Language and Literature: Dialects, Dingal and Pingal

Where this sits

RPSC's seventh syllabus line: "Language and literature — dialects of Rajasthani, Rajasthani literature and folk literature."

This chapter is written from the survey that created the classification everyone still uses. Almost every dialect map of Rajasthan in circulation descends from George Abraham Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India, Volume IX, Indo-Aryan Family, Central Group, Part II: Specimens of the Rajasthani and Gujarati, and that volume was read directly for this chapter.

Which immediately raises the question this site has committed to asking. The LSI is a colonial survey, and our rule puts "dialect and language boundaries as settled linguistics" firmly in the column of things not to take from such a source at face value. So this chapter presents Grierson's scheme as Grierson's — the framework the field works from and argues with, not a natural fact about how people speak. That is not a hedge. It is the accurate description of what a dialect classification is.

The payoff of going to the source is that Grierson gives the actual grammatical tests he used to draw his lines. No preparation material carries them, and they turn a memorised list into something you can reason about.

1. Grierson's basic division

Grierson's scheme rests on two standards, one for each half of Rajasthan.

• For Western Rajasthani, the standard is Marwari.
• For Eastern Rajasthani, in his own words, "we have taken Jaipuri as the standard".

Everything else in the scheme is positioned against those two.

Where the word "Rajasthani" comes from

The name is younger than the language, and Grierson says so himself. In the opening lines of the volume he writes that "Rajasthani means literally the language of Rajasthan", and then, without any softening: "The name, as connoting a language, has been invented for the purposes of this Survey, in order to distinguish it from Western Hindi on the one hand, and from Gujarati on the other."

He goes further, and the sentence is the one to carry into an interview. "Europeans have hitherto included the various dialects under the loose term of 'Hindi'... Natives do not employ any general name for the language, but content themselves with referring to the various dialects, Marwari, Jaipuri, Malvi, and so forth."

So the label under which a state of eight crore people now argues for constitutional recognition was coined by a British survey officer to solve a filing problem. That is not an argument against using it. It is the reason to name whose word it is every time you use it.

The volume was printed in 1908, by the Superintendent of Government Printing, India. The year matters because 1912 circulates widely for the same classification: the Linguistic Survey ran across two decades and many volumes, and 1912 belongs to another of them. The Rajasthani classification is dated 1908 because that is the imprint on Volume IX, Part II.

Three different totals for the same language sit in one paragraph of his introduction, and he explains each. The Survey's own estimate was "more than fifteen millions", built on the returns of the Census of 1891. The Census of 1901 returned 1,09,17,712, far fewer. Grierson attributes the gap to two things: the famines of the intervening decade, and "the uncertain line which lies between Rajasthani and Western Hindi, and between Rajasthani and Sindhi", which in 1891 had swept speakers of both into the Rajasthani column. His own preferred figure for a normal year was "about twelve millions". A man who gives you three numbers and the reason for each is more use than one who gives you a single number.

What Grierson says bounds Marwari

He gives the Marwari area as bounded:

He puts the number of Marwari speakers in that area at about six millions — a survey-era figure, not a current one.

The transition speeches, which are the interesting part

Grierson does not treat the boundaries as lines but as merges, and he names the intermediate forms:

• Marwari "merges into Lahnda and Panjabi through a mixed form of speech entitled Bhattiani, which has little connexion with Rajasthani."
• "On the north-west it merges into Panjabi and the Bangaru dialect of Western Hindi through Bagri."
• "In the extreme north-east of the area, it has Mewati directly to its north."

That is a different picture from a coloured map, and it is worth carrying into Mains: the edges of Rajasthani are gradients occupied by named intermediate speeches, not borders. Bagri and Bhattiani exist because the boundary is a slope.

Five dialects, and what they are actually called

Grierson does give a count, and it is five. His sentence is: "Rajasthani contains five dialects, those of the West, of the Central East, of the North-East, and two of the South-East."

Read that once more, because the version in circulation is not it. He names four directions, not five, and gets to five because the South-East holds two. There is no group called Southern Rajasthani in his scheme, and Bhili is not in the scheme at all: the Bhil languages are the subject of a separate part of the same volume, Volume IX, Part III.

Total, all five: 1,53,90,972 speakers, as estimated for the Survey.

Two of those rows are quietly examinable. Grierson concedes that North-Eastern Rajasthani looks so much like Western Hindi that "some people maintain that it is a dialect of that language and not of Rajasthani", and that "the point is not one of great importance, but in my opinion it must be classed under the latter". That is a classifier telling you where his own line is soft. And Nimadi is not a Rajasthan dialect in any modern sense: its territory is the Nimar country of the Narmada valley, in what is now Madhya Pradesh, and Grierson records that it "has no literature, and has not hitherto been described".

2. The grammatical tests, which nobody teaches

This is the most valuable thing in the chapter. Grierson says "Standard Marwari varies but little from Jaipuri", and then gives three main points of difference:

On the future, he is specific. Jaipuri has two: one whose typical letter is s (as in mar-sy-, "I shall strike"), and one taking the suffix -lo, which changes for gender and number (mar-lo). Marwari has three: one whose typical letter is h, one adding -la which does not change for gender or number, and a third adding -ga, like the Hindi ga.

The ro / ko genitive is the single most useful thing here. It is a one-word test: a Rajasthani speech that says ro is on the western side of Grierson's line, one that says ko is on the eastern. That third Marwari future in -ga, "like the Hindi ga", is the other half of the story — the western dialect closest to Hindi in one feature while differing sharply in another, which is exactly why single-feature classifications are contested.

The same method, applied to the rest

Grierson supplies a one-line diagnostic for almost every dialect, and they are far more useful than a coloured map. Each is a thing you can hear.

The Deorawati line is worth a sentence in Mains on its own. A speech can borrow a neighbour's pronouns, its verb "to be" and much of its vocabulary and still be classified where its genitive puts it. That is what it means to say a grammatical feature is diagnostic: it survives the borrowing.

3. The dialects, and where Grierson places them

Two placements are examinable precisely because they are surprising.

Mewari is a form of Marwari, on Grierson's scheme — not a separate top-level dialect. And Malvi and Mewati are grouped with Western Hindi, not with the Rajasthani core. He notes that Malvi has a plural formed with -hor, which he compares to old Kanauji.

A candidate should know these are Grierson's judgements. Whether Rajasthani is one language with dialects or a spectrum of related but distinct tongues is an argument that continues, and it has political weight because it bears on demands for recognition of Rajasthani under the Eighth Schedule. The classification is contested; the fact that Grierson's is the classification being contested is not.

3b. The sub-dialects, which is where the matching questions live

Almost every dialect question RPSC sets is really a sub-dialect question, and the sub-dialect layer is in the Survey in full, with regions and with estimated speakers. Grierson organises Marwari's varieties by direction, which is easier to hold than an alphabetical list.

Four things in that table settle questions that are otherwise guesswork.

Bikaneri and Shekhawati are the same speech. Grierson's words: "Bikaneri and Shekhawati are the same language. They are simply Marwari with an infusion of Jaipuri, which naturally increases as we go eastwards." He then groups the two with Bagri and calls the three together Northern Marwari.

Godwari and Gorawati are two different things and the spellings collapse into each other constantly. Godwari is Southern Marwari, named from the Godwar tract, spoken in the eastern parts of the Sojat, Bali and Desuri parganas. Gorawati is the Marwari of Kishangarh, an Eastern Marwari form. They sit at opposite ends of the Marwari country.

Bagri means the speech of the Bagar. Grierson explains the name: a range of rocky hills crosses Shekhawati, the country east of it is Dhundhar and the country west of it is Bagar, "generally applied to the sandy country where water is only procurable at a great depth". The Bagar runs north-west far beyond Shekhawati, "and it is this tract, outside Shekhawati, which is the home of Bagri". Standard Bagri sits in the north-east corner of Bikaner State, running into Hissar and Sirsa, Loharu and Dadri. Its backbone, he says, "is essentially Marwari."

