The Sanskritization of a Hindi-Urdu Epic

Abstract Chapter 4 investigates Kathavachak’s progressive editing of his Ramayan over many years, particularly in the 1940s and 50s, in order to excise vocabulary he did not consider suitable for a modern religious text in Hindi, that is, Urdu with its Persian and Arabic roots, and Braj Bhasha with its associations with a premodern literary culture. Urdu of course presented the greater challenge; his original Ramayan was full of Urdu vocabulary. While it was an insurmountable task to remove all of it given the shared history and lexicon of Hindi and Urdu, he did remove a significant share of it. To show the extent of his editing, the chapter includes close readings of passages from the “old” and “new” Radheshyam Ramayans and provides evidence from interviews to establish that Kathavachak himself changed the text largely for political reasons.