A proverb of course is only really understood by a native; and, as its application is often merely arbitrary, or at best a selection out of many possible applications, it would be folly to work out renderings without the aid of natives; so in editing the Hindustání Proverbs I am working with two separate sets of munshís (literate natives), living apart in Dehlí and Ambálá, so that I get renderings which I can test one against the other; and it is astonishing to find how often the munshís differ among themselves as to the right sense of a proverb. One proverb suggests another, so I am constantly picking up through my munshís new ones not to be found in Fallon's Dictionary, or important variants of those he gives. I think the best course, for the present at any rate, is to publish these in this journal, and so I send an instalment, and will send more as the work progresses from time to time. I am sending about 400 now, and this may sound a great number to have escaped Fallon, but his collection numbers over 12,000; and the fact is that proverbs in India are so numerous, and their variants so many and so constantly in use, that it is not at all likely that Fallon's collection is anything approaching to completeness.
In his term Hindustání Proverbs, as in his Hindustání Dictionary, Fallon uses the word Hindustání in its widest application. Properly speaking, Hindustání or Urdú was the language which arose as a lingua franca on the irruption of the Muhammadans into India, and is in fact an Arabico-Persianised form of the bháshá or speech of the people, i.e. of Hindí. Urdú is still the lingua franca of India, and varies with the speakers, i.e. Muhammadans fill it with Arabic and Persian, Hindús with Sanskrit, and all with the prevailing idiom of their homes, so that the terms Urdú and Hindustání can be made to cover styles of speech almost mutually unintelligible. Hindí, again, is a very wide term, and covers idioms varying as much as the Maithilí of the east and the Panjábí of the west. I have, therefore, to be clear, divided my proverbs into Persian, Urdú, Hindí, and Panjábí, though Fallon would have included them all under the one term, Hindustání. To an expert the idioms are easily and at once separable, just as would be French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese; the only difficulty being between Hindí and Urdú, as the Urdú of the Hindús is almost all Hindí, the grammar in all cases being the same.