And Bagri is not Bangaru. The same word Bagar also appears as Bangar, and it gave its name to Bangaru, a dialect of Western Hindi in east Hissar, Delhi and Karnal. Grierson is blunt: "Bangaru is a form of speech quite different from Bagri. The latter is a dialect of Rajasthani."

The eastern sub-dialects, and where they came from

Grierson did not survey Jaipur State himself. He takes the sub-dialect division from a special linguistic survey of the State conducted by the Rev. G. Macalister and published by the Maharaja of Jaipur in 1898, which found thirteen forms of speech in the State, of which six are forms of Jaipuri.

Note that Kathaira and Chaurasi are both south-western and Nagarchal and Rajawati are both south-eastern. Lists that scatter them across the compass are guessing.

The name Jaipuri is itself a European coinage, and Grierson says so. "The name 'Jaipuri' employed for the main language of Eastern Rajasthani has been coined by Europeans, from the name of the chief town of the State. Natives usually call it Dhundhari, or the language of the Dhundhar country", the tract south-east of the hills that divide Shekhawati from Jaipur proper, the name being traced to a once-celebrated sacrificial mount, dhundh. He records two further native names: Jhadshahi boli, "the speech of the kingdom of the wilderness", and, contemptuously, kai-ket-ki boli, from the Jaipuri word kai, "what".

That is the second time in this chapter that the standard name for a Rajasthani speech turns out to be a foreign convenience. The language is Rajasthani because a survey needed a heading, and its eastern standard is Jaipuri because a town was easy to point at. Both names are the ones the exam uses, and neither is what a speaker would have said.

Mewati and Ahirwati, and the two Rathis

Mewati has four sub-dialects in Alwar, and Grierson prints the Alwar State officials' own figures for them.

Mewati in total: 11,21,154. Grierson calls it "a border dialect", representing "Rajasthani fading off into the Braj Bhakha dialect of Hindi".

Ahirwati has two other names, and Rathi is not one of them. Grierson: "Ahirwati, also called Hirwati and Ahirwal, or the language of the Ahir country". Its centre is Rewari, in the west of the old Gurgaon district; it also covers the Dahar tract round Najafgarh and the Jhajjar tahsil of Rohtak. He classes it as a variety of Mewati: "its backbone is throughout Mewati, and it can only be classed as a form of that dialect of Rajasthani". Total speakers, 4,48,915. And it is, in his phrase, "the connecting link between Mewati and three other dialects, Bangaru, Bagri and Shekhawati".

Rathi, in the Survey, means two different things and neither is Ahirwati. One is Rathi Mewati, from the Rath tract of Alwar, in the table above. The other sits at the far south-western corner of the state: the people of Mount Abu, in Sirohi, "known as the Abu lok", speak a form of Sirohi "which is called Rathi by the Rajputs of the plains". Grierson adds what the word carries. The Abu people "style themselves Rajputs"; the Rajputs of the plains "call them Rathi, i.e., half-castes, a title which they resent".

That last line is the reason this site reads colonial surveys the way it does. A word that arrives in a dialect list as a neutral label is, in the source itself, recorded as an insult that its subjects rejected. The name is real evidence of what the plains Rajputs thought. It is not evidence about the speech.

Two more names worth having

Mewari runs well past Mewar, and picks up local names as it goes: it is spoken in the Nimbahera pargana of Tonk and the Gangapur pargana of Neemuch, in north Pratapgarh, in south Ajmer, and in two places where it is called something else. In the south of Kishangarh it is called Sarwari. In the hilly Khairar tract, where Mewar, Jaipur and Bundi meet, it is called Khairari, and Grierson records it as the speech of the Minas of that country, about 21,000 of them within Bundi State.

Malvi's two named varieties are both easy marks. Rangri is "the form of Malvi spoken by Rajputs of Malwa proper", distinguished by "its preference for Marwari forms". Sondwari is spoken by the Sondias of the north-east of the Western Malwa Agency, the Chaumahla tract of Jhalawar, and the neighbouring Bhopal Agency. Both are sub-dialects of Malvi, not groups of their own.

4. What the Census actually counts

Grierson drew the map; the Census counts the people, and it does not use Grierson's categories. The figures below are from the Census of India 2011, Language — Paper 1 of 2018, Statement 1, which lists every mother tongue returned by 10,000 speakers or more.

Three facts here are worth more than the numbers, and each of them is directly examinable.

One: Rajasthani is not a Scheduled language

Rajasthani was returned by 2,58,06,344 speakers in 2011 — and the Census groups it, with every one of those speakers, under HINDI.

That grouping is the whole of the Eighth Schedule argument in one line of a table. A demand for recognition of Rajasthani is a demand to be counted as a language rather than as a mother tongue inside Hindi — and the Census, by grouping it, records the position the demand is against. The number is large: at 2.58 crore, Rajasthani alone exceeds several languages that are in the Eighth Schedule.

Two: Wagdi is not counted with Rajasthani at all

Wagdi — the speech of Vagad, the Dungarpur and Banswara country — was returned by 33,93,991 speakers, and the Census groups it under BHILI/BHILODI, a Non-Scheduled language, not under Hindi.

So the Census classification cuts across the linguistic one. On a dialect map Wagdi sits at the southern end of the Rajasthani spectrum; in the Census it sits inside a tribal language of the Bhil belt. Neither is a mistake — they are answering different questions, one about grammatical descent and one about what people said their mother tongue was. But a candidate who quotes a Rajasthani speaker-total should know that Wagdi's 34 lakh are not inside it.

And note who else is there. Garasia appears under Bhili/Bhilodi too — the same community whose Walar dance the folk-dance chapter could not describe from official sources. A community's language and its dance are classified by different departments and both end up thinly recorded.

Three: Bagri is counted twice, under two different languages

The same name appears in two places in the same table, seven times larger in one than the other. Grierson had already described Bagri as the speech through which Marwari merges into Punjabi and Bangaru — and the Census, a century later, records exactly that ambiguity by splitting the returns between the two. A transition dialect does not resolve when you count it; it splits.

This is the single best illustration on the page of why dialect boundaries are arguments rather than lines, and it is worth a sentence in a Mains answer on linguistic identity.

A comparison across a century

Grierson put the Marwari speakers of his area at about six millions. The Census of 2011 returns 78,31,749 for Marwari. The two figures are not comparable and should never be quoted as a growth rate — the areas differ, the categories differ, and Grierson's is a survey estimate against an enumeration. What the pair is good for is showing that the name has held for a century while everything around it was reclassified.

One dialect not found. Ahirwati does not appear in Statement 1, which covers mother tongues returned by 10,000 speakers or more. That means it was not separately returned at that threshold, not that it does not exist, and this page therefore gives no Census figure for it.

Four: the man who drew the map said it was not Hindi

The Census groups every Rajasthani mother tongue under Hindi. Grierson, whose classification the Census is not using, had ruled that out in advance, in the concluding paragraph of the same introduction:

"They are entitled to the dignity of being classed as together forming a separate, independent language. They differ much more widely from Western Hindi than does, for instance, Panjabi. Under any circumstances they cannot be classed as dialects of Western Hindi. If they are to be considered as dialects of some hitherto acknowledged language, then they are dialects of Gujarati."

That is a hundred-and-eighteen-year-old sentence doing live work. The argument for Eighth Schedule recognition does not have to be built from scratch: the survey that produced the standard classification concluded, on grammatical grounds it sets out at length, that Rajasthani is not Hindi and that if it must be subordinated to anything, the candidate is Gujarati and not Hindi at all. A candidate who can quote that line has changed the shape of the answer.

Five: one national body already counts Rajasthani as a language

The Sahitya Akademi does what the Eighth Schedule does not. Its own statement, on its official site: "Besides the 22 languages enumerated in the Constitution of India, the Sahitya Akademi has recognised English and Rajasthani as languages in which its programme may be implemented." The Akademi therefore works in 24 languages, and Rajasthani is one of them.

