What Is The History Of Urdu?

Urdu, the national language of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan gets its origin from a protean combination of languages that include Arabic, Persian (the national anthem of Pakistan is purely in Persian with only one Urdu word in it), Hindi, English, Sanskrit and many more languages.  It won't be imprudent to establish that linguistically Pakistan owes its credit to two major geographical regions: India, because of the entrenched roots of the Dravidian language and the Indo-Aryan languages in Urdu and Middle East, because of Urdu's remarkable semblance of scripts and vocabulary to Arabic and Persian.

Although Urdu became popular in the Mughal era, the origin of Pakistan's national language dates before than that.  It was initially a combination of a dialect of Hindi spoken with traces of Arabic, Punjabi, Meerut, Turkish and Persian.  The melange resulting from this actually became a language that later on established its own grammar, vocabulary and style.

The oldest works of Urdu are found in the poetic oeuvres of Masood Saad Salman of Lahore.  Almost two centuries later, Amir Khusru, who was a courtier at the time of Alaudin Khilji, wrote in an engaging amalgam of Persian and Urdu.  Furthermore the popularity and prosperity of Urdu had a lot to do with the Sufis, who played a paramount role in its promotion by writing religious poems in Urdu and even preaching religion in the language.  Later on many other works of Urdu literature followed suit, which included contributions from Amir Khusrau, Shah Waliullah, Waris Shah, Mir Taqi and the greatest Urdu poet that held the supreme echelon- Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib.
Following poetry, the legacy of Urdu enriched further with exquisite yet persuasive works of authors like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (who became the pioneer in shedding the enamel of mere hedonistic literary indulgence from Urdu and in lieu used the language in more useful ways, using it for illustrating on subjects like Archaelogy, Art, Science and Politics), Maulana Shibli, Maulana Altaf Hussain Hali and the Poet of the East – Dr. Allama Mohammed Iqbal, who used Urdu as his major literary weapon to play a role in igniting the spirit of Independence in Muslims of the subcontinent.

It wasn't surprising that Pakistan chose Urdu as its national language as it the language had become a symbol of unity for the Muslims, providing them with a persistent platform of identity of which they could always be proud of!