Quetta is a wonderful city in the country if one is interested in finding out human capacity to learn diverse languages. One can come across a large number of shopkeepers, apparently not very educated, in the bazaar who form a polyglot community. A turbaned shopkeeper with baggy trousers can floor a university professor or linguistic historian with the familiarity he has with at least half a dozen languages spoken across the country. He can converse in Brahui, Balochi, Pashto, Urdu, Persian, Dari (a dialect of Persian), Punjabi and simple English. He can switch effortlessly from one language to another to put his client at ease who likes to bargain in his/her own language. This happens as a matter of routine. It’s not a show of some linguistic achievement as he is little interested in showing off his language skills to impress academics living in ivory towers. On the contrary an academic who can barely manage to make a bookish use of one or two languages while writing on some arcane subject is touted as a scholar who knows the secrets of expression.

Quetta, a city not generally known for scholarship, is a kind of inverted ‘Tower of Babel’ where multiplicity of languages enhances people’s capacity to understand one another better and thus becomes human strength. More and more academic institutions, particularly the universities in the country, on the other hand, are turning into sanitised monolingual places.

Isn’t it funnily odd that in multilingual Pakistan a shopkeeper can speak several languages while a professor/doctor, ostensibly a learned person placed on a high pedestal, uses for expressing his kitschy ideas just one highfalutin language which is usually English or Urdu. Our universities claim to be fecund spaces that generate knowledge. But all this sounds hollow and flies in the face of ground reality. Efforts to produce knowledge without learning languages are akin to singing without using vocal cords. Can we imagine the existence of human life on this planet in the absence of language? Most of what we inherit in any field as human kind is transmitted through language.

“Compared to language, all other inventions pale in significance, since everything we have ever achieved depends on language and originates from it,” writes Guy Deutscher in his marvelous book ‘The Unfolding of Language’. It’s as simple as that. But getting such a basic fact straight seems to be a gargantuan task which is beyond the intellectual faculty of the movers and shakers of our academic world. A recent move by the University of Sargodha says it all. The university administration (read vice chancellor) in its wisdom decided to thin down the departments of Punjabi, Persian and Arabic languages. The university went ahead, it’s reported, with such a patently stupid decision and enforced it with the imprimatur of its syndicate which failed to prevent serious academic folly. Anticipating a strong reaction a stratagem was employed to minimise the impact of the fallout: a newly created ‘Department of Urdu and Oriental languages’ subsumed Punjabi and Persian while Arabic merged with the Department of Islamic Studies which effectively undermined the independent status of abovementioned languages.

The rationale presented for this irrational, anti-people and anti-intellectual step, a misstep in fact, was that teaching of these languages wasn’t cost effective. Well, the vice chancellor seems to be calculating business executive rather than a scholar with a probing mind. Should he be reminded that the institution he heads is a public university funded by the government from state coffers? Is there any compelling need for him to behave like an owner of a citrus processing plant in his city?

‘Exalted’ status accorded to Punjabi, Persian and Arabic lays bare the colonial mindset of the university administration and the syndicate. An entrenched bias against these languages nudges the decision-makers to declare them “oriental languages”. The phrase unmistakably carries pejorative overtones. ‘Orientalism’ is a term invented by apologists of colonialism which disparagingly separates the native from the European. The act of declaring our languages ‘oriental’ reeks of intellectual bankruptcy.

A few words about why teaching Punjabi, Persian and Arabic are necessary for our intellectual and spiritual growth. Punjabi (contemporary) is a language spoken by the majority of Pakistanis. It has a literary tradition spanning over one thousand years. It’s receptacle of people’s life i.e. the past and the present. One can’t understand Punjab and Pakistan fully without understanding Punjabi. It’s above all a marker of our identity. The Persian is closely linked with our past. It inspired literary products in the subcontinent, in its northern part in particular, till the end of 19th century. Most of the chronicles and books on history and other subjects from eleventh century to times of Maharaja Ranjit Singh were composed in Persian. There can be no historian, anthropologist or political scientist worth the name who can afford not to be familiar with Persian. Can a scholar claim to understand our faith, religious practices and spiritual journey without knowing the Arabic language? Even to appreciate the language we speak we need to know a bit of Arabic in terms of vocabulary.

The university spokesperson will deny doing any damage to the languages in question. The university has simply shuffled them, its officials would insist. But fact of the matter is that they have virtually put Punjabi, Persian and Arabic ‘under house arrest’ if not dispatched them into ‘exile’. It’s shame that a vice chancellor has nothing but contempt for the language(s) of the people of Punjab who pay taxes to keep him and his cohorts in good health. Someone sitting in the Chief Minister Secretariat must take notice and tell this wise guy to get this decision of ‘insidious intent’ revoked. The departments of Punjabi, Persian and Arabic languages must be immediately restored. It’s not a matter of ego. It’s an academic, cultural and religious need. If vice chancellor can’t do it, he may be requested to leave for Quetta to discover how significant languages are. In the meanwhile, a shopkeeper from Quetta may be persuaded to act as the VC of the University of Sargodha, the one who has respect for languages and can converse in several. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 28th, 2017