The recognition is not ceremonial. It has a dated, unbroken record of awards. The Akademi's own award list is headed "RAJASTHANI (Since 1974)".

Source: Sahitya Akademi, list of Akademi Award winners, read 26 August 2026. The full Rajasthani list runs to every year from 1974.

And the Akademi's highest honour has gone to a Rajasthani writer. Vijay Dan Detha (1926-2013) was elected a Fellow of the Sahitya Akademi in 2004, listed by the Akademi under the language Rajasthani. He is also the man who received the first Rajasthani award, in 1974, for the tenth volume of Batan Ri Phulwari, a collection of folk-tales. The first thing the national literary body honoured in Rajasthani was the oral tradition written down.

The state maintains its own institutions on the same premise, and their names, cities and journals are asked directly.

Sources: Rajasthan Sahitya Akademi, "About Academy"; and the Government of Rajasthan Art and Culture portal's page on the Bikaner akademi's Establishment Day, which gives 25 January 1983. Both read 26 August 2026. The Bikaner akademi's date is worth fixing in memory, because 25 January 1985 circulates widely and the day and month are right in both versions. Only the year is wrong.

Put the three together and the Eighth Schedule question resolves into a single sentence. Rajasthani is recognised as a language by the Sahitya Akademi, has been given awards under that name every year since 1974, has a state akademi of its own at Bikaner since 1983, and is counted inside Hindi by the Census. The demand is not for a status nobody has granted. It is for the Constitution to agree with the bodies that already have.

4b. The board's classification, which is a third view

This chapter carries three independent accounts of the same dialects — Grierson's survey, the Census of 2011, and the Rajasthan Board's — and they do not agree, which is the useful part.

Where Rajasthani comes from

The board settles on one derivation among several. Scholars interpret the role of Apabhramsa differently, and the interpretation it finds most appropriate is that Rajasthani evolved out of Marugurjari Apabhramsa.

And it draws the parallel that makes the claim testable: Marubhasha — Rajasthani — evolved from Marugurjari Apabhramsa, while Gujarati evolved from Gurjari. Both languages evince grammatical similarities, which is offered as the evidence for the common ancestor.

That is why Gujarati keeps appearing in the entries below. A shared parent explains what would otherwise look like borrowing — and it is a better answer than saying a dialect was simply influenced by its neighbour.

Two categories, against Grierson's five groups

The board notes that Grierson divided the Rajasthani dialects into five main groups, and then offers a broader two-fold division of its own.

Two things in that table are worth having. First, the name: Ahirwati is also called Rathi — the dialect for which section 4 records that the Census gives no figure at all, since it was not returned by ten thousand speakers. A dialect can be absent from a national enumeration and still be a named category in the state's own textbook.

Second, the division is the same one Grierson drew but stated differently. Section 1 gives his scheme as resting on two standards, Marwari for the west and Jaipuri for the east. The board keeps the east-west axis and lists the members; Grierson keeps it and names the standards. They are the same cut, described from opposite ends.

The dialects, with their sub-dialects

The Chhe test, beside Grierson's ro and ko

Section 2 gives Grierson's genitive test: a speech that says ro is west of his line, one that says ko is east of it. The board offers a different marker entirely — the word Chhe, shared by Dhundari and Hadoti, and read as evidence of Gujarat influence.

The two tests are not rivals; they measure different things. Grierson's ro/ko separates Rajasthani from Rajasthani; the board's Chhe traces a relationship to Gujarati across the whole eastern group. A candidate who can say which marker answers which question is doing linguistics rather than recitation.

Three classifications, and why they disagree

Section 4 already makes this point through Wagdi, which is Rajasthani on a dialect map and Bhili in the Census. The board provides the third position: it treats Wagadi as a Rajasthani dialect of the Banswara-Dungarpur country, and separately treats Bhili as the dialect of the hill tribes. So one speech is a Rajasthani dialect to the board, a Bhili mother tongue to the Census, and a southern extension of the Rajasthani spectrum to Grierson. None of the three is wrong. They are answering three different questions, and knowing which is being asked is the whole skill.

Archival literature

One definition worth carrying. The earliest Rajasthani literature survives in the form of inscriptions, and literature engraved on inscriptions, coins and seals is called archival literature. The body of it is meagre, the board says, but what survives is of great literary and historical importance — and the influence of the oral tradition on Rajasthani literature is clearly visible throughout.

That term ties this chapter to the sources chapter, where inscriptions and coin legends are treated as historical evidence. The board is naming the same material as a literary category — the same object is a source to a historian and a genre to a literary scholar.

The hand the records are actually written in

A page about inscriptions and bahis should say what the writing looked like, and the Survey does. Grierson distinguishes two scripts in use for Marwari in his day:

• For books and printing, the ordinary Deva-nagari character.
• For correspondence and mercantile documents, "a rough corruption similar to the 'Mahajani' character of Upper India and to the Modi of Marathi". Its spelling is careless and "vowels being quite commonly omitted, so that it is often illegible". No types were ever cast for it, which is why it survives only in manuscript.

In a footnote he adds the point that makes it memorable. "The Mahajani character is really this Marwari current script which has been carried in the course of trade all over India." Its vowel-less illegibility, he says, has generated stories, of which the best known is of the Marwari merchant at Delhi whose clerk wrote home babu ajmer gayo, bari bahi bhej dyo, "the Babu has gone to Ajmer, send the big ledger", and, the vowels being unwritten, was read as babu aj mar-gayo, bari bahu bhej dijo: "the Babu died today, send the chief wife."

The joke is a script lesson. A commercial hand optimised for speed, written by people who already knew what the document said, is exactly the kind of record that is hard for a historian and easy for a bookkeeper. The bahi the anecdote turns on is the same bahi the sources chapter treats as evidence.

One further point of fact, because it cuts against the assumption that a dialect implies a script. Grierson records that Ahirwati was written in all three of Deva-nagari, Gurmukhi and the Persian character, the choice resting with the writer: his Nabha specimens came in Gurmukhi, his Gurgaon specimens in Nagari, his Rohtak specimens in Persian. One speech, three alphabets, decided by who was holding the pen.

5. The two literary languages: Dingal and Pingal

Rajasthani literature is written in two literary idioms, and the distinction is asked constantly.

Most Dingal literature is said to have been composed by Charans, and it is the vehicle of war poetry celebrating martial exploits.

What the two words actually mean, from the two people who defined them

Both idioms have a precise definition, and it is a definition by which language the poet chose, not by mood.

Grierson, in the Marwari section of the Survey: "The writers sometimes composed in Marwari and sometimes in Braj Bhakha. In the former case the language was called Dingal and in the latter Pingal."

Tessitori, editing a Dingal text nine years later, says the same thing at greater length: "there are two different forms of language, which the bards of Rajputana use in their poetical compositions, the one called Dingala and the other Pingala. The latter is but the Braja Bhakha, more or less impure and vitiated by the introduction of Marwari words and the influence of local idioms. The former is the local Marwari, differing from the colloquial only for the elaborateness of the diction and the use of poetical and obsolete words. Dingala is therefore practically synonymous with literary or poetical Marwari."

This fills the empty cell in the table above and changes what the pair is for. Heroic against lyrical is a description of what the two idioms were used for. Marwari against Braj Bhakha is what they are. A question that asks which idiom a work is in is asking, underneath, which language the poet was writing.

Tessitori also periodises Dingal, which nothing else on this page does. He fixes the close of the sixteenth century as roughly the end of the Old Western Rajasthani period and the beginning of Modern Marwari, and applies the same line to the literary idiom: Old Dingal, from the thirteenth century to the end of the sixteenth; Later Dingal, from the beginning of the seventeenth to his own day. That is a scholar's periodisation with a stated criterion and a named author, which is what a periodisation has to be to be worth quoting.

Connect this to the sources chapter. The sources chapter warns that rasos and praise-poetry are magnificent as evidence of self-image and treacherous for chronology. Dingal is the idiom of exactly that literature. So the language question and the source-criticism question are the same question: a tradition whose highest register is heroic praise will not be a reliable chronicle, and knowing the idiom tells you what to expect of the text.

