This excellent dissertation takes the romance Padmavat, composed in 1542 in an Avadhi dialect of Hindi by Malik Muhammad Jayasi, as its starting point. However, it is not restricted to the romance itself. It analyzes the anachronisms prevalent in anxious modern discourses about the nature of "India" and "Islam".

Most importantly, it illustrates the beginning stages of Mughal adaptation to the Indian environment, which ultimately resulted in the 18th c. form of Northern Indian which has been called Hindi, Hindavi, Urdu and Hindustani, and which is still, in a modified form, the Hindi spoken in Bollywood movies and the lingua franca of northern India.

The illustration is a page from the manuscript of Padmavat.

Hindi-Urdu