In recent days, a few decisive issues concerning language have been frequently flung in the air. Decisive though these issues are, they also have a sensational valence — triggering emotional responses quite naturally, these issues are often derailed from their linguistic-historical tracks and they crash on to a political-ideological site, left smouldering with smoke drifting over.

Central among these issues is this question of ‘mother tongue’. Dangling in the air is the argument that since the mother tongue of a vast majority of Pakistani children is not Urdu, they should receive their school instruction not in that language, but in their native tongue — be it Pashto, Brahvi, Punjabi, Sindhi or Seraiki. People invoke the authority of none other than one of the greatest linguists of our times, Noam Chomsky, to support what is merely a common sense observation, that children learn better if they are taught in their mother tongue.

Without serious qualification, this ‘mother tongue’ claim in the context of Pakistan is highly problematic. The question is complex and ought to be viewed on its own unique merits. Pakistan hardly has mutually isolated linguistic pockets, such as some Bantu languages in Africa, and for Pakistani children there is nothing alien or unfamiliar about Urdu. When they hear Urdu, they do not feel culturally dislocated — as they do when they hear English. Yes, the evidence is anecdotal, but these observations are highly plausible for at least three reasons.

One is that children all over the country grow up hearing Urdu through social media. Mobile phones have spread through our rural regions like wildfire and, according to World Bank figures, nearly 74 percent of the Pakistani population has access to electricity one way or another.

Another factor in familiarising our youngsters to Urdu — at least to street Urdu — is Bollywood. In fact, our regional young people are obsessed with the frivolous glamour of the endless products of this commercial factory, deprived as these growing children generally are of sports facilities and of meaningful art forms. Indeed, in the remotest of villages of the country, one often finds young kids running aimlessly in the narrow, filth-paved streets as they chant popular Bollywood songs, many of these songs being ghazalesque in nature.

Never have I come across a single student who fails to understand Urdu

In my own university, I deal with teenage students hailing from all over the country — from the Gwadar region in the south to Gilgit in the north, and from Chaman in the west to Sahiwal in the east. Never have I come across a single student who fails to understand Urdu. True, many of these students can hardly be called literate, but they are utterly comfortable with Urdu, and yet if one speaks to them in English, they certainly appear to be dislocated, quite often looking embarrassed and intimidated.

But there is a third, historical reason why Urdu is no stranger — linguistically or culturally — in the country’s ‘non-Urdu’ regions. It so happens that there is hardly any corner in Pakistan where one does not find young Urdu writers and poets of a fine quality. Gujrat or Kunjah, Layyah or Vehari, Chakwal or Dera Ismail Khan, Skardu or Shigar — noteworthy Urdu writers and scholars are found as part of an unbroken local tradition everywhere.

This means that there does exist some kind of a living Urdu milieu throughout that continues to produce newer generations of writers, a living flame that goes on burning unextinguished. Urdu is in the very air that Pakistani children breathe. Talking of a tradition, let’s recall that the outstanding Urdu humour writer of this era of ours, Mushtaq Ahmed Yusufi, was Rajasthani — was he writing in a language alien to him?

And the case of Punjab, the largest province of Pakistan, is particularly instructive. In fact, this is a case that should serve as a curative to the received standard ‘mother tongue’ narrative. In urban Punjab, young people as a rule communicate with one another in Urdu. They may speak with local accents and intonations, and they may adjust Urdu words according to their own phonetic habits, smoothly (and often creatively) importing Punjabi idioms while they speak, but they converse in Urdu nonetheless.

Urdu is fully naturalised in urban Punjab. This is so deeply rooted now that youngsters of this region feel more comfortable in Urdu than in their ‘mother tongue’. Indeed, in the most recent census, a large number of these heralds of Pakistan’s future declared Urdu — not Punjabi — as their mother tongue.

One is tempted to state the obvious here. We know that, since the late 19th century, the home of Urdu has been none other than Punjab, a ‘non-Urdu’ region. What of the greatest Urdu poet of the 20th century, the monumental Allama Muhammad Iqbal? What of the begetters of modern-day Urdu verse, Meeraji, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Noon Meem Rashid? What of the outstanding fiction writer Saadat Hassan Manto? What of Urdu journalism and scholarship, and what of the hub of the Progressive Writers’ Association? Punjab glows in its multifarious spectral colours of Urdu literature and language.

It sounds like a travesty of facts and a cultural offence to declare, without qualification, that Urdu belongs to a small minority of the people of Pakistan, and it appears to be propaganda to argue that, since it is not the ‘mother tongue’ of a vast majority of children of the country, these children ought to be taught in their ‘own’ tongue.

Such unqualified declarations seem to be an oversimplification at best, motivated perhaps by political or ideological vested interests. Ironically, this political-ideological thrust endangers other Pakistani languages that have largely been abandoned.

There are, for example, few scholars of the treasures of Seraiki these days, and far fewer of Sindhi than there were during the time of the learned Hussamuddin Rashidi. Let me dare say this: the majority of Pakistani children have two ‘mother tongues’, and one of them is Urdu.

The columnist is dean of the School of Liberal Arts at the University of Management and Technology, Lahore, and visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 5th, 2021