By
Syed Shahabuddin, The Milli Gazette
Published
Online: May 13, 2011
Print
Issue: 1-15 April 2011
The
really sad part of the story is that the Urdu Movement which was started by
Zakir Hussain under the banner of Anjuman Taraqqi-e-Urdu Hind was soon fatigued
and lost its way. The formal declaration of Urdu as the second official
language of the state acclaimed as the ‘mantra’ for the revival of the Urdu has
led it nowhere. Similarly, the system of appointing one token Urdu language
teacher in every school or one Urdu translator and one Urdu typist in
government offices at various levels may have produced job opportunities for
some university as well as Madrasa graduates.
But
Urdu’s status has shown lamentable decline in the number of standard books
published, the circulation of newspapers and journals. Above all, the number of
persons who can pronounce Urdu words correctly and read and write it is fast
declining. Thus, the real objective of the Hindi movement to assimilate Urdu,
to kill its individuality and uniqueness and its cultural ethos and to reduce
it to a cultural fad, as a ‘shaili’ of Hindi, has succeeded. With less and less
number of children learning Urdu and through Urdu, at least as a language, if
not its literature, it is slated to disappear from the literary and cultural
scene of the country. This would have happened much earlier but did not, for
the joint contribution, ironically, of the theologians, the filmmakers &
the institution of ‘Mushaira’.
It
is worth recalling that Hindu communalism adopted the same tactics to defeat
Punjabi. A Sikh-majority state was out of question. So the demand was
transformed into one for a Punjabi state which was reduced to its present
boundary, by the defection of the Punjabi-speaking Hindus to Hindi & the
separation of Haryana and H.P. But Punjabi escaped the fate of Urdu because it
continued to have a homeland while Urdu does not!
The
process of steady substitution of Urdu by Hindi has finally reached the climax
in UP. Urdu was first excluded from the realm of school education, then from
administration, then from information and mass media. The former Prime
Minister, once Chief Minister of UP, Charan Singh, joyfully and proudly claimed
that UP has become a unilingual state. The only minority language worth the
name was Urdu and now it has been reduced to an ethnic language to be spoken at
home but not learnt in schools and colleges. In UP, its homeland, Urdu has
steadily lost its traditional status as the language of urban culture to a
point when Urdu is nowhere to be seen in government offices or work places or
schools, despite the token gestures of making Urdu the second official language
of the state to be used for specific purposes.
After
Independence, Hindustani written in both Persian and Devnagri scripts was
projected as the national language. In a second Partition, Hindi in Devnagari
script was approved as the official language of the Union.
The
Urdu-speaking community has over the years become insensitive to the near-fatal
blows. May be it has been mesmerized by the time-tested anesthetic and
soporific of lavish paeans and praise by politicians in power for its beauty,
sweetness and contribution to the Freedom Movement, official patronage of
Mushairas, literary awards and opening of Urdu Academies. Urdu intelligentsia
has been purchased through opening of college and departments of Urdu in
universities with their teachers participating in seminars and reaping
occasional benefits. Such patronage does provide jobs and pleasures to a few
but ignores the methodical and systematic agenda of annihilation. The Urdu
speaking community has thus been kept by the political establishment in good
humour by publicly acclaiming it and by allotting token time on radio and TV
and placing government advertisements in Urdu press, not to mention, expanding
the largely unwanted facilities for higher education in Urdu, producing
unemployable graduates, honours graduates and holders of MA and PhD degrees.
No comments:
Post a Comment