6. The works to know

Two of these attach to people already on this site.

Prithviraj Rathore was the younger brother of Rai Singh of Bikaner and son of Kalyanmal — and Rai Singh is the ruler who built Junagarh between 1589 and 1594, from the dynasties and administration chapters. The fort and the poem come out of the same household.

Suryamall Misran was Rajkavi of Bundi and is described as proficient in six languages, including Dingal, Sanskrit, Prakrit and Apabhramsha, and as a scholar of grammar, logic, history and politics. A court poet who is also a trained historian is exactly the figure the sources chapter says to look for, and the Vansh Bhaskar is correspondingly more usable than a raso.

The Sanskrit works — Prithviraja Vijaya, Hammira Mahakavya, the temple prashastis — and the Persian chronicles are treated in the sources chapter, as is the khyat and bahi literature.

6b. The forms, which is the other half of the syllabus line

The syllabus says literature, and literature in Rajasthani is organised by form. A khyat and a vachanika are not two books, they are two kinds of writing, and the exam asks for the kind.

The authority here is Luigi Pio Tessitori (1887-1919), the Italian scholar who conducted the Asiatic Society of Bengal's Bardic and Historical Survey of Rajputana from a base in Rajputana between 1914 and his death at Bikaner. His Descriptive Catalogue of Bardic and Historical Manuscripts, Section I, Part I, published at Calcutta in 1917 and prefaced from Jodhpur in August 1915, opens by naming the prose genres, and the sentence is the cleanest definition available of what the class contains:

"Under the general title of 'Prose Chronicles', the present section... includes all kinds of works in prose, such as those meant by the Marwari terms khyata, vata, vigata, vamsavali, pidhis and similar ones, all of which partake more or less of an historical character."

The vachanika definition is the single most valuable line in this section, because it is a definition a candidate can use. A vachanika is not "a mixture of prose and poetry". It is prose that rhymes, with metrical verse dropped into it.

Two vachanikas hold the whole tradition between them.

The Vachanika Achaldas Khichi ri, by the Charan Sivadas, is what Tessitori calls the classical model, from the Old Dingal period. It honours Achaldas, the Khichi chief of Gagron, and his death in a sortie against Muslim besiegers, in the earlier half of the fifteenth century. Achaldas had married a daughter of Rana Mokal of Chittor, who was assassinated while marching to his son-in-law's aid.

The Vachanika Rathor Ratan Singhji ri Mahesdasot ri, by Khiriya Jaga, composed about 1660, is the last noteworthy example of the form, "which closes the period when such literary compositions were frequent". Tessitori edited it and published it as Bibliotheca Indica New Series No. 41 in 1917, with the title-page description "Dingala Text, with Notes and Glossary." In it Ratan Singh is described coming to meet Jaswant Singh "surrounded by a throng of bards, Charans and Bhats".

Do not confuse khyat with khyal. A khyat is a prose chronicle. A khyal is a Marwari play: the Survey's own list of authorities on Marwari includes Rev. J. Robson, A Selection of Khyals or Marwari Plays, Beawar Mission Press, 1866. One is a chronicle and one is theatre, and they differ by a single letter.

The Charans, and why the office matters more than the idiom

Section 5 says Dingal is the Charans' idiom. The more useful fact is that being a Charan was a position, not a genre.

Tessitori's own material shows the arrangement working. Khiriya Jaga was in the service of Ratan Singh of Ratlam; three of his kavittas celebrating Ratan Singh's liberality survive in a manuscript in the Darbar Library in the Fort of Bikaner; after the battle of Ujjain his family was rewarded by Ratan Singh's successor with two villages, Alaniya and Deri, held by the poet's descendants for generations. In the story of Achaldas, the bard Sivadas is deliberately sent out of the doomed fort with the heir, so that between them the house should have "a revenger of his death and a Homer of his deeds."

That is the whole method of Charan literature in one image. The poet is placed near the record because the record is the point, and he is preserved from the battle because a defeat with no one to sing it is simply a defeat. A tradition organised that way will be exact about names, kin and grants, and unreliable about who was in the wrong. The sources chapter reaches the same conclusion from the other end.

Grierson, writing in 1908, adds the scale of what was then unread. Beyond the Marwari poems, he says, "there is an enormous mass of literature in various forms of Rajasthani, of considerable historical importance, about which hardly anything is known", the corpus of bardic histories described in Tod's Rajasthan, "still a virgin mine for the student of history and of language". He warns that unless a body of scholars took it up on a uniform plan, "the only students of Rajputana history for many years to come will be fish-insects and white-ants". Tessitori's Bardic and Historical Survey, begun six years later, is the direct answer to that sentence.

One caution on the most famous work of all

The Prithviraj Raso is the standard first answer to any question about early Rajasthani literature, and the Survey attaches two warnings to it. Grierson names Chand Bardai as its author and calls it the most celebrated of the bardic histories, then says of the portion then published that it "is written in an old form of Western Hindi, not Rajasthani", and that this work, "while the most celebrated, is also the one regarding the authenticity of which the most serious doubts are justified".

Both halves are examinable and they point in opposite directions from the usual answer. The Raso is the famous Rajasthani work whose published text a linguist would not call Rajasthani, and whose date is the least secure of any work on this page. It belongs in an answer as a problem, not as a foundation.

7. Statement-based questions: the fault lines

Type A — Standard, wrong dialect

• Marwari is Grierson's standard for Western Rajasthani; Jaipuri for Eastern.
• Mewari is, on his scheme, an eastern form of Marwari, not a separate top-level dialect.

Type B — Grouping, wrong family

• Malvi and Mewati are placed by Grierson as most nearly related to Western Hindi.
• Bhattiani has, in his words, "little connexion with Rajasthani".
• Bagri is the merge into Punjabi and Bangaru.

Type C — The grammatical tests

Type D — The Census, wrong grouping

Type E — The board's dialect scheme

Type F — Literature, wrong idiom or author

Type G — Grierson's scheme, as it is usually misquoted

Type H — Recognition, and who gives it

8. Writing this in Mains

Say whose classification it is. Grierson's LSI is the framework for every dialect map of Rajasthan in use, and it was a colonial survey with an administrative purpose. Using it while naming it is the honest move, and it lets you go on to note that whether Rajasthani is one language or several remains contested — a question with real stakes for Eighth Schedule recognition.

Use the grammatical tests rather than the map. A one-word test — ro against ko — does more work than a coloured diagram, and it shows you have read past the summary.

Use the transition speeches to argue against hard boundaries. Bagri and Bhattiani exist because the edge of Rajasthani is a slope. Languages shade into one another, and the intermediate forms have names and speakers of their own.

Join the language question to the source question. Dingal is the idiom of heroic praise poetry, which is precisely the literature the sources chapter says to distrust for chronology. Knowing the register tells you what kind of evidence the text can be, which is source criticism done through linguistics.

Answer the recognition question with institutions, not sentiment. Rajasthani is recognised by the Sahitya Akademi and has carried its own annual award since 1974; it has a state akademi at Bikaner since 25 January 1983; and it is counted inside Hindi by the Census of 2011. Grierson, in 1908, had already written that these dialects "cannot be classed as dialects of Western Hindi." An answer built on that sequence is arguing from the record rather than from feeling, and it lets you concede the real difficulty honestly: the boundary between Rajasthani and Hindi is genuinely uncertain, which is why the enumerators keep resolving it the way they do.

9. Nowadays

Covering 1 January to 27 August 2026. This section is updated every month until Prelims and Mains. Everything in it is dated, because a current-affairs fact without a date is worse than no fact at all.

The live question in this chapter is recognition, and it did not move in this window. Rajasthani is still not in the Eighth Schedule. No Bill, notification or Union government decision granting it recognition was made between 1 January and 27 August 2026, and the chapter's account of why the question is hard, that the language's own boundaries are contested and the Census counts its dialects under three different heads, is unchanged.

