GUJARAT or Guzerat, a region of India, in the Bombay Presidency. In the widest sense of the name it includes the whole of the country where the Gujarati language is spoken, i.e. the northern districts and states of the Presidency from Palanpur to Damaun, with Kathiawar and Cutch. But it is more properly confined to the country north of the Nerbudda and east of the Rann of Cutch and Kathiawar. In this sense it has an area of 29,071 sq. m., with a population in 1901 of 4,798,504. It includes the states distributed among the agencies of Palanpur, Mahi Kantha, Rewa Kantha and Cambay, with most of Baroda and the British districts of Ahmedabad, Kaira, Panch Mahals and Broach. Less than one-fourth is British territory. The region takes its name from the Gujars, a tribe who passed into India from the north-west, established a kingdom in Rajputana, and spread south in A.D. 400-600. The ancient Hindu capital was Anhilvada; the Mahommedan dynasty, which ruled from 1396 to 1572, founded Ahmedabad, which is still the largest city; but Gujarat owed much of its historical importance to the seaports of Broach, Cambay and Surat. Its fertile plain, with a regular rainfall and numerous rivers, has caused it to be styled the “garden of India.” It suffered, however, severely from the famine of 1899-1901. For an account of the history, geography, &c., of Gujarat see the articles on the various states and districts. Gujarat gives its name to the vernacular of northern Bombay, viz. Gujarati, one of the three great languages of that Presidency, spoken by more than 9 millions. It has an ancient literature and a peculiar character. As the language of the Parsis it is prominent in the Bombay press; and it is also the commercial language of Bombay city, which lies outside the territorial area of Gujarat.
See J. Campbell, History of Gujarat (Bombay, 1896); Sir E. C. Bayley, The Muhammedan Kingdom of Gujarat (1886); A. K. Forbes, Ras Mala (1856).
GUJARATI and RAJASTHANI, the names of two members of the western sub-group of the Intermediate Group of Indo-Aryan languages (q.v.). The remaining member of this sub-group is Panjabi or Punjabi (see [Hindostani]). In 1901 the speakers of those now dealt with numbered: Gujarati, 9,439,925, and Rajasthani, 10,917,712. The two languages are closely connected and might almost be termed co-dialects of the same form of speech. Together they occupy an almost square block of country, some 400 m. broad, reaching from near Agra and Delhi on the river Jumna to the Arabian Sea. Gujarati (properly Gujarātī) is spoken in Gujarat, the northern maritime province of the Bombay Presidency, and also in Baroda and the native states adjoining. Rajasthani (properly Rājasthānī, from “Rājasthān,” the native name for Rajputana) is spoken in Rajputana and the adjoining parts of Central India.
In the articles [Indo-Aryan Languages] and [Prakrit] the history of the earlier stages of the Indo-Aryan vernaculars is given at some length. It is there shown that, from the most ancient times, there were two main groups of these forms of speech—one, the language of the Midland, spoken in the country near the Gangetic Doab, and the other, the so-called “Outer Band,” containing the Midland on three sides, west, north and south. The country to the west and south-west of the Midland, in which this outer group of languages was spoken, included the modern Punjab, Rajputana and Gujarat. In process of time the population of the Midland expanded and carried its language to its new homes. It occupied the eastern and central Punjab, and the mixed (or “intermediate”) language which there grew up became the modern Panjabi. To the west it spread into Rajputana, till its progress was stopped by the Indian desert, and in Rajputana another intermediate language took rise and became Rajasthani. As elsewhere explained, the language-wave of the Midland exercised less and less influence as it travelled farther from its home, so that, while in eastern Rajputana the local dialect is now almost a pure midland speech, in the west there are many evident traces of the old outer language still surviving. To the south-west of Rajputana there was no desert to stop the wave of Midland expansion, which therefore rolled on unobstructed into Gujarat, where it reached the sea. Here the survivals of the old outer language are stronger still. The old outer Prakrit of north Gujarat was known as “Saurāṣṭrī,” while the Prakrit of the Midland invaders was called “Śaurasēnī,” and we may therefore describe Gujarati as being an intermediate language derived (as explained in the articles [Prakrit]) from a mixture of the Apabhramśa forms of Saurāṣṭrī and Śaurasēnī, in which the latter predominated.
