How Urdu is disappearing from Hindi film songs

‘Kahin ek maasoom, naazuk-si ladki, bahut khoobsoorat’ (Shankar Hussain, 1977), ‘Gham-e-hasti se bas begana hota, khudaya’ (Vallah Kya Baat Hai, 1962), ‘Zindagi ke safar mein akele thay hum’ (Nartakee, 1963), ‘Main kaun hoon main kahan hoon’ (Main Chup Rahungi, 1962), among others are quintessential examples of soulful numbers chock-a-block with Urdu words.

Alas, that seems to have vanished from today’s Hindi films and their pedestrian songs. Nowadays, one hardly comes across dialogues in chaste Urdu and songs with Urdu words. Even if you get to listen to some songs or dialogues that have Urdu words, their enunciation or articulation (talaffuz) is so execrable that it grates on your ears. ‘Ghalat’ becomes ‘Galat’ (!), ‘Khwaab’ sounds ‘Khaab’ (!), ‘Mushkil’ degenerates into ‘Mushquil/Mushqil’ (!), ‘Kaamyaab’ falls into the pit of ‘Qaamyaab’ (!).

Mind you, these are the commonest Urdu words that have become integral to our colloquial Hindustani. Yet, they are pronounced and written incorrectly. Actors, singers, script-writers and lyricists are no exceptions. In fact, the Anglicized actors and singers speak diabolical Hindi and aren’t familiar with Urdu.

But earlier, the scene was altogether different. Urdu was the predominant language of Hindi films and music. Unlike today’s linguistic polarisation, the actors of yore, whether Hindu or Muslim, spoke Urdu and never considered it to be a language of a particular community.

Apart from the four remarkable Urdu poets and lyricists, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Kaifi Azmi, Sahir Ludhianvi and Shakeel Badayuni, Qamar Jalalabadi (Om Prakash Bhandari), Shailendra, Anand Bakshi, Rajendra Krishan Duggal, Yogesh Gaur, and Raja Mehndi Ali Khan knew Urdu very well.

Singers like Mohammed Rafi, Mukesh, Kishore, Manna Dey and Talat had a command of both the languages. Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhonsle, Manna Dey and Kishore learnt perfect Urdu diction from the maulvis and scholars.

Actors like Prithviraj Kapoor, Paidi Jairaj, Raj Kapoor, Rajendra Kumar and Sunil Dutt were all Urdu-knowing people. Abbottabad-born Manoj Kumar wrote his scripts in Urdu. Luralai (Pakistan)-born Kulbhushan Pandit (better known as Rajkumar) couldn’t read and write Hindi and he always spoke Urdu in his inimitable style. To cut the story short, Urdu was the predominant language of Hindi cinema and music in those days.

Once that generation faded away, Urdu also began to decline as a pivotal language of Hindi films and music. If you notice, post-2000, a paradigm shift took place in all spheres. A whole new crop of ‘convent-educated’ filmmakers, actors, singers, dialogue-writers emerged with an inadequate knowledge of Hindi, let alone Urdu. These people have no feel for Urdu and Hindi. They are given scripts written in the Roman script! They cannot read Hindi and Urdu is Greek to them.

According to Arslan Jafri, an erudite researcher at Ahmedabad University, ‘Contemporary playback singers like Shreya Ghoshal and Shankar Mahadevan are more inclined towards Hindi phonetic norms than Urdu. That’s why words like iqraar, kh_ushi, and aashiqon become ikraar, khushi, and aashikon respectively.

Since these guys are linguistically challenged and are unaware of the fundamental distinctions between Urdu and Hindi, they end up massacring even the simplest Urdu words. The difference lies in the script of the two languages. While the Urdu Nastaliq script has separate letters assigned to specific sounds, the Devanagari script has no equivalent letters. Therefore, those who don’t know Urdu remain ignorant of these pronunciations.

That is the reason today’s popular singers like Sonu Nigam, Arijit, and Shaan say ‘Kayamat’ for ‘Qayamat’, ‘Qaaynaat’ for ‘Kainaat’ and ‘Qamsin’ for ‘Kamsin’. The gradual marginalisation and pigeonholing of an exquisite tongue and its perceived association with a community and religion has further resulted in the erosion, nay banishment, of Urdu and its elitist culture from the highly commercialised world of Bollywood. Otherwise also, finer things in life don’t thrive and survive in a commercial world where lucre rules the roost