The manuscripts, where the year's real activity was. Two counts circulated and both need their basis stated. On 21 February 2026 the Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute said that of roughly 1,24,000 manuscripts and documents across its Jodhpur directorate and six branches, about 95 per cent are digitised, with the material to go online under government guidelines. That is the Director's statement to a news channel, not a departmental report. Separately, on 7 May 2026 Rajasthan was reported as the leading state in the Gyan Bharatam Mission manuscript survey, with 15,21,034 manuscripts verified and Bikaner accounting for about 3,39,740. That is a mid-survey progress figure, not an audited total, and the survey was still running to 16 June 2026.

Why those numbers belong in a literature chapter at all. The Dingal and Pingal corpus, the khyats and the vats are manuscript literature. A digitisation programme is the mechanism by which this chapter's primary sources become checkable, and until the material is actually online, the works listed above remain known largely through printed editions and catalogues.

What has not changed. Grierson's classification remains the one being contested, and the contest is not a defect in it. The Census 2011 groupings stand: Rajasthani returned under Hindi, Wagdi under Bhili/Bhilodi, and Bagri counted twice. No new Census, linguistic survey or state notification in this window altered any of them.

Important for RAS

Prelims Focus

• Census of India 2011, speakers by mother tongue — Rajasthani 2,58,06,344 · Marwari 78,31,749 · Malvi 52,12,617 · Mewari 42,12,262 · Hara/Harauti 29,44,356 · Nimadi 23,09,265 · Dhundhari 14,76,446 · Mewati 8,56,643 · Bagri Rajasthani 2,34,227 · Bishnoi 12,079 — all grouped under HINDI

• The two that break the pattern — Wagdi (33,93,991) and Garasia (76,749) are grouped under BHILI/BHILODI, a Non-Scheduled language, not under Hindi. Wagdi's 34 lakh are not inside any Rajasthani total

• Bagri is counted twice — Bagri Rajasthani under Hindi (2,34,227) and Bagri under Punjabi (16,56,588). Grierson had already called Bagri the speech through which Marwari merges into Punjabi and Bangaru

• Rajasthani is NOT in the Eighth Schedule — it is a mother tongue grouped under Hindi, which is precisely what the recognition demand is about

• Ahirwati does not appear among mother tongues returned by 10,000 or more speakers, so no Census figure is given for it here

• Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. IX, Central Group, Part II — Specimens of the Rajasthani and Gujarati; the source of the standard dialect classification

• Two standards — Marwari for Western Rajasthani; Jaipuri for Eastern Rajasthani

• Grammatical tests — genitive postposition ko (Jaipuri) against ro (Marwari); verb substantive chhũ / chhõ in Jaipuri; two future forms in Jaipuri (typical letter s; suffix -lo, varying for gender and number) against three in Marwari (typical letter h; invariable -la; -ga as in Hindi)

• Placements — Mewari / Morwayi is an eastern form of Marwari, in Mewar; Malvi and Mewati are "most nearly related to Western Hindi"; Bagri is the merge into Punjabi and Bangaru; Bhattiani has "little connexion with Rajasthani"; Standard Marwari is spoken in the centre of Marwar State, mixing with Jaipuri in the north-east and in Kishangarh, Ajmer and west Merwara

• Marwari speakers — about six millions at the time of the survey

• Dingal — heroic, archaic Rajasthani, the idiom of the Charans and of martial poetry. Pingal — lyrical, devotional and romantic

• Kanhadade Prabandha — Padmanabha, 1455, western Apabhramsha; resistance to Alauddin Khalji

• Veli Krisan Rukmani Ri — Prithviraj Rathore (1549-1600), brother of Rai Singh of Bikaner, son of Kalyanmal; Dingal; called the "fifth Veda" and "nineteenth Purana" by Dursa Adha

• Vansh Bhaskar — Suryamall Misran (1815-1868), Rajkavi of Bundi; Dingal historical poetry on Bundi and northern India

• Origin, per the board — Rajasthani from Marugurjari Apabhramsa; Gujarati from Gurjari; the two show grammatical similarities

• Two categories — Western: Marwari, Mewari, Bagdi, Shekhawati · Eastern: Dhundari, Hadoti, Mewati, Ahirwati (Rathi). The board notes Grierson divided them into five main groups

• Sub-dialects — Marwari: Thali, Gorwari · Mewari: Parvati Mewari (hills), Maidani Mewari (plains) · Dhundari: Torawati, Rajawati, Nagarchola · Malawi: Rangdi, Neemadi

• Areas — Marwari: Jodhpur, Nagaur, Jaisalmer, Pali · Mewari: Udaipur, Chittorgarh, Rajsamand, Bhilwara · Dhundari: Jaipur, Dausa, Dudu · Hadoti: Kota, Bundi, Jhalawar, Baran · Mewati: Alwar and parts of Bharatpur, extending into Haryana, with Brij influence near Bharatpur · Wagadi: Banswara, Dungarpur · Malawi: Pratapgarh · Shekhawati: Churu, Jhunjhunu, Hanumangarh, Suratgarh, Ganganagar

• The Chhe marker — used in Dhundari and Hadoti, read as Gujarat influence. Distinct from Grierson's ro / ko genitive test

• Shekhawati is named after Rao Shekha; Bhili is the main hill dialect because the Bhils predominate among Bhil, Meena and Garasiya

• Archival literature — literature engraved on inscriptions, coins and seals; meagre in body, great in importance

• The name — "Rajasthani" as a language name was invented for the Linguistic Survey; before it, speakers named only the dialects. Jaipuri is likewise a European coinage from the town's name; the native name is Dhundhari, also Jhadshahi boli

• Grierson's five — West (Marwari), Central-East (Jaipuri, Harauti), North-East (Mewati, Ahirwati), and two South-Eastern (Malvi, Nimadi). No "Southern" group; Bhili is a separate language, Vol. IX Part III

• Speakers by dialect, LSI estimate — Marwari 60,88,389 · Central-East 29,07,200 · North-Eastern 15,70,099 · Malvi 48,50,507 · Nimadi 4,74,777 · total 1,53,90,972. The Census of 1901 returned 1,09,17,712; Grierson's own normal-year figure was "about twelve millions"

• Marwari's five areal sets — Standard · Eastern (Mewari, Ajmer, Merwara, Gorawati) · Southern (Godwari, Sirohi, Deorawati, Marwari-Gujarati) · Western (Thali, Dhatki) · Northern (Bikaneri, Shekhawati, Bagri)

• Six forms of Jaipuri, from Macalister's 1898 survey of Jaipur State — Torawati (north) · Standard (centre) · Kathaira and Chaurasi (south-west) · Nagarchal and Rajawati (south-east). Beside them, Kishangarhi, Ajmeri and Harauti, with Sipari in Gwalior

• Four Mewati sub-dialects in Alwar — Standard, Rathi (Rath tract), Nahera, Kather (also of Bharatpur, mixed with Braj)

• Ahirwati — also Hirwati and Ahirwal; centre Rewari; a form of Mewati; 4,48,915 speakers; the link between Mewati and Bangaru, Bagri and Shekhawati; its marker is "I am" = sũ, against Mewati hũ

• Bagri — from Bagar, the sandy tract west of the Dhundhar hills; home in north-east Bikaner; not Dungarpur-Banswara, and not the same as Bangaru, which is Western Hindi

• Confusable names — Godwari (Southern Marwari, Godwar tract) against Gorawati (Marwari of Kishangarh); Bikaneri = Shekhawati; Sarwari (Mewari of south Kishangarh); Khairari (Mewari of the Khairar Minas); Rangri and Sondwari both under Malvi

• Diagnostics beyond ro / ko — Malvi genitive ko, present hũ, past tho, future -ga invariable · Harauti ke for kai and the agent in ne, which Jaipuri never takes · Ahirwati sũ · Godwari ch to s, s to h · Deorawati keeps ro and never Gujarati no · Sondwari initial s to h · Nimadi e to a (na, ma, aga)

