Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c11.5.4

c11.5.4

Persian words and phrases speedily found their way into the speech of the common people, being used as a convenient medium of communication between the extensive entourage of the Mughals and the original inhabitants of the country. Before long there grew up that *lingua franca* of Northern India, known as Urdu, a ‘highly Persianized form of Hindi which nevertheless continued to retain the grammatical structure of an Indian tongue ’.¹ And as with the language, so with many other forms of expression, artistic and literary, identically the same process was taking place.