88 A HISTORY OF HINDI LITERATURE period is marked by the creation of a new Hindi literary dialect and of Hindi prose. Lallu Ji Lai.— At the commencement of the nineteenth century the head of the Fort William College at Calcutta was Dr. John Gilchrist. With the help of the other European officers of the College, such as Captain Abraham Lockett, Professor J. W. Taylor, and Dr. Hunter, he gave a great impetus to the cultivation of vernacular literature. Text-books suitable for the study of the European officials were collected, and a group of vernacular scholars gathered together and encouraged to produce new literature. Most of the work was in connection with the Urdu language, but Lallu Ji Lai, who also wrote Urdu, and Sadal Misra, did for Hindi what was being done by other scholars for Urdu. The works which they produced, if not the first prose works in those languages, were the first literary standards, and established prose as a recognised form of literature. Lallu Ji Lai was a Brahman whose family had come originally from Gujarat, but had long been settled in North India. Under the direction of Dr. John Gilchrist he and Sadal Misra were the creators of modern "High Hindi." Many dialects of Hindi were, as we have seen, spoken in North India, but the vehicle of polite speech amongst those who did not know Persian, was Urdu. Urdu, however, had a vocabulary borrowed largely from the Persian and Arabic languages, which were specially connected with Muhammadanism. A literary language for Hindi-speaking people which could commend itself more to Hindus was very desirable, and the result was produced by taking Urdu and expelling from it words of Persian or Arabic origin, and substitut- ing for them words of Sanskrit or Hindi origin. The n2im.e Khar i Boll { "^ure speech") is sometimes used for the dialect of Delhi and Meerut, which was the language from which Urdu sprang, as well as for the modern Hindi literary dialect. It seems to be implied that Lallu Ji Lai was only restoring the Delhi and Meerut dialect to its original purity and using it for
