It may be asserted with some assurance that the very name ‘Siraiki’ will be quite unfamiliar to most readers of this article. The well-known predilection of most South Asianists for working from English sources and their concentration upon the larger Indian scene, where such sources are so much more abundant than for Pakistan, may contribute to this unfamiliarity; but it is doubtless due principally to the quite recent introduction of the term on a general scale in its homeland. In simple terms, ‘Sirāikī’ is the language of the middle Indus valley, while the ‘Sirāikī movement’ that seeks to improve its standing is based in the central part of this region, the South-West Panjab, principally in its most important cities, Multan and Bahawalpur. This article sets out to inform a wider audience about the movement which is attempting to assert the language's separate identity and to secure for it increased official recognition.
Under the terms of a Fellowship at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, the author was given study-leave for the academic year 1967–68 to go to Pakistan and India in order to improve his knowledge of Urdu and Punjabi. Having chosen Lahore as the most suitable place to pursue the concurrent study of these two languages, he lived there from September 1967 until April 1968, during which time he became increasingly conscious of, and interested in, the rather peculiar socio-linguistic position of Punjabi in the city's life. This article is a sunnary of the observations he was able to make about this, and of the thoughts to which he was led.
The Indo-Iranian linguistic frontier constitutes one of the most complex and interesting language-areas of the sub-continent. Given the nature of the area, it is perhaps inevitable that scholarly attention should have been directed particularly to its remoter corners, where so much that is of historical importance has been preserved, and we certainly have every reason to be grateful for the fascination which such out of the way survivals have held for the minds of several outstanding linguists. It is, on the other hand, a matter for regret that so little has been done by comparison on the languages which flourish in less inaccessible parts of the frontier, particularly on the Indo-Aryan side. The wide distribution of such languages alone, quite apart from their intrinsic interest, demands that they too be accorded adequate coverage if the peculiarly complex language-patterns of the area are ever to be properly understood as a whole. The present article, based largely on material collected during a recent field-trip to Pakistan,1 represents an attempt to fill one such gap in contemporary coverage, by providing descriptions of the extreme north-western extensions of the main body of Indo-Aryan.
The considerable size of the Ādi Granth, the varied authorship of its contents, and their arrangement within the volume to suit the requirements of liturgical performance rather than those of scholarly perusal, all these may be accounted factors to be held responsible for delaying, until quite recently, its critical analysis. Certainly the delay was not warranted by the intrinsic importance of the Ādi Granth (AG), which derives primarily from its status as the living scripture of the Sikhs, secondarily from the authenticity of the transmission of its text which this status has helped to secure since its compilation by Gurū Arjan in 1604.
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