The status of Urdu in a Hindu Rashtra

The New Education Policy 2020, first excluded Urdu and then reincluded it under pressure. Alas, a fabulous language has become a ‘political shuttlecock.’ If Sanskrit is already a functionally dead language, Urdu is a culturally moribund tongue in a rabidly Hindu-ized India. Such a beautiful tongue is being expunged slowly and systematically.

Less than a year ago, Punjab University almost removed Urdu from its PG level and then reincluded it under pressure. Now, it’s being suggested that Urdu script, which is based on Persian, should be done away with to make it (Urdu) on an even keel with Hindi which is based on Devanagari script. How can we rob Urdu of its rasmul-khat (script)? The script is exclusive to a tongue and provides a linguistic rampart to it. If Urdu loses its script, how will it retain its identity?

It’s worthwhile to mention that in Poona, I used to teach Urdu to those who were interested in learning it along with its cursive script. Then I got a warning from a politico-religious outfit to stop my classes or else I would be eliminated.

This new India has no place for Urdu. You may have noticed that the CM of UP Yogi Adityanath speaks without using a single Urdu word. Many ministers of this government are enthusiastically emulating Yogi. Dove-tailing a language with a community, cultural group or ethnicity is an erroneous belief. But can the present political dispensation be fully blamed for the decline Urdu?

Even before, 2014, Hindi film posters stopped showing the names of the films in Urdu. Till 1995, all cinema posters would show the name of the Hindi films in English, Hindi and Urdu. But the scenario began to change after that. Urdu never got proper political patronage and its status remains equivocal and ambiguous. The unfortunate tag of a Muslim language has further alienated it. How can a language be Hindu or Muslim?

A language is much greater than a religion and is far removed from ethnic ramifications. The Palestine conflict in the Gaza belt has witnessed that Muslims and Jews, baying for each other’s blood, speak immaculate Arabic and Hebrew as both are Semitic tongues and originated from a common root of Yiddish and Ladino.

Can you hate Sampooran Singh Kalra ‘Gulzar’ because he writes in Urdu and can’t even write his name in Devanagari script? Will you stop liking Pandit Jagannath Azad, Pandit Brij Narayan ‘Chakbast’, Justice Anand Narayan Mullah, Naubatrai Nazar, Dayashankar Naseem, Raghupati Sahay ‘Firaq’ Gorakhpuri or Munshi Premchand, to name but a few for writing in Urdu?

The great critic, Dr Gopichand Narang (again a Hindu!), calls Urdu, the language of the sub-continent and the supreme form of Hindi. Though one may object as Urdu being the supreme form of Hindi is a subjective opinion, there’s no gainsaying the fact that a proliferation of Urdu words in our everyday lingo is hardly frowned upon even by rabid Hindus. Words like dil, dehaat, zukaam, deemak, badan, raah, khoobsoorat etc are all Persio-Arabic words as Urdu is an amalgam of Persian-Arabic, Turkish, Khari Boli Hindi, Purbi and Braj.

All Indian languages have words and roots from Persian and Arabic. Marathi has thirty-eight thousand words that are of Persian origin. Even all four southern languages viz, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam have words from Persian and Arabic roots. Philologist A K Ramanujan, literary giant U R Ananthmurthy and Kannada polymath Kuvempu accepted the fact that Persio-Arabic linguistic influences on sub-continental tongues can never be denied or diminished.

French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was wholeheartedly accepted by the French people as though he was actually an Italian and spoke Italian better than French! His birthplace, Corsica in the Mediterranean, was captured and colonized by the French army when he was born there in 1769 and throughout his life, he spoke better Italian than French. The point is--Urdu or for that matter, any language is above religio-cultural bindings. To encapsulate, Urdu’s ethos are sub-continental, if not universal. But its appeal is indeed universal. Finally, can you dislike ghazals which are laden with Urdu words? So, appreciate Urdu and let it survive and thrive. Don’t be so myopic as to kill a beautiful tongue.

(The writer is a scholar of Sanskrit and Semitic languages, civilizations and literature)