Lucknow: Listen carefully to a conversation of a Lucknowite and the boundaries between Hindi, Urdu and Awadhi begin to blur. A sentence may have Hindi as its grammatical base, borrow the warmth of Awadhi and turn to Urdu for courtesy or refinement.
Nijhawan’s research on All India Radio’s Lucknow station, established in 1938, records debates over Hindi, Urdu and Hindustani. You Can Also Check: Gold Rate in Lucknow | Silver Rate in Lucknow | Bank Holidays in Lucknow | Public Holidays in Lucknow | Lucknow AQI | Weather in Lucknow | Petrol Price in Lucknow | Diesel Price in Lucknow | CNG Price in Lucknow | LPG Price in Lucknow Stay updated with the latest Lucknow news.
“Lucknow’s language has Urdu’s sweetness, the cultural inheritance of Awadh carried through Awadhi, and the flow of Hindi,” said Prof Hemanshu Sen of Lucknow University ’s Hindi department. “The Triveni of these three modes of expression flourished in coexistence during the phase of the Nawabs,” Singh said. The confluence, he added, helped evolve an expression popularly referred to as “Hindustani”, enriching Lucknow’s multilingual identity. “As the atmosphere has different gases, different languages are at play in Lucknow,” he said. English and ‘Hinglish’ have now entered professional and personal conversations, creating what he calls a linguistic ‘pastiche’,” he said. “Language is social property,” Prof Hemanshu Sen said, explaining why people absorb words through interaction rather than textbooks. “Language is not a monument, it is a living tree, old branches shed off and new branches and leaves replace old ones,” said oral historian and cultural exponent Mehmood Abdi. “Galawat comes from ‘galana’,” he said, referring to the process of making something soft and tender. Abdi said the layer of oil floating over ‘korma’, ‘salan’ or ‘nihari’ was traditionally called ‘teera’, but is now commonly called ‘tari’. Spices, he said, were earlier ‘peesna’, or crushed, and then ‘chhanna, or tossed and sieved. “Difficult vocabulary and, more importantly, traditional idioms are gradually disappearing,” Prof Hemanshu Sen said. Villages still preserve expressions and idioms in which “a few words can convey what might otherwise require an entire sentence”.
On Hindi Diwas , this everyday linguistic traffic tells a story stretching back centuries. For Singh, what distinguishes Lucknow is not simply the presence of three languages, but how easily they overlap. Hindi, he explained, provides the base in official and standardised settings, while Urdu offers certain trajectories of respect and leisure. “Awadhi brings folk wisdom and local colour. Shobna Nijhawan’s research shows that Lucknow, despite its celebrated association with Urdu, became an important centre of Hindi publishing in the 1920s and 1930s. Publications helped build a modern Hindi reading public in the same city known for its Urdu literary culture. The question of what ordinary people could understand also confronted broadcasters. Radio could not speak only in highly Sanskritised Hindi or heavily Persianised Urdu if programmes were to reach diverse urban and rural audiences. That flexibility remains part of everyday Lucknow. Speakers may consequently move between Hindi, Urdu and Awadhi without consciously thinking that they are switching languages. The vocabulary changes with relationships, surroundings and occasions. This linguistic movement can even be tasted in Lucknow’s food. He points to names that have changed with the city. ‘Majlisi roti’, once prepared as ‘tabarruk’ during Muharram gatherings, is now commonly known as ‘khameeri roti’. Kitchen vocabulary is changing too. Chef Mohsin Qureshi points to another disappearing distinction. The same erosion is occurring in everyday conversation. English-medium education and the association of English with better employment prospects, she believes, have reduced younger people’s inclination towards deeper engagement with Hindi. She finds some of that linguistic richness surviving more strongly outside the city. Download the TOI App.
Abdi said today’s famous ‘Galaouti kebab’ was earlier called ‘Galawat ke kebab’.
Awadhi, therefore, carried a substantial literary inheritance into the city’s linguistic world.
Prof RP Singh of Lucknow University’s English and Modern European Languages calls this meeting of languages a “Triveni”. That mingling has deep roots. Linguist Baburam Saksena, in his landmark ‘Evolution of Awadhi’, traced Awadhi as a developed speech tradition with its own grammar, sounds and literary history. Its richness is evident in works as different as Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s ‘Padmavat’ and Tulsidas’s ‘Ramcharitmanas’. In ‘A House Divided’, Amrit Rai traced them to a shared linguistic past, showing how social, literary and political developments gradually pushed their formal versions apart. Everyday speech, however, continued to borrow freely from the common reservoir. Lucknow provided an unusually fertile setting for this exchange. Abdul Halim Sharar’s classic ‘Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture’ portrays a city where language could hardly be separated from poetry, storytelling, theatre, food, ceremonies and manners. Urdu flourished in the Persian-influenced culture of the Nawabi capital, while Awadhi remained deeply rooted in the wider region.
Hindi and Urdu, too, were historically less separated than their modern labels suggest.