by the influence of southern Indian languages: Fact: This theory is BS.
There are many theories, but one central theme runs through all of them: the story of the Dakhni is the story of migration. Migration due to war, trade or employment. A long-term migration which assimilated and integrated into the regions and the cultures that interacted with it. Which makes us what we are: foreigners in our own land, at the same time, more rooted to a shared history than even the “original” natives.
Here are some oral theories, which I have accumulated over the past several years through conversations with elders in our extended family, and a little bit of search on the Internet:
a) We are the descendants of professional soldiers who worked for various Afghan, Tajik and Persian generals in North India, who traveled down south during various conquests, or in search of military jobs. A name mentioned often is Malik Gafoor, a general of Allaudin Khilji who traveled all the way down south till Madurai in Tamil Nadu, between 1309 and 1311. Besides Allaudin Khilji, the Bahman Sultanate also recruited soldiers from the North, or brought with them noblemen and courtiers from where they came from, considered to be current Afghanistan or Tajikistan. Invasions in those days did not involve drones and aircraft carriers, and took place over many months and often even years. These soldiers settled in the Deccan plateau region, around Bidar, extending up to Solapur in Maharashtra and eastwards towards coastal Andhra Pradesh. Soldiers were allocated land or jagirs as performance reward, and many meagre present-day land holdings of Dakhnis in south India seem to be inherited from these jagirs. The soldiers could have brought their families or may have married locally.
c) Much like the Nawayaths, we are the descendents of Arab and Persian traders who settled along the western coast of India. The difference being that Nawayaths stayed on around the western coast, Bhatkal, for instance. Some families traveled into the interior, to the states of the Deccan plateau, adopting local customs and picking up languages along the way. Some of these families were encouraged by south Indian noblemen and were given land in exchange for trading opportunities with Arabs and Persians.
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