It is a great pleasure to me to write a Foreword to Pre-Mughal Persian in Hindustan by Shamsul Ulama Professor Abdul Ghani, which is the first comprehensive and critical survey in English of the growth of persian language and literature in India.

The Persian language in the Indian subcontinent (Persian: زبان فارسی در شبه قاره هند), before the British colonization, was the region's lingua franca and a widely used official language in north India. The language was brought into South Asia by various Turkic and Afghan dynasties, in particular the Turko-Afghan Ghurid Dynasty, Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Dynasty. Persian held official status in the court and the administration within these empires and it heavily influenced many of the local indigenous languages, particularly Hindi and Urdu.

Evidence of Persian's historical influence there can be seen in the extent of its influence on the languages of the Indian subcontinent. Many of these areas have seen a certain influence by Persian not only in literature but also in everyday speech. Persian exerted a strong influence on Balochi (an Iranic language), Pashto (another Iranic language), and Urdu, but also a relatively strong influence on Indic languages such as Punjabi, Sindhi, Kashmiri, Gujarati. Other languages like Hindi, Odia, Marathi and Rajasthani also have a considerable amount of loan words from Persian.