By Dr Tariq Rahman
IN A recent issue of Dawn, there was a letter titled ‘Language: creating a new reality’ by K. Perwaiz regarding some of my alleged statements about Urdu and Hindi. There were misunderstandings in this letter which need to be corrected and this is the main subject of this column.

The writer of the letter quoted some of my earlier writings in the press and took offence at statements I made at the Aga Khan University last month about Urdu. According to the writer, I made two statements: first, that the Urdu press and school textbooks were neither pro-peace nor sensitive to women’s rights etc; and, second, that Urdu was the same as Hindi and that it came from Hindi. K. Perwaiz then concluded that I had ‘belittled’ Urdu and that nobody liked their language to be belittled.

Now let us take these statements in their proper context. First, the charge of having ‘belittled’ Urdu. Anyone who has read my academic work e.g. Language and Politics in Pakistan and Language, Ideology and Power, should know that I have always supported Urdu against the elitist use of English. I have been arguing since 1994 that we should make our young people proud of their languages and their roots. This means giving respect and value to their mother tongues – Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Balochi, etc – as well as Urdu as the language of wider communication (LWC).

I have gone to the extent of suggesting that elitist English-medium schools should be phased out by converting all schools to the same medium of instruction which should be the mother tongue in primary schooling and then Urdu (as the LWC). English should be taught as a second language using modern, interactive methods (films, songs, plays, conversation) throughout the school and college years. Higher education and research should, however, be in English.

This view goes against the view of the privileged classes and I expected criticism from members of those classes. However, unexpectedly, I was accused of belittling Urdu when, in fact, I have shown respect for all languages including the mother-tongue of the people and even English, which, after all, is a global language and as such it would be foolish not to teach it.

So, though I want English to be taught, I only want it to be spread more equitably among the school-going population in the interest of justice and equity. I do not want some people to purchase skills in English from the market at exorbitant rates while others are not even able to dream of doing so and are cheated of their hard-earned income by schools which claim to be English-medium when they are not.

The very presence of English among the privileged classes has caused an apartheid in our educational system which is causing resentment. A lot of the lawlessness we witness is because the gap between the haves and the have-nots is increasing. Even militancy using the idiom of Islam or ethnic identity is fuelled by deprivation, inequality and the unjust distribution of goods and services.

It is to correct this imbalance that state schools should be improved and a parallel, privileged, for-profit system of education be phased out. If my suggestions are accepted it will increase the role of Urdu in education not decrease it. This being so, I fail to understand how I have ‘belittled’ Urdu.

As for the charge that I said that the Urdu press and school textbooks express views which are not conducive to promoting peaceful, tolerant and democratic values, yes, I did say that. Indeed, Khalid Ahmed of The Friday Times, has pointed out that if my ideas are implemented, intolerant and pro-war views will become ascendant. He used my own data from my book Denizens of Alien Worlds to prove that madressah students are most intolerant, the English-medium ones most tolerant while those from Urdu-medium schools are somewhere in between.

He had a point, of course. I, therefore, suggested that if we increase the role of Urdu in our education system, we must purge our textbooks of the legacy of the Ziaul Haq years and also of earlier pro-war and anti-India policies. This is something which a number of intellectuals have been saying and which the ministry of education supports in principle as far as school textbooks are concerned.

If we want to live peacefully in a domestic context as well as with our neighbours, we should promote values of peace and tolerance in our media and textbooks. Hence, to say that textbooks in Urdu should be made more pro-peace, more sensitive to women’s rights and more tolerant of minorities is not an insult to the language. It is an attempt to make it more conducive to a happy coexistence.

Of course, there are left-leaning writers in Urdu, but we are talking of textbooks not of literature. Textbooks were deliberately crammed with intolerant and pro-war material, and this is what needs to be removed from them.

Now for my statement that Urdu comes from Hindi and that they are both really the same language. These are complicated issues of linguistic history and it is not possible to go into the details. However, let me make a few things clear. The ancestor of Urdu and Hindi was called by several names – Hindi, Hindvi, Gujri, Dakni, Indostan, Moors, Rekhta, Hindustani – until 1780 when the name ‘Urdu’ was used for this language for the first time.

Most earlier sources, generally Persian, use words such as ‘the Sheikh said in the Hindi language’. Amir Khusro, although he used different names for languages of different areas, reserved the term ‘Hindi’ for a language which appears much like the ancestor of both modern Urdu and Hindi.

Even after this date, Hindi, Hindustani and Rekhta were used, but gradually Urdu came to be reserved exclusively for that variant of the language which was written in the Perso-Arabic script and used Persian diction. The parent of modern Hindi and modern Urdu, whatever name we use for it, started bifurcating in the 18th century.

Muslim intellectuals purged it of certain words (‘sagar’, ‘nain’, ‘preet’ etc) to make it an identity symbol of the Muslim gentry. Somewhat later, identity-conscious Hindus did the same for modern Hindi. They wrote it in the Devanagari script and put Sanskritic words in it. Thus, the literary or official varieties of one common language are two languages now: Urdu and Hindi.

However, the language of the streets, of popular films, songs and drama dips towards the Urdu end of the continuum. These are historical realities to be presented for the purposes of scholarly accuracy.

Now I come to the use of Hindi in India. I never sang praises of it because the variant used officially, that is Sanskritised Hindi, is an artificial language which people do not understand or use in real-life situations. Moreover, attempts to impose it all over India were resented by the speakers of Dravidian languages, which, in fact, led to the subdivision of India into linguistic provinces. This was given as the excuse for the retention of English as the official language.

I did praise the practice of the makers of Hindi movies and TV soap operas which chose to use a comprehensible language which people in India and Pakistan – at least those who know Hindi or Urdu – can understand. While official Hindi is used for symbolic and identity-related reasons, just as Urdu laden with Persian and Arabic words is in Pakistan, the unofficial language of the streets are very close to each other.

There is so much confusion about language issues that I intended to write about these matters anyway. I thank Mr Perwaiz whose letter inspired me to write this earlier than I had envisaged.
Source: Dawn
Date:7/3/2007