• Script — Deva-nagari for books; for correspondence and mercantile documents a current hand akin to the Mahajani of Upper India and the Modi of Marathi, with vowels commonly omitted and no types ever cast. Ahirwati was written in Nagari, Gurmukhi and Persian, at the writer's choice

• Dingal and Pingal, defined by language not by mood — Dingal is composition in Marwari; Pingal is composition in Braj Bhakha. Tessitori: "Dingala is practically synonymous with literary or poetical Marwari", and divides it into Old Dingal (13th c. to end of 16th) and Later Dingal (17th c. onward)

• Prose forms — khyat (prose chronicle) · vat · vigat (pargana-by-pargana survey) · vamsavali (pedigree) · pidhi (genealogy) · vachanika (rhymed prose, each sentence rhyming with the next, with duhas, chappaya kavittas and gahas intermixed). Do not confuse khyat with khyal, a Marwari play

• Two vachanikas — Vachanika Achaldas Khichi ri, by the Charan Sivadas, on the Khichi chief of Gagron, Old Dingal, 15th century · Vachanika Rathor Ratan Singhji ri Mahesdasot ri, by Khiriya Jaga, about 1660, edited by Tessitori, 1917

• Tessitori — Luigi Pio Tessitori (1887-1919), who conducted the Bardic and Historical Survey of Rajputana for the Asiatic Society of Bengal and published the Descriptive Catalogue of Bardic and Historical Manuscripts (Calcutta, 1917)

• The Prithviraj Raso, per Grierson — by Chand Bardai; the published portion is "an old form of Western Hindi, not Rajasthani"; and it is the work "regarding the authenticity of which the most serious doubts are justified"

• Recognition — Sahitya Akademi recognises English and Rajasthani beside the 22 Eighth Schedule languages, so 24 in all; Rajasthani award since 1974, first to Vijay Dan Detha for Batan Ri Phulwari, Vol. X; Detha elected Akademi Fellow, 2004

• State bodies — Rajasthan Sahitya Akademi, Udaipur, 28 January 1958, journal Madhumati · Rajasthani Bhasha, Sahitya evam Sanskriti Akademi, Bikaner, 25 January 1983, journal Jagti Jot

• Grierson's conclusion, which the Census does not follow — the Rajasthani dialects "cannot be classed as dialects of Western Hindi" and are "entitled to the dignity of being classed as together forming a separate, independent language"

Interview and Mains Angles

• Every dialect map of Rajasthan descends from a colonial survey conducted to make the region administrable. How much of what we call a language boundary is an artefact of who was counting?
• Bagri and Bhattiani exist in the gaps between Rajasthani, Punjabi and Hindi. Do transition speeches disprove the idea of discrete languages, or only complicate it?
• Dingal is the idiom of heroic praise. Does a literary tradition whose highest register is panegyric make its own history harder to write?
• Whether Rajasthani is one language or several bears on its recognition under the Eighth Schedule. Should a classification made in 1908 for administrative convenience still be doing constitutional work?
• The Sahitya Akademi has treated Rajasthani as a language since 1974 and the Constitution has not. When two arms of the same state disagree about whether something is a language, which one is describing reality?
• Grierson admits he coined the name "Rajasthani", and that speakers used only the names of dialects. Does giving a group of speeches one name create a linguistic fact, or a political one?
• The Rajputs of the plains called the speech of the Abu hills "Rathi", meaning half-caste, and its speakers resented the name. How much of a dialect map is a record of who had the standing to name whom?
• Charan poets were kept close to rulers, and in one account deliberately kept out of a battle so the deeds would survive it. Does a literature commissioned to remember become less trustworthy, or only differently trustworthy?

Practice

• Practice: Language and Literature — 60 questions built from this chapter: 53 MCQs, 4 assertion-reason and 3 match-the-following, including Grierson's own grammatical tests.

More in This Series

• Sources of the History of Rajasthan — the khyats, rasos and Sanskrit works, and why the literary family is weak on chronology
• Major Dynasties of Rajasthan — Rai Singh of Bikaner, whose brother wrote the Veli Krisan Rukmani Ri
• Caution for Readers — including how we read colonial sources such as the LSI

Aggregator Watch

Unresolved claims from this box are collected, with what was checked, on the Caution for Readers page.

Sources & Verification

Checked as of 19 August 2026.

The principal source is George Abraham Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India, Volume IX, Indo-Aryan Family, Central Group, Part II: Specimens of the Rajasthani and Gujarati, read directly from the scanned text held by the Internet Archive, identifier in.ernet.dli.2015.95521.

Verified from it: the use of Marwari as the standard for Western Rajasthani and Grierson's statement that "we have taken Jaipuri as the standard" for the Eastern dialects; the boundaries of the Marwari area to the south in Sirohi and Palanpur, west in Thar and Parkar and Jaisalmer, north in Bikaner, the Shekhawati tract and southern Punjab, east in the Eastern dialects, south-east in Malvi and Bhil dialects, south-west in Gujarati, and north-west in Punjabi and the Lahnda of Bahawalpur; the figure of about six millions of Marwari speakers in that area; the merging of Marwari into Lahnda and Punjabi through Bhattiani, "which has little connexion with Rajasthani", and into Punjabi and the Bangaru dialect of Western Hindi through Bagri, with Mewati directly to the north in the extreme north-east; the statement that Standard Marwari is spoken in the centre of the Marwar State and is "somewhat mixed with Jaipuri" in the north-east of the State and in Kishangarh, Ajmer and west Merwara; the description of Mewari or Morwayi as "a well-known eastern form of Marwari" in Mewar and its neighbourhood, named "according to locality"; the placement of Mewati and Malvi as "most nearly related to Western Hindi", and Malvi's plural in -hor compared to old Kanauji; and the three main points of difference between Jaipuri and Standard Marwari — the genitive postposition ko against ro, the verb substantive, and the two Jaipuri future forms (typical letter s; suffix -lo varying for gender and number) against three in Marwari (typical letter h; invariable -la; -ga as in Hindi).

On the status of this source, stated under our own rule. The Linguistic Survey of India is a colonial undertaking, conducted to make India's languages legible to an administration, and dialect boundaries are precisely the category that section 6 of Caution for Readers says not to take from such a source as settled fact. This chapter therefore presents Grierson's scheme as Grierson's, attributing it in the body throughout. What is not in doubt is that his classification is the one the field has argued with ever since, which is why it must be learned; what is in doubt is whether it describes how people actually speak, and the continuing dispute over whether Rajasthani is one language or several is noted rather than resolved.

A note on the OCR. The scanned text is legible but imperfect, particularly in transliterated forms with diacritics. Where a form could not be read with confidence it has been omitted rather than guessed — this is why the Marwari verb-substantive forms are described as "its own distinct forms" instead of being given: the Jaipuri forms were legible and the Marwari ones were not.

Verified separately (from secondary sources, not the LSI): the characterisation of Dingal as heroic poetry in archaic Rajasthani associated with the Charans, and of Pingal as the lyrical, devotional and romantic idiom; Kanhadade Prabandha by Padmanabha, 1455, in a western Apabhramsha dialect, treating the resistance to Alauddin Khalji; Prithviraj Rathore's dates (1549-1600), his relationship as younger brother of Rai Singh of Bikaner and son of Kalyanmal, his authorship of the Veli Krisan Rukmani Ri in Dingal, and Dursa Adha's description of it as the "fifth Veda" and "nineteenth Purana"; and Suryamall Misran's dates (19 October 1815 to 11 October 1868), his position as Rajkavi of Bundi, his proficiency across six languages including Dingal, Sanskrit, Prakrit and Apabhramsha, and his authorship of the Vansh Bhaskar.

