Dedh Ishqiya and Urdu in India Today

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In a 21^st century take on the “Muslims Social”, Dedh Ishqiya does a marvellous job of using High Urdu to amaze and entertain. Looking beyond the wordplay, though, the film’s layered take on language provides some intelligent and much needed commentary on the state of Urdu in India today and its relationship with the country’s Muslims.

In a riotously funny scene from recently released comic thriller Dedh Ishqiya, Jaan Mohammad (played by Vijay Raaz) aggressively threatens a very drunk Khalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) to leave town so that he can win the hand of the beautiful Begum Para (Madhuri Dixit). In a twist typical of the film, fist fights and gun brandishing suddenly give way to poetry, as Khalujaan picks up the word “wādā” (promise) used by Jaan and starts taunting him using a sher. A gangster by profession and somewhat removed from the world of poetry, Jaan retorts as best he can by racking his brains and coming up with the only sher he knows on “wādā. This change of playing field from violence to poetry, though, can only end badly for Jaan. His verse induces derisive laughter from Khalujaan who then points out that Jaan’s original sher spoke of “bādā” (wine) and not “wādā” at all. Jaan just confused the two rhyming words.

It is credit to the competence of director Abhishek Chaubey that the Bombay theatre I was in, found the wordplay funny and laughed along with Khalu, in spite of the fact that very few would have been able to point out Jaan’s mistake themselves. Anupama Chopra, movie critic for the Hindustan Times, though, might have empathised more with Jaan and his struggles with High Urdu. While generally praising the film, she did end her review with one small regret: “I also struggled with the Urdu,” she said. “It was melodious but I wish I understood more of it.”

This frank admission, and the fact that Dedh Ishqiya is the only Bollywood film I’ve ever seen with English subtitles, contains within it some stark irony for an industry which, it could be said, was born into Urdu. As Mukul Kesavan has pointed out, Bollywood with its fantasy, musicals and location (Bombay) was an almost direct successor to Parsi theatre. And like the theatre, the new film industry adopted Urdu, given that it was the only language at the time which had any sort of pan-national appeal. To churn out words for this new industry, were recruited large numbers of Urdu writers and poets from North India. Bollywood’s Golden Age from the 40s to the 60s was studded with Urdudāns such as Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Saadat Hasan Manto, Sahir Ludhianvi, Shakeel Badayuni and, most relevant to this movie, Ismat Chughtai. Lihāf (Quilt), Chughtai’s story of lesbian love between a begum and her maid, forms one of the principal subplots within Dedh Ishqiya. The movie itself has a subtle hat tip to this source in the scene where Khalujaan and Babban have been tied up by Para and Muniya (Huma Qureshi). As the shadows of the two woman making love flit across the screen—in itself a symbol from Lihāf—Khalujaan remarks impishly to Babban, “thand lag rahī hai? Lihāf māng le!” (Feeling cold? Ask for a quilt).

To grant Chopra her limited point, the language of Dedh Ishqiya is particularly “high” for the average film of today. But go back just 50 years, and you would find a very similar linguistic standard prevalent in the industry, especially in the music. Wonder how a film reviewer reconciles her job as a critic when a film of just 50 years back would be inaccessible to her. But then in an industry where Katrina Kaif, a person who plays all her roles with a thick British accent, is the dominant star maybe Chopra is doing all right. And of course, there is the point that Chopra would hardly be alone. Whatever be the origins of Bollywood, the fact is that a very large majority of Indians would be unable to understand the sort of High Urdu that the movie uses—it’s not for nothing that the film carried English subtitles.

In a mark of the intelligence of the film though, one of the themes of Dedh Ishqiya is this very hollowness of Urdu in India today.

Urdu started life as a standardised register of the local language of Delhi. As SR Faruqi points out in his book Early Urdu Literary Culture and History, “Urdu” itself is a metonym for the city of Delhi. The name “Urdu”, though, is very recent and the language has variously been called Hindvi/Gujri/Rekhta/Dakhani and even Hindi; as late as the early 20th century, the words “Hindi” and “Urdu” were being used interchangeably.

The development of Urdu as an elite language though was a rather late development in the history of North India. Throughout the medieval period, Persian had been the region’s lingua franca and official language. In fact it was so ingrained in India that when the British proposed to do away with Persian in 1839, 500 citizens from Dhaka, split almost equally amongst Hindu and Muslim, vigorously petitioned the government to desist from such a move. In spite of this, the British did replace Persian and, in North India, introduced Urdu in its place as an official language. Unfortunately, the legacy of Farsi was less easy to shake off. The Urdu that took root in the offices of the Raj was corpulently Persianised. This was maybe a deliberate tactic by the clerks—mostly upper class Muslims, Kayasths, Kashmiri Brahmins and Khatris—who controlled the language and profited from the fact that the general populace was totally dependent on them for something as simple as comprehension. In many ways, this attitude was not dissimilar to that of the current Anglophone class which break out into paroxysms every time anyone so much as talks of replacing English with the local languages of each state.

