KEEPING Urdu alive in an age promoting a homogeneous — and, indeed, humongous — culture is quite a challenge. If pronouncements made during the 7th Urdu Conference are anything to go by, the bigger challenge is to keep the language relevant to modern times.

The chord was struck early by Dr Pirzada Qasim at the opening ceremony when he referred to the “unconscious drift towards global culture.” Subsequent voices throughout the conference wondered if the drift was only “unconscious” or if it was also inevitable in equal measure. It was not quite a direct contention to what Dr Qasim had said, but the argument kept coming up, and more so in the one that focused solely on the future of the language.

The lone direct contention came from Qazi Afzal Husain, who had come from Aligarh Muslim University, India, and impressed all with his erudition. Quoting French philosopher Michel Foucault, he argued in favour of the inevitability factor.

The universal pro-human man has a history of no more than a few centuries and the entity would “soon be gone altogether,” he quoted Fou­cault as having said. With this changing definition of man, he continued, the language of literature will have to adjust. Various languages are keeping pace with the phenomenon; Urdu is not.

The thread was picked up a day later by Dr Nasir Abbas Nayyar, who comes from Punjab University each year and thrills the audience with his grip on linguistics which is almost mesmerisingly synchronised with the changing times. This time round, he spoke on the imminent demise of the ‘Cosmopolitan Man’ that various ideologies and their followers had always presented as “the ultimate aim of any human being.”

Urdu survived the on­slaught of what he called the “imperial globalisation” of the 19th century, but is not quite ready for the “corporate globalisation” of the 21st. He reasoned his case quite convincingly, but before taking a look at that, let’s set the larger context by turning to what Dr Fatima Hasan, Dr Inamul Haq Jawed and Dr Najeeba Arif together pointed out in their respective speeches: official neglect.

Incident after incident was quoted about the scenario prevailing in bureaucratic corridors. From the Academy of Letters to Muqtadira Qaumi Zaban, various bodies set up in the name of Urdu, they highlighted, are simply sitting back and having “a bit of fun.” This “fun” naturally comes at the cost of the language they are supposed to be protecting, if not promoting.

The plight of the Urdu Lughat Board, as painted by Dr Hasan, was an eye-opener in particular. Having had the distinction of producing an exhaustive 22-volume Urdu dictionary, the Board is now inactive “with just one full-time employee who is going to retire within months.” It stands out as a realistic example of official disinterest in matters related to the national language.

It is against this rather bleak backdrop that the words of Dr Nasir Abbas Nayyar must be seen to have an inkling of what lies ahead: “In an era of information economy, languages need to have a body of knowledge freely available in order to serve the purpose. Gone are the days when it was enough for a lingua franca to survive. Today it has to be lingua academica as well,” he argued.

“Urdu, as such, needs to tread rather carefully on the path of globalisation, and would do well to consider the alternative in the shape of glocalisation — the process of linking the local with the global,” he suggested.

With the kind of auto mode that manages things in our ‘local’ environment, it looks almost beyond us, but that does not take anything away from the argument itself.

Intizar Husain, the doyen of anything Urdu, said it in almost as many words in his remarks towards the end. Blaming the leadership from the very outset, he lamented the politicisation of the language issue in Pakistan. “The official patronisation of the Urdu language is nothing different from what the controversial Kalabagh Dam is for national politics — a lot of sound and fury, but no substance,” he said to sustained applause from the audience.

Perhaps the only ray of hope in this context came from Raza Ali Abidi who projected a better future for the language for a very different reason. “With the national population rate still booming, Urdu, and, indeed, our religion, are both safe,” he remarked with a twinkle in his eyes.

Abidi’s twist may well work out for the language, but will it hold for the literature as well? The sight of the stage at the opening ceremony told its own story. It glittered with luminaries — more than a dozen of them — and made for a sight to behold. The average age, however, was in the higher 70s. If you know what it means, the heart sinks at the very thought.