Added on 20 August 2026, from the Census of India. The Census of India 2011, Language — Paper 1 of 2018 (table C-16, Statement 1, published by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner), was read directly. Statement 1 lists every mother tongue returned by 10,000 speakers or more, covering 121 languages and 270 mother tongues, of which 22 are specified in the Eighth Schedule. Verified from it: Rajasthani 2,58,06,344, Marwari 78,31,749, Malvi 52,12,617, Mewari 42,12,262, Hara/Harauti 29,44,356, Nimadi 23,09,265, Dhundhari 14,76,446, Mewati 8,56,643, Bagri Rajasthani 2,34,227 and Bishnoi 12,079, all grouped under HINDI; Wagdi 33,93,991 and Garasia 76,749, both grouped under BHILI/BHILODI, a Non-Scheduled language; and Bagri 16,56,588, grouped under PUNJABI.

The three findings, stated plainly, because each of them corrects a common assumption. First, Rajasthani's 2.58 crore speakers are counted inside Hindi, so Rajasthani has no Eighth Schedule status — the grouping is the thing the recognition demand is against. Second, Wagdi is not counted with Rajasthani at all; its 34 lakh speakers sit under Bhili/Bhilodi, so any Rajasthani total quoted as including Vagad is wrong on the Census's own terms. Third, Bagri appears twice in the same table under two different languages, seven times larger under Punjabi than under Hindi — which is precisely the merger Grierson described a century earlier, and which shows that a transition dialect does not resolve when you count it; it splits.

A comparison this page declines to make. Grierson's about six millions for Marwari and the Census's 78,31,749 are a century and two methods apart — different areas, different categories, a survey estimate against an enumeration. They are set side by side to show the name persisting, never as a growth rate, and neither figure is used to gloss the other.

Flagged rather than asserted: (a) any fixed count of "the main dialects", which Grierson does not give in that form; (b) Dhundhari, Wagdi, Ahirwati and Nimadi as defined dialect areas, not verified from the volume read; (c) current speaker numbers, the six-million figure being survey-era and for Marwari only; (d) folk-literature genre lists; and (e) dates for the emergence of Dingal as a literary idiom.

Added on 28 August 2026, with the source for each.

Added on 27 August 2026, from the same volume of the Linguistic Survey, read again in full. All of the following are verified from Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India, Volume IX, Indo-Aryan Family, Central Group, Part II: Specimens of the Rajasthani and Gujarati, Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1908, in the scan held by the Internet Archive under identifier in.ernet.dli.2015.95521:

1. The name. "Rajasthani means literally the language of Rajasthan... The name, as connoting a language, has been invented for the purposes of this Survey", and "natives do not employ any general name for the language, but content themselves with referring to the various dialects, Marwari, Jaipuri, Malvi, and so forth."
2. The imprint year. The title page carries 1908. The volume's own list of proposed volumes shows Vol. IX Part III as "Bhil languages, Khandesi, etc.", which is why Bhili is not a Rajasthani dialect in this scheme.
3. The five dialects. "Rajasthani contains five dialects, those of the West, of the Central East, of the North-East, and two of the South-East", with the Central-East "recognised under two well-known names, Jaipuri and Harauti"; North-Eastern comprising Mewati and Ahirwati and being "the form of Rajasthani which agrees most closely with Western Hindi"; Malvi as the principal South-Eastern dialect; and Nimadi as the other, "by origin a form of Malvi", which "has no literature, and has not hitherto been described".
4. Speakers by dialect, as estimated for the Survey: Marwari 60,88,389, Central-East 29,07,200, North-Eastern 15,70,099, Malvi 48,50,507, Nimadi 4,74,777, total 1,53,90,972; the Census of 1901 figure of 1,09,17,712; and Grierson's own normal-year estimate of "about twelve millions", with the famines of the 1890s and "the uncertain line which lies between Rajasthani and Western Hindi, and between Rajasthani and Sindhi" given as the reasons the three differ.
5. The general conclusion. The Rajasthani dialects "are entitled to the dignity of being classed as together forming a separate, independent language. They differ much more widely from Western Hindi than does, for instance, Panjabi. Under any circumstances they cannot be classed as dialects of Western Hindi. If they are to be considered as dialects of some hitherto acknowledged language, then they are dialects of Gujarati."
6. Marwari's sub-dialects in five areal sets, with the estimated speakers used on this page: Mewari 16,84,864, Marwari of Ajmer 2,08,700, Godwari 1,47,000, Sirohi 1,79,300, Deorawati 86,000, Marwari-Gujarati 65,270, Thali 4,80,900, the mixed Marwari-Sindhi speeches 2,04,749, Bikaneri 5,43,770, Shekhawati 4,88,017, Northern Marwari total 13,59,146. Also "Bikaneri and Shekhawati are the same language", and the naming of Gorawati as the Marwari of Kishangarh against Godwari as the speech of the Godwar tract in the Sojat, Bali and Desuri parganas.
7. Bagri. The name means "the language of the Bagar", the sandy country west of the Dhundhar hills "where water is only procurable at a great depth"; standard Bagri is in "the north-east corner of the Bikaner State", extending into Hissar, Sirsa, Loharu and Dadri; "its backbone is essentially Marwari"; and "Bangaru is a form of speech quite different from Bagri. The latter is a dialect of Rajasthani."
8. Eastern Rajasthani's sub-dialects, taken by Grierson from the Rev. G. Macalister's special linguistic survey of Jaipur State, published by the Maharaja of Jaipur in 1898, which found thirteen forms of speech in the State of which six are forms of Jaipuri: Torawati (north), standard Jaipuri (centre), Kathaira and Chaurasi (south-west), Nagarchal and Rajawati (south-east); with Kishangarhi 1,16,700, Ajmeri 1,11,600, standard Jaipuri 7,90,231, Kathaira 1,27,957, Chaurasi 1,82,133, Nagarchal 71,575, Rajawati 1,73,449, and Harauti 9,91,101 including Sipari 48,000 of the Shiopur pargana of Gwalior.
9. The names of the eastern standard. "The name 'Jaipuri'... has been coined by Europeans, from the name of the chief town of the State. Natives usually call it Dhundhari", from the Dhundhar country, the name traced to a sacrificial mount, dhundh; other native names being Jhadshahi boli, "the speech of the kingdom of the wilderness", and, contemptuously, kai-ket-ki boli, from the Jaipuri kai, "what".
10. Mewati and Ahirwati. Mewati "represents Rajasthani fading off into the Braj Bhakha dialect of Hindi", total 11,21,154, with the four Alwar sub-dialects as returned by Alwar State officials: Standard 2,53,800, Rathi 2,22,200, Nahera 1,69,300, Kather 1,13,300 plus 80,000 in Bharatpur. Ahirwati, "also called Hirwati and Ahirwal", centred on Rewari, "can only be classed as a form of that dialect", total 4,48,915, and is "the connecting link between Mewati and three other dialects, Bangaru, Bagri and Shekhawati"; its marker is the verb substantive sũ against Mewati hũ.
11. The two Rathis. Rathi Mewati of the Rath tract of Alwar, and the speech of the Abu lok of Mount Abu in Sirohi, "which is called Rathi by the Rajputs of the plains", the Survey adding that this means "half-castes, a title which they resent". Sarwari is recorded as the name of Mewari in south Kishangarh, and Khairari as the Mewari of the Khairar hills, spoken by the Minas, about 21,000 of them within Bundi State.
12. The additional grammatical tests used in the new table: Malvi's genitive ko, present hũ, past tho and invariable future in -ga; Harauti's ke for kai and the agent postposition ne, "while in Jaipuri the agent never takes this suffix"; Godwari's ch to s and s to h; Deorawati's retention of the Marwari genitive ro and never the Gujarati no, while both chhũ and hũ occur; Sondwari's "universal change of an initial s to h"; and Nimadi's change of the e of other Rajasthani dialects to a, as in na, ma and aga.
13. Malvi's varieties. Rangri is "the form of Malvi spoken by Rajputs of Malwa proper... distinguished by its preference for Marwari forms"; Sondwari is spoken by the Sondias of the north-east of the Western Malwa Agency, the Chaumahla tract of Jhalawar and the neighbouring Bhopal Agency.
14. The written character. "For books and the like the ordinary Deva-nagari character is employed. For correspondence and mercantile documents a rough corruption similar to the 'Mahajani' character of Upper India and to the Modi of Marathi, is used", with "vowels being quite commonly omitted, so that it is often illegible", and "no types have ever been cast in this character". The footnote adds that the Mahajani character "is really this Marwari current script which has been carried in the course of trade all over India", and supplies the merchant's-ledger anecdote quoted on this page. Separately, Ahirwati "is written in all three characters, Deva-nagari, Gurmukhi, and Persian", the choice resting with the writer.
15. Dingal and Pingal. "The writers sometimes composed in Marwari and sometimes in Braj Bhakha. In the former case the language was called Dingal and in the latter Pingal."
16. The Dadu Panth. "Most of Dadu's disciples wrote in their native tongue, Jaipuri, but all the works of Dadu himself which I have seen are in an old form of Western Hindi."
17. The absence of a recorded literature, in 1908, for two dialects. "I am not acquainted with any literary work in the Mewati dialect", and "I know of no works written in Ahirwati, and of no previous account of their language."
18. The Prithviraj Raso. Attributed to Chand Bardai; the published portion "is written in an old form of Western Hindi, not Rajasthani"; and it is "the one regarding the authenticity of which the most serious doubts are justified". The same passage supplies Grierson's description of the unread bardic corpus as "a virgin mine for the student of history and of language" and his warning about "fish-insects and white-ants".
19. The khyal. The Survey's list of authorities on Marwari includes Rev. J. Robson, A Selection of Khyals or Marwari Plays, with an Introduction and Glossary, Beawar Mission Press, 1866, and dates Kellogg's Grammar of the Hindi Language to a first edition of Allahabad and Calcutta, 1876 and a second of London, 1893.

