Maahey et al
I once had the pleasure of playing a rather minor role in a made for TV film by Aparna Sen. We shot on location near Jamshedpur and I had the opportunity to associate for a fortnight with some reasonably well-known names of Indian cinema - Shabana Azmi, Farooque Shaikh, Dr Sreeram Lagu and the like.
Shabana had recently married the film-writer Salim (of Salim-Javed fame), and sometimes expounded to us on all that she was learning from him of Urdu/Hindustani culture.
One of the things she pointed out was that ghazals today, because of the crossover between Hindi and Urdu, share a vocabulary of both Sanskrit and Persian words, and interestingly, there are ghazals performed by Pakistani singers, that contain only words of Sanskrit origin. Equally, there are lines in 'Hindi' movies that contain naught but Urdu words. Having said which, the Sanskrit and Persian origins of words in Hindi/Urdu tend to interact slightly like the Germanic/Norman-French words in English. There are a number of synonyms, and the invading language words tend to be used frequently for 'upper class' touches.
Ghalib, of course, wrote some time ago, and its posisble his poems were un'tainted' by Sanskrit words.
Bambayya Hindi, of course, is a cheap and nasty bastard language, and the only one I know, having grown up with it. I got into all sorts of trouble in school for using Marathi words in Hindi essays. I reached my nadir when I achieved a mark of 0.5 out of a possible 25 in an essay in which, amongst other solecisms, I substituted the Marathi 'Kholi' for the Hindi 'kamra' (thereby leading us back to the origin of this thread).
Anyway, apologies for any boredom these reminiscences may have caused.
cheer
the sunshine warrior
