By
Syed Shahabuddin, The Milli Gazette
Published
Online: May 13, 2011
Print
Issue: 1-15 April 2011
Counter-Productive Strategies of
Urdu Movement
A self-defeating counter-productive
strategy on the part of the Urdu-speaking community has been the propagation of
another myth that Urdu is not the language of the Muslims alone but of many
non-Muslims. No language has a religion. So, no language is the monopoly of a
religious group, a caste or a tribe. A language belongs to anyone who chooses
to own it and to learn it and use it. This was a fact in preindependent India.
But in India today Urdu is the de facto language of those Muslim Indians who
declare it as their mother tongue, only just over 50% of them, apart from a
handful of non-Muslims who declare Urdu as their mother tongue. Some of them
see a balance of benefit by this expression of loyalty. But they do not teach
Urdu to their children! This situation has resulted in successive governments,
central and state, reducing the space for promotion of Urdu.
Political
parties in their manifestos and the governments in their progress reports
always make promises about Urdu, not surprisingly as proposals for what they
plan to do for Muslims and not as what they propose for reviving a slowly dying
language. In any case, a promise is a promise and is beneficial as far as it
goes but it makes Urdu promotion a communal issue and thus keeps away the Hindu
society from supporting the cause of Urdu. Urdu-speaking community, in my view,
should, therefore, change its strategy and courageously take full
responsibility for the realization of its constitutional rights as the language
of the Urdu speaking minority at every level.
As
for the unrealistic sub-conscious desire of the Urdu speaking community to seek
parity with Hindi, is echoed even today. Whatever it’s past history and
howsoever great its contribution to Indian culture, Urdu is today no more than
a minority language. In coming to terms with this reality, Urdu has lost
another 25 years.
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