Professor Hafiz Mahmud Shirani in his historic book “Punjab Mein Urdu” (Urdu in Punjab) stresses that this interaction between the local languages of Punjab with Persian of the settlers gave birth to a proto language. Some Hindu poets had also written Qasidas (Eulogies) in honor of Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi in Sanskrit. It is thought that even Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi may have some acquaintance with the local languages because his royal stamp bore an inscription in Sanskrit on one side and Arabic on the other side. The lively interaction between the cultures must have necessitated a common language. A lot of intermarriages must have taken place. A fair number of preachers and Sufis, for example Hazrat Ali Hujveri popularly know as Data Ganj Bakhsh (died 465 CE) and Shah Yousuf (died 550 CE) started spreading the message of Islam to the local population. The army comprised of both the local and migrant soldiers. The first active interaction of South Asian languages with Persian must have started during this period because large number of Persian speaking Muslims flocked to Punjab. Khawaja Masud Saad Salman was a resident of Lahore, which was the capital of Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi and his predecessors from 413H to 583H, i.e 979-1030 AD. written work, of Khawaja with us, not even a single shair (stanza) ! All we know of his writing in Urdu (the language was certainly not known by this name in those times) is a statement by Amir Khusrau (1253-1325 CE) who reports in the preface of his famous book ‘Ghuratul Kamal’ that Khawaja Masud Saad Salman had his Dewan (poetry collections) in three languages : Persian, Turkish and Urdu. The predicament here is that we don’t have any written Kalaam, i.e. Modern research, however, has dug even deeper and now Khawaja Masud Saad Salman a celebrated Persian poet whose era spans the 12th century AD is generally acknowledged as the first Urdu poet. The line was stretched further back by subsequent research and the honor was handed over to Quli Qutub Shah (1565-1610 CE), a King of Golkanda. Various answers have been given to this question: Maulana Mohammad Hussain Azad wrote in the monumental Aab-e-Hayat’ (Water of Life) asserts that Wali Deccani (1644-1707 CE) is the “Bava Adam” (founding father) of Urdu poetry. So the million dollar question : Who was the first Urdu poet? Now if we pin down the first Urdu poet, we should be able to trace down the origins of the language to a fair degree. Like most other languages of the world, Urdu too started its literature through poetry. But the case of Urdu is a little different, which makes the job doubly difficult, as we shall explore in the following lines. It is not an easy job to dig out the roots any language, it can be likened to pinpointing the origin of a river : you can get entirely different results from following different courses. These lines are written to keep the record straight and give the reader a general idea about this highly debatable, contentious and interesting issue. It is hardly surprising that this is so wide spread because the proponents of the theory are such stalwarts as Maulana Mohammad Hussain Azad, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and Mir Aman Dehlvi. It is a common assumption that Urdu was born in the Mughal camps of Emperor Mohammad Shah Jahan (1628–58 CE) some time during the first half of the seventeenth century.
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