The milling crowd convinced me of Urdu’s bright future in India,” said a friend who had just returned from Jashn-e-Rekhta, a cultural event in Delhi. “Yes,” I replied, “But only if Devanagari and Roman are also considered scripts of Urdu.”
It’s already a reality, although not officially recognised. The majority of people thronging to Jashn-e-Rekhta can’t read or write Urdu in its recognised script, Nastaliq. Most of them are not Muslim either. Their familiarity with the language is through Devanagari and Roman scripts. The website of the event’s organiser, Rekhta, is perhaps the largest digital repository of Urdu literature and it is also tri-scriptual, being available in Nastaliq of Urdu, Devanagari of Hindi, and Roman of English.
Urdu has found a haven in Hindi — the language from which it branched off, which it regarded as a rival, and in opposition to which the separatist politics crystallised.
Notwithstanding its political weaponisation in the past, India’s generosity continues to cherish Urdu’s innate beauty. It lives in Hindi cinema and, post-liberalisation, became the lingo of TV news. It became the toast of the sophisticates and its literary events have become culturally chic. Urdu literature is sold as Hindi transliteration or in English translation. No prizes for guessing that most of the literati who patronise it are Hindu.
Could the popularity of Urdu among the majority community be a metaphor for a deeper reality: that the Muslims feel at home among the Hindus despite branching off through Conversion and cutting off through Partition; and, Islam, despite the history of invasion and conquest, finds a hospitable space in the midst of Hinduism?
This metaphor has another layer. If Urdu owes its increasing popularity to Hindi script, maybe, Muslims too could find greater acceptance if, instead of the ongoing Arabisation, they took to Indianisation. And if Islam stressed more on commonality with Hinduism rather than regarding its influence as contamination.
The founder of Rekhta is Sanjiv Saraf. Those who have read Anita Desai’s novel In Custody, or watched its celluloid adaptation Muhafiz (1993), might recall the character Deven Sharma, a Hindi lecturer in love with Urdu poetry. He idolises the poet Nur Shahjahanabadi whose corpulent body and dissolute demeanour reflect the decadence of “Urdu culture”. Another character, Murad, a rich, raffish and unscrupulous editor of an Urdu magazine, asks him to record an interview of Nur. He comes from a class which brims with a sense of ownership of the canons and conventions of Urdu, and uses it now for politics and now for commerce, not to speak of the cultural soft power.
Through a series of bumpy interactions, the poet finds Deven earnest enough to be entrusted with the custody of his poetry manuscripts. The choice of Deven, a Hindu and Hindi-language lecturer, over Murad, a Muslim editor of an Urdu magazine, is full of symbolism whose substance we see unfolding before our eyes as Urdu comes home to Hindi.
Also read: Urdu literature has ignored Dalit Muslims. Pasmandas must own the language
Urdu’s link to Islam
A language is identified by its syntax, not its script. Yet, Urdu has been identified by its script, and also by the religion of its speakers. It’s been the language of Muslims and the language of Islam. It was weaponised, and political wars were waged over it. It divided India, and it divided Pakistan too. One of the reasons behind the Partition was the refusal of Urdu speakers to countenance the historical changes symbolised by the rise of Hindi. The slogan Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan was a reaction to this intransigence, which, in turn, led to Urdu-Muslim-Pakistan, and carved a country where Urdu was no one’s language. The imposition of the language on Bangla speakers broke the country, and brought Bangladesh onto the map.
Urdu has had a chequered past, which is best reflected in its present name. It has Turkish origins, with the same etymology as the English word Horde, and carries the memory of invasion and conquest. That the word has a military connotation and has meant a cantonment, and that India is dotted with Urdu Bazars (military settlements) presents a problematic picture of its evolution.
Hindi means Indian, and Urdu has been same as Hindi. Until the mid-19th century, Ghalib, the greatest poet of the language, referred to his Urdu poetry as “Hindi Kalam”, and named his collection of letters, Ood-e-Hindi (Fragrance of Hindi).
There are two parallel narratives. One that calls Urdu an Indian language, which is true. This school of thought considers Urdu a daughter of Sanskrit, an evolved form of Khari Boli. Its syntax is Sanskritic. More than 75 per cent of its vocabulary is Indian, and all the parts of speech, except some nouns of academic and literary nature, are Indian.
Another narrative claims that irrespective of religion, Urdu is everybody’s language, which it is not. Written in the same Nastaliq script as Arabic and Persian, practising the same literary genre, and drawing its academic and technical vocabulary from the two languages, it is very much a Muslim language. True, many great writers and litterateurs of Urdu have been Hindu, but high cultural pursuits in a language is one thing and identifying with it as one’s mother tongue is another. The Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb, a phoney construct, was coined to describe Hindu aristocracy’s imitation of the ways of their Muslim counterparts. There was no ambiguity about the cultural hierarchy.
Urdu’s identification with Muslims has been strongest in the religious sphere. Urdu being written in the same script as the Quran, and being the third biggest repository of Islamic literature after Arabic and Persian, could not but be identified with Muslims. Even more so, when there was no corresponding production of Hindu religious literature in Urdu language.
Also read: ‘Modi shasan’ not ‘Modi sarkar’: This IIM alumnus wants Urdu out of Hindi
Urdu today
Urdu’s Islamisation was a natural corollary of the anti-Bid’ah movement initiated by the theological school of Shah Waliullah, which, like the contemporaneous Wahabi movement in Arabia, sought to purify Islam of later accretions. In India, it meant the rejection of local influences from the religious practices of Muslims. Correspondingly, words of Indian origin were culled out from Urdu, and almost all literary and academic words were imported from Persian and Arabic. Literary genres, in any case, had been borrowed from abroad. Islamisation of Urdu had a dual effect. It laid the foundations of separatism among Muslims and left no reason for Hindus to feel any affinity with the language.
And so, in the 1860s, some Hindu notables led by linguist and historian Raja Sivaprasad demanded that alongside—not in place of—Nastaliq script of Urdu, Devanagari, the script in which most Hindus had literacy, should also be allowed in administration.
This would enable them to compete for the government jobs from which they had so far been disenfranchised because of their lack of literacy in Nastaliq.
The Muslim salariat class felt threatened. These creatures of the Kutchery Milieu, the Ashraaf, had a preponderance in government jobs thanks to their cultural felicity in Nastaliq Urdu. Their leader Sir Syed Ahmad Khan came hammers and tongs against Devanagari Hindi being brought on par with Nastaliq Urdu. It can be pointed out as the formal beginning of communal politics involving the two languages. Urdu was the metaphor for Islam. It was the legacy of the Muslim rule.
Understandably, the post-Independence education policy de-emphasised Urdu. State patronage was appreciably reduced. And since it was the language of the people who have always lived off the State patronage, they couldn’t imagine life without it. They were the first to jump the sinking ship. Today, Urdu literacy is lowest among the Ashraaf and highest among the lower classes who are educated in madrasas. But it’s the Ashraaf who claim to live the “Urdu culture”. Earlier they did politics with Urdu, now they do commerce. It has become the language of events, cheap thrill Mushairas and communal speeches.
Today, Urdu lives in Hindi and among Hindus. The story has a moral. The way a de-Islamised Urdu has been embraced, so will a secularised Muslim and Indianised Islam.
Ibn Khaldun Bharati is a student of Islam, and looks at Islamic history from an Indian perspective. He tweets at @IbnKhaldunIndic. Views are personal.
Editor’s Note: We know the writer well and only allow pseudonyms when we do so.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)