Dakhni, which has bid fairwell to one of its custodians in Hyderabad’s theatre veteran Babban Khan, lost patronage after Mughal conquest and gave way to Persian and later Urdu; today it has become a mere vernacular
In the passing of Babban Khan, Hyderabad’s veteran playwright, director, and performer of the iconic one-man show Adrak Ke Panje (Ginger’s Offshoots), India has lost one of the last custodians of Dakhni language and culture. For over 35 years, from its debut in 1965 until its final run in 2001, Khan’s satire — staged an astonishing 10,180 times across India and abroad — earned a place in the Guinness World Records as one of the longest-running one-man shows. The play was a defiant celebration of Hyderabadi Dakhni, the vernacular of the Deccan that had long been relegated to domestic banter and street humour.
“The credit goes to him for elevating Hyderabadi Urdu, or the Dakhni dialect, into a respectable art form. He introduced this dialect to the world as a full-fledged theatrical language; a dialect that, until then, had been confined merely to satire,” actor and theatre practitioner Ajay Mankenapalli said in an interview to a newspaper. Dakhani belongs to a literary tradition that was once at par with Persian, widely recognised as the proud language of the Deccan sultanates. Often called qadim (old) Urdu, Dakhni is roughly 200 years older than the standardised literary Urdu that emerged in the North.
The story of the Dakhni language is inextricably linked to migration, cultural amalgamation, imperial patronage, and eventual political decline; the manner it faded away teaches us a lesson or two about how languages rise and fall with the fortunes of their patrons and peoples. Dakhni’s roots go back to the turbulent 14th century. In 1327, Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq of the Delhi Sultanate famously (and disastrously) shifted his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad in the Deccan. Thousands of soldiers, administrators, Sufi saints, and ordinary folk migrated southward, carrying with them Dehlavi, the early form of Hindustani spoken around Delhi.
The syncretic voice of Dakhni poets
In the linguistically diverse Deccan, Dehlavi mingled with Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, and Persian, birthing a new hybrid that became the lingua franca of the region’s Muslims. By 1347, when the Bahmani Sultanate broke away from Delhi, Dakhni had already taken root as the everyday speech of settlers as well as converts. Literary Dakhni emerged outside the Persian-dominated courts, primarily through Sufi preaching aimed at the common people.
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The earliest known surviving work is the 4,000-line masnavi (a poem written in rhyming couplets) Kadam Rao Padam Rao, composed between 1421 and 1434 (or 1435) by Fakhruddin Nizami in Bidar, then the Bahmani capital. A romantic epic drawing on local folklore, it blended Persianate storytelling with Deccani vocabulary and Dravidian loanwords, marking the birth of a distinct southern literary voice: Dravidian loanwords, to name just a few, include curry and pandal to English; danda and mayura to Sanskrit/Indo-Aryan, and oryza (cultivated rice) and zingiberis (ginger root) to ancient Greek.
These borrowings show Dravidian speakers’ early interactions with other cultures; interestingly, some words appear as early as the Rig Veda. The language truly flowered after the Bahmani Sultanate fragmented into the five Deccan Sultanates in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Bijapur under the Adil Shahis and Golconda under the Qutb Shahis became its twin capitals of creativity. It was here that Dakhni shed its purely religious role and took on a secular, courtly, and mystical flavour. Sultans themselves became patrons and poets. Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, founder of Hyderabad, composed an entire kulliyyat (collected works) in Dakhni: secular poetry of love, nature, and Deccani pride. Ibrahim Adil Shah II, the sixth Sultan of the Bijapur Sultanate, wrote Kitab-e-Navras, a treatise on the nine rasas of Indian aesthetics, and the masnavi Pem Nem, both in the local tongue.
