IN one of the many inconsequential literary sittings, where mostly inexperienced Urdu poets and writers present their new creations before hostile, conservative would-be critics who frown upon anything done out of a carefully drawn circle, someone once recited a poem in which he used the word ‘man’ for heart. As soon as the discussion on the poem started, several participants raised an expected ‘linguistic’ objection, saying: “Magar Sahab, man tau Hindi hai.” Most people present there seemed to agree that using a ‘Hindi’ word in Urdu is somehow morally wrong. A few differing voices tried to counter the objection with the example of Iqbal’s “Man apna purana paapi hai…” but they were drowned in the self-righteous din. Perhaps even major poets are not supposed to leave their mark on some rules even if they erroneously break them here and there.

The fact is that out of the four words making up the objecting sentence, three have the shameful, ‘Hindi’ origin: man, tau and hai; only ‘Hindi’ is a word borrowed from Arabic.

The renowned social scientist and professor Aijaz Ahmad, in his lecture titled In the Mirror of Urdu: Recompositions of Nation and Community, 1947-65, points to this prevalent practice of privileging words borrowed from ‘Islamic’ languages — Persian and Arabic — at the cost of those having a local, ‘non-Islamic’ origin. He mentions the lexicographer Moulvi Syed Ahmad Dehlvi (d.1918) who compiled the classic four-volume dictionary of the Urdu language Farhang-e Asifia containing about 55,000 entries; although Moulvi Sahib himself preferred the borrowed words over local ones, three-fourth of the entries in his Farhang happen to have roots in Sanskrit and the various local Prakrits.

The prominent scholar Mohammad Saleem-ur Rahman once revealed in an article that Moulvi Sahib did not include in his dictionary some local words and phrases which he himself used in the long and interesting preface to it!

It can be easily concluded that however ‘patriotic’ the practice of shunning ‘Hindi’ words in Urdu usage may be, it amounts to trying to deny an overwhelmingly large part of our linguistic identity. It seems as much an effort to impose on ourselves an imported, middle-eastern collective identity as is evident in other aspects of our cultural self. In short, the underlying drive is to give Urdu a deeper Islamic hue than other, less-burdened-by-religion languages.

The identity crisis of the speakers and users of Urdu (both ahl-e zaban and the other lot) has something peculiar to do with their religion as well. It’s an obvious, though generally denied, fact that 99 per cent of South Asian Muslims have descended from converts and their ancestors had their origin in this land. It is even more obvious in the case of, for instance, Punjab, where many communities share their surnames with their Sikh and Hindu brethren. Despite this, an outlandish fiction has been created and propagated about the South Asian Muslims’ origin. It is a common practice to begin any cultural or political argument with the following premise: “When Muslims came to India…” Fact is, Muslims did not ‘come’ to South Asia from a foreign land; about 15 to 20 per cent of the local population got converted to Islam. One wonders: what is the harm in acknowledging this reality?

Once converted, their faith became common with Muslims living in other parts of the world, but they continued to belong, in the cultural and every other sense, to the land where they were born. However, for Muslim conquerors, rulers and land-grabbers, it was a critical part of their identity to cite their roots in Central Asia, Afghanistan or the Arab Middle East, so that they could enjoy the status of higher-castes according to the local custom. The force of perpetual myth-making has, gradually, made even the conquered, converted, middle and lower-caste Muslims internalise this idea of a foreign origin.

Foreign goods, including languages, have enjoyed a privileged status in our land for long. In the course of political and historical developments, many Persian (and, through it, Arabic) words and phrases have entered Urdu (as in other languages of the subcontinent); but here they have come to acquire a high-caste status — relegating words and phrases with local roots to a lower place. New rules of language were invented, such as the one which disallows the conjugation of Persian and ‘Hindi’ words, although the Persian used by the original speakers has no such binding. A full-fledged campaign was launched with the aim of establishing that the Urdu artificially infested with Persian was more ‘authentic’ than the local variety. The use of the verb ‘aana’ (to come), for instance, was considered less sophisticated than ‘tashreef lana’ or ‘hazir hona’, and so on. It is perhaps on this basis that Urdu is claimed to be not a language but a ‘tehzeeb’ (civilisation)! Furthermore, many local words and phrases were declared as ‘matrook’ (abandoned). It seems a significant part of the project of acquiring a borrowed identity to discard undesirable words and as a result impoverish the Urdu language.