Also added on 27 August 2026, from the work of L. P. Tessitori, read directly. Luigi Pio Tessitori (1887-1919) conducted the Bardic and Historical Survey of Rajputana for the Asiatic Society of Bengal.

20. L. P. Tessitori (ed.), Vacanika Rathora Ratana Singhaji ri Mahesadasota ri, Khiriya Jaga ri kahi, Part I: Dingala Text, with Notes and Glossary, Bibliotheca Indica New Series No. 41, Asiatic Society of Bengal, printed at the Baptist Mission Press, Calcutta, 1917; read in the scan held by the Internet Archive under identifier vacanikarathra00khiiuoft. Verified from its introduction: the definition of Dingal and Pingal ("the latter is but the Braja Bhakha... the former is the local Marwari... Dingala is therefore practically synonymous with literary or poetical Marwari"); the periodisation into Old Dingal, thirteenth century to the end of the sixteenth, and Later Dingal, from the beginning of the seventeenth; the definition of vacanika as rhymed prose in which "each phrase or sentence... is required to rhyme with the next", with duhas, chappaya kavittas and gahas intermixed; the composition of this vachanika about 1660 by Khiriya Jaga, in the service of Ratan Singh of Ratlam, and the grant of the villages of Alaniya and Deri to his descendants; the description of Ratan Singh attended by "a throng of bards, Charanas and Bhatas"; the identification of the Vachanika Achaldas Khichi ri by the Charan Sivadas as the classical model of the form, on Achaldas, the Khichi chief of Gagron, who married a daughter of Rana Mokal of Chittor; and Tessitori's citation of a manuscript in the Darbar Library in the Fort of Bikaner.
21. L. P. Tessitori, A Descriptive Catalogue of Bardic and Historical Manuscripts, Section I: Prose Chronicles, Part I: Jodhpur State, Fasciculus I, Asiatic Society, Calcutta, 1917, prefaced from Jodhpur, August 1915; read in the scan held by the Internet Archive under identifier bardichistorical00tessuoft. Verified from it: the naming of the prose genres, "such as those meant by the Marwari terms khyata, vata, vigata, vamsavali, pidhis and similar ones, all of which partake more or less of an historical character"; "like all khyatas, it is in prose"; the arrangement of the Khyat of Muhanot Nainsi by clan; the description of the pargana survey of Jodhpur State compiled under Maharaja Jaswant Singh, "probably made by Muhanot Nainsi with the help of some Pancholis, about Samvat 1721 to 1723"; and the use of vamsavali for a pedigree and pidhi for a plain genealogy.

Added on 27 August 2026, on recognition and institutions.

22. Sahitya Akademi, "About Us", sahitya-akademi.gov.in, read 26 August 2026: "Besides the 22 languages enumerated in the Constitution of India, the Sahitya Akademi has recognised English and Rajasthani as languages in which its programme may be implemented."
23. Sahitya Akademi, Akademi Awards, and the language-wise list of award winners reached from it, sahitya-akademi.gov.in and the award-winners list, read 26 August 2026. The Rajasthani column is headed "RAJASTHANI (Since 1974)". Verified from it: 1974 Vijay Dan Detha, Batan Ri Phulwari Vol. X (folk-tales); 1975 Mani Madhukar, Pagfero (poetry); 1976 Kanhaiyalal Sethia, Leeltans (poetry); 1977 Satya Prakash Joshi, Bol Bharamli (poetry); 2012 Aaidan Singh Bhati; 2015 Madhu Acharya 'Ashawadi'; 2020 Bhanwar Singh Samour; 2021 Meethesh Nirmohi, Mugtee; 2025 Jitender Kumar Soni. The same list records Sheen Kaaf Nizam's 2010 award under URDU, for Gumshuda Dair Ki Gunjati Ghantiyan, and he does not appear on the Rajasthani list.
24. Sahitya Akademi, list of Fellows, sahitya-akademi.gov.in, read 26 August 2026: Sri Vijay Dan Detha, Rajasthani, 1926-2013, elected Fellow in 2004.
25. Rajasthan Sahitya Akademi, "About Academy", rsaudr.org, read 26 August 2026: the akademi was formed on 28 January 1958 and is at Udaipur; its monthly literary magazine is Madhumati.
26. Government of Rajasthan, Art and Culture sectoral portal, Rajasthani Bhasha Sahitya evam Sanskriti Akademi, "Academy Establishment Day", jkk.artandculture.rajasthan.gov.in, read 26 August 2026: "राजस्थानी भाषा साहित्य एवं संस्कृति अकादमी, बीकानेर की स्थापना 25 जनवरी 1983 को हुई" — the akademi was established at Bikaner on 25 January 1983. The same portal's page on the akademi's constitution confirms that its headquarters "shall be at Bikaner" and that it is an autonomous body. This corrects the date of 25 January 1985 that circulates in preparation material: the day and month are right, the year is not.

A correction logged, because a reader may have learned the wrong version elsewhere. Preparation material widely lists Sheen Kaf Nizam among modern Rajasthani writers on the strength of a 2010 Sahitya Akademi Award. The Akademi's own list places that award under Urdu. He is a distinguished Urdu poet of Jodhpur; he is not a Rajasthani-language laureate, and an answer that puts him in a Rajasthani list is wrong on the awarding body's own record.

One figure deliberately not printed. Grierson gives an area for the Rajasthani-speaking tract in the same paragraph as his speaker estimates, and compares it with the area of Spain, which he puts at 196,000 square miles and calls "a little larger". The area figure as it appears in the scan is inconsistent with that comparison, so no area is given on this page.

Flagged rather than asserted, in addition to the earlier list: (f) the periodisation of Rajasthani literature into three or four periods; (g) the naming chain from the Kuvalayamala and the Ain-i-Akbari, and any date for the Kuvalayamala; (h) the six-script scheme and the attribution of the Mudia script to Todarmal; (i) Apabhramsha parentage for Dingal and Pingal, and the assignment of Pingal to the Bhatts; (j) the author attributions for the rasos other than the Prithviraj Raso; (k) the glossary of verse forms beyond those defined above; (l) the folk-literature terminology and the six-type Chhoga taxonomy; (m) Rajasthani Language Day on 21 February; (n) the Padma and state honours of individual writers, the official Padma portal serving its list only through a script-driven dashboard; (o) the founding dates of the manuscript repositories and of the akademis other than Udaipur and Bikaner.