Dictionaries and other lexicographical works are more than mere works of reference. They have a history that can, in fact, be quite exciting and fascinating. Walter Hakala's compelling monograph introduces the reader to a set of questions surrounding Persian, Urdu (including Hindi-Urdu, Rekhta, and Hindustani), and English lexicographical traditions. Hakala sets out to write a history of “Urdu” lexicography that is based on a new mode of inquiry into lexicography as a discipline and its role within (Urdu) literary studies. Emphasizing the specific characteristics of lexicographical genres in constructing and reflecting “reality” as well as in educating and creating linguistic and political communities, he argues that they are compelling primary (and not merely consultative) source materials for “their ability both to construct a social class and to carry the range of ideologies that served to make this class aware of itself” (p. 28).
Underlying Hakala's study of over fifty dictionaries and other lexicographic genres (but not grammars) is a set of important questions: What motivated individuals at a specific moment in time to compile a dictionary or a lexicographical work? What were the expectations towards a dictionary and how was it consumed as well as evaluated over the decades and centuries? How were standards created and what steered the ways they changed over time? What was the role of mediating texts and middling figures in this process? Hakala is particularly interested in non-canonical, often discredited works of writers and/or compilers who were dismissed by the literati as mediocre poets and bypassed by literary historians, language reformers, or other authorities.
The respective chapters center on a specific author and his work(s) that are historically dated and rely on distinct historiographical methods: “‘1700’ requires a sociological approach, ‘1800’ reveals the contours of the colonial archive, and the two ‘1900’ chapters provide opportunities to reflect on the limits of self-representation in light of increasingly communitarian conceptions of the nation-state” (p. 29). Hakala embeds his sources into their political, sociocultural, and multi-linguistic environments. His reading of the rich archive of primary texts—including manuscripts, printed publications, and their reprints—is textual and paratextual as well as historically situated. He offers careful translations that pay account of the complexities of historically evolving Urdu and Persian terminologies.
Negotiating Languages begins with a discussion of the earliest traceable Urdu dictionary, the Ġharā ʼib al-Luġhāt. Although alphabetically organized, this work was not conceptualized in our modern understanding as an “aid” to reading other works, but as a “tool” to produce new texts (pp. 50–51). The methodological importance and relevance of understanding microhistory within macrostructures, as announced in the title of the chapter, is executed in a way that considers the text and paratext of this work on the idiomatic speech of Delhi as well as biographical information on the author, the poet and educator ‘Abdul Wāse˘᷾ ‘Hāṅswī. Critical questions about what determines literary and lexicographical authority are introduced in this chapter and accompany the reader throughout the study.
The following chapter focuses on the introduction of new sets of linguistic data into lexicographical works, including folksongs, proverbs, regional spoken variety, and specifically gendered language. As Hakala argues, “[l]exicographic works that included spoken proverbs represent a shift in the lexicographic data away from the poetic register and toward a prose of speech” (p. 30). The work at the center of this chapter is the commissioned Shams al-Bayān (c. 1794) by Mirzā Jān ‘T̤apish’ that, as Hakala's analysis reveals, followed a consistent lexicographic method. This method was subsequently appropriated by British lexicographers of the East India Company compiling English-Urdu dictionaries, turning the work into “a portal through which nonintimates could gain access to the linguistic charisma and authority of Delhi's courtly culture” (p. 30). It is through this chapter that the nonlinear changes in lexicographic methods, that is, the redefinition of the role of a lexicographic work as a commentary or a supplement towards a canonical work that would later also lead to the emergence of the “modern standard dictionary” are illustrated. This development had its origins well before British Orientalists took the stage.
The final two chapters focus on the Urdu public sphere of the twentieth century and a variety of debates and controversies surrounding the topic of language reforms as well as the impact of print technologies. The focus is on the nationalization and professionalization of “nationalist lexicography” and on two neglected lexicographers and their works: Sayyid Aḥmed Dihlawī’s Hindustani-Urdu Luġhat (1888), later renamed Farhang-i Āṣafiyah, as well as the even lesser-known Ćiraṇjī Lāl and his Maḳhzan al-Muḥāwarat (1886). It is also about two British lexicographers of Urdu, S. W. Fallon and J. T. Platts, and their relationships to their “native assistants” whose lexicographical knowledge was acknowledged to varying degrees. Hakala identifies this moment as one in which Urdu was made “legible” and accessible to its constituents: “Dictionaries were a primary and indispensable means of transforming a repertoire of multiple, socially delimited, and often contradictory linguistic registers into a single ‘national language’ ideally accessible to all citizens regardless of their social background” (p. 119). Such a story finds its continuation in studies of North Indian publishing houses, which played an essential role in the dissemination and development of Persian, Arabic, Urdu, and Hindi lexicographical projects as well as the codification and the lexical separation of languages.
I can only imagine the work, skill, and dedication it would have taken to work with the unique selection of primary source materials of this book—handwritten manuscripts in the Perso-Arabic script, tazkirahs (biographical anthologies) on the lives and works as well as the impact of the authors whose works are included in this monograph, and a diversity of archival materials from vernacular and British colonial archives of the past three centuries. This book is, however, as much about a consideration of “Hindi”/“Urdu” (including Hindvi, Hindustani, and Hindi-Urdu), as it is about Persian, Rekhta, and English, given the multilingual vocabularies of texts and contexts and an ever multilingual society out of which lexicographical works emerged. (The first monolingual dictionary of Urdu is dated to the year 1849.)
In suggesting that we think outside the well-established schemes of what defines Urdu literary culture and literary authority, Hakala's study of dictionaries and other lexicographical works as primary sources materials for the study of South Asia makes the reader want to pull out and consult a dictionary simply for the genre's sake.
