Urdu is the sixth major language of India in terms of the people who use it. Numerically it comes after Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu. Till the census of 1941 Urdu was bracketed with Hindi, Punjabi and Pahari dialects and all these put together were put under the title of Hindustani. In the 1951 census these languages were put separately. According to the 1971 census, the number of Urdu speakers was 28,607,874 which rose to 35,323,282 in 1981. In spite of the fact that Urdu is a stateless language, its inter-state character makes it an all-India language. it is the second most popular language in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh. it is the third most important language in Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan and West Bengal. it is the first official language in Jammu and Kashmir and second in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
Although it is fashionable to characterise Sanskrit as the mother of all Indian languages, the fact of the matter is quite different. At least with respect to Hindi, Sanskrit is as remotely related as a great grandparent. her mother, if the allegory has any meaning, is Urdu. To grasp this hereditary linkage, note that: (a) the entire grammar of Hindi is taken from Urdu; (b) the idioms and syntax are also Urdugenous; (c) all the personal pronouns and all prepositional terms are taken from Urdu; (d) all the important verbs and adverbs and most of the conjunctions are adopted from Urdu. The nouns and other non-Urdu vocabulary are borrowed from Sanskrit to replace Urdu words where possible.
Urdu played a vital role in India's freedom movement. Our independence struggle was stirred by the Urdu slogan, "Inquillab Zindabad" and the songs, "Sare Jahan Se Achcha Hindostan Hamara" (Iqbal), "Sarfroshi Ki Tamanna Ab Hamare Dil Mein Hai" (Bismil), to mention a few. National leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru recognised the importance of Urdu ..
Other Indian languages are also indebted in varying degrees to Urdu. The grammars of the Kashmiri, Punjabi, Gujarati and Marathi languages are similar to that of Urdu and are surely adapted therefrom. All the important verbs in these languages as well as in Bengali, Assamese, oriya, etc are also Urdu-genetic. Urdu words form considerable parts of the vocabularies of these languages. Thus Urdu among all the living languages of the country has the broadest linguistic interface. It was this feature of Urdu which prompted Mahatma Gandhi and Subhash Chandra Bose to propose Hindustani as the official language of the then emerging multilingual nation state.
The Constituent Assembly, on the strength of a single additional vote, assigned the status of central official language role of Hindi and relegated the other languages to the position of regional languages. Since the beginning of the 20th century, with the gradual rise of communal politics ... language became communalised. Urdu became the language of the Muslims; Hindi of (Northern India's) Hindus. With the partition of India, the Pakistan having adopted Urdu as its official language, Urdu became a "foreign" element and its presence "repugnant" to Indian culture. it was in this background that the slogan of "Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan" has determined the subsequent metamorphosis of official Hindi.
In the course of implementation, powers-that-be in Delhi soon began to ... delink the official Hindi from Urdu vocabulary ... The so-called Hindustani has yielded place to a Sanskritised Hindi ... It may sound paradoxical that Hindi is nothing but Urdu in Devnagari script. What is going by the name of official Hindi is actually a local, Mathura variant of the spoken Urdu. Language fundamentalists may be offended by such utterances. But facts remain facts ... (Source: The Hindustan Times, 7 May, 1998)