It will be observed that, at the present day, Gujarati breaks the continuity of the outer band of Indo-Aryan languages. To its north it has Sindhi and to its south Marathi, both outer languages with which it has only a slight connexion. On the other hand, on the east and north-east it has Rajasthani, into which it merges so gradually and imperceptibly that at the conventional border-line, in the state of Palanpur, the inhabitants of Rajputana say that the local dialect is a form of Gujarati, while the inhabitants of Gujarat say that it is Rajasthani.
Gujarati has no important local dialects, but there is considerable variation in the speeches of different classes of the community. Parsees and Mussulmans (when the latter use the language—as a rule the Gujarat Mussulmans speak Hindostani) have some striking peculiarities of pronunciation, Language. the most noticeable of which is the disregard by the latter of the distinction between cerebral and dental letters. The uneducated Hindus do not pronounce the language in the same way as their betters, and this difference is accentuated in northern Gujarat, where the lower classes substitute ē for ī, c for k, ch for kh, s for c and ch, h for s, and drop h as readily as any cockney. There is also (as in the case of the Mussulmans) a tendency to confuse cerebral and dental consonants, to substitute r for ḍ and l, to double medial consonants, and to pronounce the letter ā as å, something like the a in “all.” The Bhils of the hills east of Gujarat also speak a rude Gujarati, with special dialectic peculiarities of their own, probably due to the fact that the tribes are of Dravidian origin. These Bhil peculiarities are further mixed with corruptions of Marathi idioms in Nimar and Khandesh, where we have almost a new language.
Rajasthani has numerous dialects, each state claiming one or more of its own. Thus, in the state of Jaipur there have been catalogued no less than ten dialects among about 1,688,000 people. All Rajasthani dialects can, however, be easily classed in four well-defined groups, a north-eastern, a southern, a western and an east-central. The north-eastern (Mēwātī) is that form of Rajasthani which is merging into the Western Hindi of the Midland. It is a mixed form of speech, and need not detain us further. Similarly, the southern (Mālvī) is much mixed with the neighbouring Bundēlī form of Western Hindi. The western (Mārwāṛī) spoken in Marwar and its neighbourhood, and the east-central (Jaipurī) spoken in Jaipur and its neighbourhood, may be taken as the typical Rajasthani dialects. In the following paragraphs we shall therefore confine ourselves to Gujarati, Marwari and Jaipuri.
We know more about the ancient history of Gujarati than we do about that of any other Indo-Aryan language. The one native grammar of Apabhraṁśa Prakrit which we possess in a printed edition, was written by Hēmacandra (12th century A.D.), who lived in what is now north Gujarat, and who naturally described most fully the particular vernacular with which he was personally familiar. It was known as the Nāgara Apabhraṁśa, closely connected (as above explained) with Śaurasēnī, and was so named after the Nāgara Brahmans of the locality. These men carried on the tradition of learning inherited from Hēmacandra, and we see Gujarati almost in the act of taking birth in a work called the Mugdhāvabōdhamauktika, written by one of them only two hundred years after his death. Formal Gujarati literature is said to commence with the poet Narsingh Mētā in the 15th century. Rajasthani literature has received but small attention from European or native scholars, and we are as yet unable to say how far back the language goes.
Both Gujarati and Rajasthani are usually written in current scripts related to the well-known Nāgarī alphabet (see [Sanskrit]). The form employed in Rajputana is known all over northern India as the “Mahājanī” alphabet, being used by bankers or Mahājans, most of whom are Marwaris. It is noteworthy as possessing two distinct characters for ḍ and ṛ. The Gujarati character closely resembles the Kaithī character of northern India (see [Bihari]). The Nāgarī character is also freely used in Rajputana, and to a less extent in Gujarat, where it is employed by the Nāgara Brahmans, who claim that their tribe has given the alphabet its name.