The need for hastily, clumsily creating a separate ‘Muslim’ identity for Urdu in the heartland of Hindustan — the present UP — was acutely felt due to the conflict with Hindi, in fact the dreaded Hindi-walas who were seen as competing not only for jobs but also for cultural and political space. It was our way of resisting change. Christopher King, while discussing the Urdu-Hindi conflict in the NWP&O and the rest of the ‘Hindi Belt’ during the late 19th century in his book One Language, Two Scripts, gives the statistics of publication of books and periodicals in Hindi and Urdu. In these areas Urdu was finding it difficult to compete with Hindi. Muslims constituted about 15 to 20 per cent of the population, and the mindset of the Urdu-walas did not allow them to try and develop their language in terms of publication independently of the sarkari or riyasati patronage, which made the scope of their work rather limited. It was a common practice in those days to print three different prices on books and periodicals, namely, for the general public (awam-us nas), the aristocrats (raoosa) and the rulers of princely states (walian-e riyasat).

The Anjuman Taraqqi-e Urdu, the Hindustani Muslims’ platform to further the identity politics, was established in Aurangabad under the patronage of the Nizam of Hyderabad State. (Similarly, the Farhang-e Asifia is named after the last Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Asif Jah.) The Hindi-walas, on the other hand, tried to create a readership among the awam-un nas which would provide them the means to publish by buying their publications. Since the proportion of the Hindi readers was several times that of the Urdu readers, circulation of Hindi books and periodicals rapidly surpassed that of Urdu stuff. Premchand (1880-1936), the first modern fiction writer of Hindustan, initially used to write in Urdu, but his language carried the local colour so could not be acknowledged as ‘authentic’ Urdu. Also, unlike most Muslim writers of Urdu, he did not write for or about Muslims alone. Several of his novels were first published in the Nagri script, or the so-called Hindi. In one of his letters Premchand puts a question to an inquirer: if I do not publish in Hindi, how would I earn my living?

Since Punjab, with its newly created breed of Urdu readers, and no competition from Hindi, presented better conditions for the publication of Urdu books and periodicals, many individuals (including Hindus) moved there in the late 19th century to start their publishing houses and periodicals along with those who originated from Punjab and preferred to work in Urdu rather than Punjabi. The Hindus working in Urdu journalism and publishing were to gradually be elbowed out by the turn of the century, depriving Urdu of its secular character and turning it into a means of communicating with the strictly Muslim North Indian audience on largely parochial issues.

There is an interesting similarity in the political methods, slogans and so on in the way Urdu was turned into a political (and religious) cause and the way Islam was later used in the politics of Pakistan. For instance, a demand is routinely raised for the ‘nafaz’ (enforcement or imposition) of Urdu just as Islam’s ‘nafaz’ is demanded. Moreover, since the basic Islamic texts (Quran, Hadiths and Traditions) are in Arabic, which is Greek for the local Muslims, the existence of ulema (clerics) is considered necessary so that the ignorant people could be guided about how to follow the religious injunctions in their private and public lives. Similarly, a breed of language ulema has appointed itself to guide the ignorant users of Urdu and, thus, rule over them. The way you go to a religious alim to obtain a fatwa about this or that practice, you are supposed to ask an Urdu alim how to tread the tricky path of using ‘correct’ Urdu. Since you cannot pronounce ‘ain’ and ‘qaaf’ in the required proper way, your Islam is considered as wanting as your Urdu. And so forth.

The strange sense of superiority among the Urdu-walas, which they had contracted during their long unnecessary tussle with Hindi-walas, did not end even after 1947; if anything, Punjabis joined the ahl-e zaban in this false pride. In the initial years of the new state, Punjabis dominated the armed forces (they still do) while the civil bureaucracy was dominated by the Hindustanis (not any more). The political interests of both these groups converged as both wanted to subjugate the Bengali majority of Pakistan, not to mention other linguistic nationalities. So Punjabis and Hindustanis used Urdu politically against Bengalis. It was declared that the ‘official’ or ‘national’ language of Pakistan would be Urdu and only Urdu.

The experience of Punjabis was that a linguistic community can very well adopt another language at the cost of its own, which was considered a non-Muslim language, so they demanded others to do likewise. What they did not realise was that Bengalis had an entirely different, more natural relationship with their language. So did Sindhis. Both these linguistic communities objected that adopting Urdu as a link language should not mean the abandonment of their own language. Even in public life, the East Bengalis had no daily interaction with, for example, Balochistan, so why should they have agreed to abandon Bengali in favour of Urdu? But the babus and khakis, who went to East Bengal to rule over the population there, found it below their dignity to have to learn a low language like Bengali, especially since it is written like Hindi and Gurmukhi from left to right — i.e. in a ‘non-Muslim’ way; besides, it had a large number of Sanskrit words in it, so how could it be taken as a Muslim tongue? It was the general belief among West Pakistanis that the faith as well as the language of East Bengalis was inferior.

The role of Bengalis in our story in any case ended in 1971 with the traumatic birth of Bangladesh.