We humans learn language spoken around us in our early years. We have been living with language for so long that speech is now taken for granted. We feel it’s natural for us. Devoid of language we would be like other animals in the animal kingdom. What we proudly call human achievements wouldn’t have been possible if we had no language. Without it we couldn’t have achieved the kind of power we have over nature and other creatures. Thus language is power. That’s why anyone who is gifted with such a faculty is regarded highly regardless of whether they are poets, writers, orators, demagogues or rabble rousers. Those who put a gag on the dissidents know what language can do. They revere and fear the language. Silence means lack of power. So those who disagree and defy are silenced. Societies which do not fully realize the significance of language fail to make their members actualize their potential. Unfortunately, ours is one such society. It has created an intractable linguistic mess due to a host of historical and ideological factors. In the pre-colonial era, the ruling clique of foreign origins treated peoples’ languages indifferently and used Persian, a foreign language, as official language.

With the advent of British colonialism the language conundrum became messier. It replaced Persian with English, a freshly imported foreign language, and in addition, imposed another Indian language they developed at Fort William College, Calcutta, namely Urdu, in Punjab and what is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (a large of which was then part of Punjab) and Balochistan. Sindh escaped the crushing weight of Urdu as the colonists were favourably inclined towards Sindhi language. It was a continuation of an earlier policy of patronising the local languages/vernaculars in the Indian territories they occupied. But Punjab, present day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan were deprived of such a beneficial treatment where along with English (for upper classes) Urdu, another foreign language, was unilaterally imposed. Peoples’ languages, naturally suitable for education and official business, were stigmatized as undeveloped dialects.

From the third decade of twentieth century, the leaders of Muslim separatist movement, mostly from a region dominated by Hindu majority, started deviously equating Urdu, their mother language, with the amorphous elements of a new Muslim identity. The wheel came full circle with the emergence of the Pakistani state in 1947. Urdu, one of the languages of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, in continuation of colonial policy, was declared the sole national language despite the spirited opposition from the people of East Bengal who constituted the majority of the country. This post-colonial state that inherited all the vestiges of colonial legacy acted like a foreign power as it suppressed the natural languages of the peoples in the name of so-called national unity, which it sought to achieve through means that denied the existence of historical linkages between diverse peoples of the country.

Now in our schools and colleges foreign languages such as English, Urdu and Arabic are forcibly taught. Peoples’ languages are suppressed and demonized in order to keep them away from our children and the corridors of power. Sindh is an exception as its people use their natural speech as their official language. Illogically conceived priorities in terms of language severely stunt students’ growth and their ability of comprehension. Look around and see the fallout of such a language policy. It has failed to make the so-called educated capable of speaking cleanly in the languages they are supposed to have learnt. Watch how media persons, TV anchors, talk show hosts, politicians, bureaucrats and business persons talk. None of them can say five straight sentences in any language they claim to know. Some would start with English but after two sentences would switch over to Urdu loaded with English words, phrases and terms. To spice it up, they would sprinkle it with words from their mother tongue. Others would start with Urdu and then to impress the point they would utter a couple of sentences/phrases in English to show that they are well-educated. One who knows English can immediately detect that such people have little more than a smattering of English. To cut a long story short, educated persons in Pakistan cannot speak any language, including their natural one, because of the mess created by the state and its ideologues. The situation reflects in a way the reality of the myth of the Tower of Babel; so many languages and yet so little communication.

But one may ask what is wrong with this situation. Languages borrow from one another and change. It’s a natural process.

“The simple truth is that all languages change, all the time–the only static languages are dead languages,” writes Guy Deutscher in his ‘The Unfolding of Language’. Change is healthy and welcome if it’s a result of its normal interaction between languages in the spirit of give and take. But in our case, it’s a play of hegemony that controls the process. Languages imposed on us reflect the national and international power dynamics. Urdu is imposed in the interest of so-called national unity premised on an airy-fairy notion of state bordering on the absurd. English shows how we are still ruled by international capital led by the USA that replaced the UK in the mid of last century. So it’s taught in the name of knowledge and development. It’s interesting to remember that during the last seven decades we have neither achieved the goal of national unity nor gained knowledge nor recorded development. It is evident that there is something fundamentally wrong with our priorities regarding the language policy. The logical thing would be to teach the languages in a rational way; first teach the students their mother language as recommended by the educationists who know the far-reaching impact of pedagogy. This would help students to have good cognitive growth. It’s imperative to have grounding in one’s natural speech for unencumbered mental and intellectual growth. If there is need for lingua franca, it should be taught from the middle level. English shouldn’t be compulsory for everyone as it’s now. It hugely wastes resources. It’s more of a status symbol now. In a nutshell, by using an unsavoury mix of different half-learnt languages we destroy the beauty and power of language which define us as humans. But perhaps we are lesser humans; we can’t think straight. And this happens partly because of language conundrum. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, June 3rd, 2024