Urdu in India: victim of Hindu nationalism & Muslim separatis; PART -2

By Syed Shahabuddin, The Milli Gazette

Published Online: May 13, 2011

Print Issue: 1-15 April 2011

 

Myths about Urdu

Not surprisingly, many myths have been floated about it. It is asserted that Urdu is nothing more than a ‘style’ of Hindi. Even a liberal and secular intellectual like Jawaharlal Nehru, who made his public speeches in Urdu and declared Urdu as his mother tongue shared this untenable myth in one of his letters to the Chief Ministers. Urdu is a distinct Language, it is not a dialect nor a style of another language; it has a rich literature all its very own.

Another myth, to which even Gandhiji succumbed, propagated against Urdu was that Urdu is written ‘in the script of the Qur’an’. The fact is that Urdu is neither written in the Arabic nor in the Persian script. It has a script of its own and the Urdu script is phonetically much more comprehensive than either. It represents sounds which are peculiar to Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic, and also it has compound alphabets.

Until recently, the Urdu-speaking community itself continued to identify Urdu with the Muslims while at the same time, claiming that Urdu had a wider reach and was more entitled to be the national language or the lingua franca of the country. Urdu is neither the language of all Muslims of the sub-continent nor only of the Muslim, though increasingly, through voluntary dissociation of the Hindus from written Urdu and its use in madrasa instruction and in religious discourse, Urdu has indeed become the language of Muslim Indians for all practical purposes. An effort was made in 1937 in some states like UP and Bihar, with an objective to bring Hindus and Muslims together, to introduce both Hindi and Urdu as compulsory languages in schools so that every child who learnt Hindi as his mother tongue also learnt Urdu and vice versa. In fact, at the level of common speech Hindi and Urdu students had to learn only two scripts. This is what led Gandhi and Zakir Hussain to formulate the scheme for a common language, but by then the die had been cast. In his speech in Lahore in 1940, Jinnah identified Urdu with the Muslims of the Sub-continent and the demand for Partition. After Partition Urdu became the official language of Pakistan which was a key factor in the later secession of East Pakistan to form Bangladesh. In fact, one of the main grievances of the Bengali speaking Pakistanis was that Urdu was imposed on them. In India Urdu has paid the price of Partition. In Pakistan it has paid the price of imposition.