Imre Bangha 1 Rekhta, Poetry in Mixed Language The Emergence of Khari Boli Literature in North India Introduction In one of my classes a student was puzzled by a short poem inserted into an Urdu prose narrative. The poem had hardly any Perso-Arabic vocabulary but was written in the Urdu script as was the rest of the text. She complained that in spite of being a native speaker of Hindi who had learnt the Urdu script she could not tell the difference between Hindi and Urdu was. This spontaneous eruption is in dramatic contrast with the political role the Hindi-Urdu divide played in twentieth-century India, manifesting itself in sentences such as Abdul Haq stating that “Pakistan was not created by Jinnah, nor was it created by Iqbal; it was Urdu that created Pakistan.” 2 Although since the eighteenth century Hindi and Urdu have developed two distinct literary traditions, the borderlines between the two are far from being as clear as political boundaries. The papers in this collection show that, apart from the script, the divide was blurred in certain intermediary literary genres even in the late nineteenth century, 3 and the example of the perplexed student shows that the uncertainty persists to the present day. Instead of recognising their common linguistic and literary heritage in a plethora of North Indian vernacular dialects that from an outsider’s point of view were simply called Hindav, ‘language of India’, or Bhkh, ‘language’, to distinguish it either from Persian and Arabic or from Sanskrit and Prakrit, discourses on their early literature evolved in the two languages from the eighteenth century onwards that are marked by appropriation, neglect and exclusion,. 1 I am grateful to Prof Govind Sharma (Vrindaban), Dr Kishorilal (Allahabad), Ms Hajnalka Kovács (Chicago), Dr Francesca Orsini (Cambridge), Dr Allison Busch (New York), Mr Peter Diggle (Oxford), Dr John Gurney (Oxford) and Prof V. Narayana Rao (Madison) for their remarks on various aspects on this essay, and to Dr Katherine Brown (Leeds), Prof Monika Boehm-Tettelbach (Heidelberg), Dr Jeevan Deol (London) and Dr Azad Shamatov (Tashkent) for drawing my attention to and providing me with some important source material. A grant from the Max Müller Fund (Oxford) made possible a study tour in India to examine and copy some Rekhta manuscripts. 2 Addul Haq: ‘Qaum zabn.’ Bulletin of the Anjuman-i Taraqq-yi Urdu (16 Feb. 1961), p. 22, quoted in Rai 1991, p. 264. 3 E.g. Orsini 2003 on nineteenth-century Brahms printed books.