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Notable works that followed include: Asadullah Wajhi’s Sab Ras (1635), a sophisticated allegory of the soul’s journey, and Ibn-e-Nishati’s Phulban (1655), a Deccani adaptation of a Persian tale, both composed in Golconda. Poets like Nusrati in Bijapur and San’ati (author of Qissa-e-Benazir, 1645) laced their verse with local colour (references to Deccani seasons, flora, Hindu deities, and festivals) while favouring Sanskrit-derived and indigenous words over heavy Persian and Arabic. The forms were classic: masnavi, qasida (panegyrics), and ghazals. Sufi and Bhakti saints used Dakhni for accessible teachings, weaving communal harmony into the fabric of Deccani identity.
This was no provincial dialect but a confident literary language. As historian Richard Eaton and linguist David Matthews have observed, the very name “Dakhni” (of the Deccan), first prominently used in 1645, signalled “a new point of geographical reference, and the new spirit of cultural independence.” After the 1565 Battle of Talikota, when Deccan forces defeated Vijayanagara, plunder funded a cultural renaissance. Dakhni poets celebrated the south while maintaining Persianate aesthetics, creating a uniquely syncretic voice.
‘A picturesque style of speech’
This golden age, however, sadly came to an end. The turning point came with Aurangzeb’s conquest in the wake of his southern campaigns. In 1686, Bijapur fell; in 1687, Golconda surrendered. The Mughal emperor’s conquest integrated the Deccan into a vast northern-centric empire, where Persian remained the language of administration and emerging Rekhta (a Persianised northern Hindustani that would evolve into modern Urdu) gained prestige in Delhi and Agra. Courtly patronage for Dakhni dwindled. Elites lost power; poets faced pressure to adapt or migrate. One Bijapuri poet, Hashmi Bijapuri, captured the despair over the loss in a post-conquest verse: “Tujhe chaakri kya, tu apneech bol/ Tera sher Dakhni hai, Dakhneech bol (Why seek patronage? Speak in your own tongue; Your poetry is Dakhni, so speak in Dakhni).
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Literary productions were few and far between. The Deccan’s once-thriving poetic circles fell silent as cultural capital shifted north. By the 18th century, Dakhni survived primarily as a spoken regional dialect: rich, idiomatic, and laced with Marathi, Kannada, and Telugu words like kaiku (why), nakko (no), and hau (yes), but stripped of formal literary patronage. The Asaf Jahi Nizams of Hyderabad offered some regional protection, but Persian dominated officialdom until 1837, and standardised Urdu later filled the literary vacuum. As scholar MN Sayeed, former head of Urdu at Bangalore University, has noted, “Most Dakhni speakers are unaware that epic poetry was once written in their language.”
Wali Dakhni (1667-1707), a poet of Deccani origin, ironically helped accelerate the shift. His divan, composed in a style palatable to northern tastes, helped birth Rekhta and modern Urdu. As historians HK Sherwani and PM Joshi observed in History of the Mediaeval Deccan (1295–1724), part of a seminal two-volume study, which covers Bahmani and Shahi kingdoms, Dakhni’s literary end directly fed Urdu’s rise, but at the cost of its own distinct southern identity. Dakhni, however, did not disappear entirely. One could still notice its remnants in folk songs, day-to-day conversation in Hyde, and later in theatre and cinema.
Babban Khan’s Adrak Ke Panje was a modern revival: a string of everyday Hyderabadi vignettes delivered in unfiltered, unapologetic Dakhni that made audiences lap it up with a sense of recognition. As Bilkiz Alladin wrote in The Illustrated Weekly of India, it offered “a glimpse of the now disappearing, picturesque style of speech”.
Khan’s work, performed in 60 countries and translated into 27 languages, proved Dakhni’s wit could transcend borders. It inspired Hyderabadi films like Lakshmikanth Chenna’s Hyderabad Nawabs (2006) and kept the dialect’s earthy flavour alive when standardised Urdu often felt distant and formal. Khan showed that even a “dialect” confined to satire could conquer stages worldwide. Today, Dakhni’s full literary revival may be unlikely, but its spirit, one hopes, will remain very much alive.
