Giving tongue to the language of politics

BOOK EXTRACT

Mushirul Hasan is vice-chancellor of Delhi's Jamia Millia Islamia and an authority on modern South Asian history. His latest book takes aim (as, in one way or another, do his others) at the perception of Muslims as culturally monolithic, and shows how ideas of Muslims have changed from the 19th century onward.

Urdu's eclipse has dried up a major source of livelihood in the police, judiciary and the professions. But a greater source of worry is not just making both ends meet but the very survival of 'Muslim identity'. To recall some of the bare facts, Zakir Husain, Vice-Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia until 1948, had stated that 'Indian Muslims ... would not accept the complete loss of their cultural identity.

They would like to be good Muslims as well as good Indians'. Begum Anis Kidwai heard the alarm bells ringing during the first official Independence Day celebrations:

At that moment India was going back to the past, with people donning tilaks on their foreheads. And I wondered why they had sent for Brahmins. Why were they looking for a Qazi (reciter of the Qur'an)? What

will bhikshus do in Government House? I felt suffocated. Lost in these thoughts I reached Government House. Momentarily I experienced a sense of pride. The national flag flew on the stately entrance which provided free passage to the common folk.

Now, everything here was ours and our comrades in the national struggle lived in it. But soon my heart sank again. A language was being spoken there which was stranger to us than English, a language in the words of Josh Malihabadi:

Jis ko dewon ke siva koi
samajh na sake
Zayr mashq hai woh andaze
bayan ay saqi.
What cannot be understood
except by giants,
Saqi, that is the current
style of expression.

The chowkis on the right side of the dais were adorned with Buddhist priests. Many languages were spoken. English, Sanskrit, Arabic, chaste Hindi. But not a word in our precious language [Urdu], each expression of which 'sends a hundred flowers in bloom'.

Mujeeb expressed similar anxieties:

I remember my own reaction when I visited Uttar Pradesh Assembly. It was, I believe the inaugural; session. There were crowds of people in the visitors' galleries and the hall, but hardly a face that was known to me. I was simple-minded enough to ask a man standing next to me where the chief minister was, and I got in reply a reproachful look and the remark, 'Can't you see he is sitting there?'

I felt extremely uncomfortable. I could not spot anyone dressed like me, the language spoken around was not the Urdu which I thought was the language of Lucknow, the cultural metropolis of Uttar Pradesh, and there seemed to be no one within sight worth talking to. I left the assembly building with a feeling of mingled panic and disgust.

Controversies deepened, chiefly in north India, between the votaries of Hindi and those asserting their right to read and write in Urdu. The contest had, in fact, begun in the 1860s: it gathered momentum under the aegis of the Hindu revitalization movements.

In the Constituent Assembly which came into existence in December 1946 "" a few months before partition "" the Hindi protagonists, also the torchbearers of Hindu revivalism, depicted Urdu as a Muslim language, identified it with the Pakistan demand, and insisted that there should be no legitimate occasion top concede anything to a language that had functioned as a symbol of secession.

After Independence too a brute majority usurped the right of Muslims to read and write in Urdu by stigmatizing the language for its 'foreign' origin.

The UP Official Language Act 1951, and the wrangling in the Assembly indicated which way the wind was blowing. Under Zakir Husain's leadership, over ten thousand signatures were collected from Lucknow alone, but nothing much happened either in Delhi or Lucknow to promote the teaching of Urdu or accord it official status.

'It is strange,' the poet Sardar Jafri stated on 5 June 1998 in the presence of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then Prime Minister, 'that even after 50 years of independence both Ghalib and Urdu are homeless. Urdu became a victim of communal politics.'

Today, Urdu's fate is probably sealed forever. It survives lazily either in government-sponsored institutes and academies or amongst the Punjabi migrants from Punjab who congregate at Delhi's India International Centre where they are regaled by ghazals or the resounding voice of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan singing Ali da pehla number.

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MODERATE OR MILITANT
IMAGES OF INDIA'S MUSLIMS

Author: Mushirul Hasan
Publisher: OUP
PAGES: xii + 252
Price: Rs 495