Urdu in India: victim of Hindu nationalism & Muslim separatis;PART -4

By Syed Shahabuddin, The Milli Gazette

Published Online: May 13, 2011

Print Issue: 1-15 April 2011

 

Minimal Aspirations of Urdu In Post-Independence-India

With the defection of the Hindu elite, the Muslims were left with the responsibility of nurturing Urdu. With a few exceptions on both sides, the cultural divide had widened and while the Freedom Movement tried to bring about Hindu-Muslim unity, the cultural gulf could not be bridged. The Muslim elite almost gave up the struggle and owned Urdu as their language. In schools the number of Hindu children declaring Urdu as their mother tongue slowly came down to zero.

As mentioned earlier, Urdu has recognized the change of circumstances and accepted the dominance and superior status of Hindi. Since 1950 the Urdu community has been demanding only that Urdu as a mother tongue be the medium of instruction at the primary for Urdu-speaking children and that at the secondary level it be taught as the first language under the Three Language Formula to those who declare Urdu as their Mother Tongue, with the provision that all such children also learn Hindi in the Hindi-speaking states as the compulsory Second Language and in other states, in the same manner, the Principal Languages of those states.

However, time and again Urdu has been rebuffed even in respect of the constitutional & legal demand. Communal politics, which has cast its shadow on the mindset even in a secular state, is not prepared to accept even this minimal demand. So, Urdu stands exiled totally from UP which, even today has the largest Urdu- speaking community (25 %) in the country. This has meant that in every successive generation the percentage of Urdu-knowing people is going down. In the first stage, Urdu-speaking children were denied facilities through numerical jugglery and administrative tricks. But they continued to use Urdu because they learnt to speak it at home and learnt to write it from private tutors. The second stage was reached when Urdu-speaking children began using with greater frequency Hindi equivalents of common Urdu words. The third stage is now with us, spelling Urdu incorrectly in writing, while mispronouncing Urdu words which are in common use. Ghaziabad became Gajiabad while Akash Vani invites listeners to ‘Galib ki Gajal Begum Akhtar ki jabani.’

Some experts assume that the spirit of a language is in its spoken form and that words when they travel from one language to another get deformed and suffer change in meaning and pronunciation; they do not see that Urdu will survive in the land of its birth, retaining both its vocabulary and its pronunciation. They look upon Urdu as a language which has always been progressive and generous in accepting words from other languages. No doubt, this is how Urdu grew and how it retains its innate vitality but why should common words which are understood at every level be distorted or replaced by unfamiliar Sanskrit equivalents till they become common currency?