As a reaction, the rural classes—who were mostly Hindu—championed the cause of Nagari using organisation such as the Nagari Pracharini Sabha (of Banaras) and the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan (of Allahabad), both founded at the turn of the century. In this way, the origins of modern Hindi were utilitarian and commonsensical—it aimed to simplify Urdu. Unfortunately, this straightforward matter of language, as we all know, got violently communalised and to top it all, the end result was a register which was de-Persianised, as promised, but also corpulently Sanskritised, leading us all back to square one as far as ease of comprehension goes. Alok Rai calls this new register “school Hindi” and wryly remarks that this leads to children across the length and breadth of North India to valiantly struggle to learn a language which is supposed to be their mother tongue. It is no wonder that all popular culture in India, such as Bollywood, steers clear of either extreme and sticks to the spoken speech of Hindustan. In 1947 though, the sharp politicisation of the Hindi-Urdu issue meant that this “School Hindi” was adopted as India’s official language. Suddenly, in places like Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, the birthplace of Urdu, Urdu stopped being taught and used in government. This lack of patronage had little effect on the everyday Urdu (or Hindustani) of spoken speech, a large portion of the language which was shared in common with Shudh Hindi. It did however have the effect of severely curtailing the sphere of influence of High Urdu. A high or literary register without patronage is, by definition, not going to get very far and that is what happened. Post-1947, Urdu atrophied dramatically.

Normally, if this was any other country, High Urdu would have a dignified death much as Ottoman Turkish did when Ataturk changed the official language of Turkey to Modern Turkish. Indeed, since Urdu offers almost no economic benefits, the only people who study it today as a primary language are people who get this education free at madrasas and are too poor to pay for anything else. In India, though, the communal history of Hindi-Urdu, made Urdu one of various meaningless markers of Muslim identity that can be taken out and flogged whenever necessary. As an example, when AAP want to reach out to Muslims in Delhi, it releases an Urdu pamphlet. This is unneeded because firstly, a large number of Delhi Muslims would be unable to read the Urdu script in the first place and secondly, even those that do, will almost certainly read the Devanagri script better or, at least, just as well. If all AAP wanted to do was to communicate with Muslims, a Hindi pamphlet would have done a much better job. And of course, this was just a minor example. Governments have, for decades, used the “Muslim” symbolism of Urdu—a sort of internal Orientalism if you will—to great effect employing it as a diversionary tactic to get away with non-performance on rather more pressing issues such as health or sanitation.

Given that a majority of its characters are Muslims, Dedh Ishqiya might be classified as a modern “Muslim social”. True to its genre, the film does explore the stereotypical elements of elite Indo-Islamic culture. Dedh Ishqiya has havelīs, nawābs and begums, flowing sherwanīs and, of course, stars High Urdu. Unlike a traditional Muslim Social such as Umrao Jaan or Pakeezah (which would have High Urdu through and through), the movie functions on multiple planes of language. At the almost surrealistic mushairā-cum-swayamwar that Begum Para holds to choose a suitor for herself, the most mellifluous Urdu is spoken and, indeed, Chaubey and Bhardwaj take advantage of the register to produce some crackling repartee and wit. Things though start unravelling in the character of Jaan Mohammed, a local gangster looking to gentrify himself by marrying a begum. Respectability though needs to be earned and before he gets to become a nawāb he’ll have to get the language right. Jaan’s battles with Urdu lead to some curious results. Throughout the movie he uses some high vocabulary (“shamsheer” for “talwār” and “gauhar” for ”hīre-motī”/) but slips up on the simplest of Urdu words, mispronouncing “Ishq” as “Issak” or “shart” as “sart”. And not only Jaan, for all the other characters, this High Urdu is just a mask put on to impress. Khalujaan, who is otherwise a talented poet, talks to his closest friend Babban in their common earthy register of Bhopali Urdu. The one time he does put on airs as a fake nawāb, Babban tells him rather plainly that “tumhārī sārī nawābīyat hai nā, picchwāde main ghusaid doongā” (I’ll stuff you airs up your ass). And when right towards the end of the movie, Jaan Mohammad despotically orders Para and Khalujaan to dance for him, one of his flunkies pipes up to complain, “Yeh itne dinon se ghazlein-wazlein sun ke nā badhazmī sī ho ga’ī hai, sāli. Inse item number karwāte hain. ” (I’m tired of all this high-falutin’ poetry. Let’s get them to do some item numbers).

This sort of linguistic meta-commentary is rare in Bollywood (Chupke Chupke is one exception which comes to mind), which is odd given how integral language is to the art of cinema. But Dedh Ishqiya does take a shot at it and skilfully uses the nuances of language to explore different shades of the story as well as make a larger point about the state of Urdu in India today. And that is

Madan Mohan Malaviya: how a four-time Congress president became a BJP icon

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Many of the Right’s pet issues today, from “reconversion” to the cementing of an aggressive Hindu political identity were initially championed by Malaviya in British India

The Bharat Ratna has always been a political award and this year was no different. The Modi government has conferred India’s highest civilian award on Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Madan Mohan Malaviya. Vajpayee was, of course, the first prime minster from the BJP and easily the party’s tallest leader. Born more than 150 years ago, Malaviya’s link with the BJP and its ideology is somewhat less know.

Madan Mohan Malaviya was born in Allahabad in a Brahmin family highly respected for its learning and knowledge of Hindu scriptures. Financial circumstances forced him to take up a job as an English teacher in a local school after graduating from his BA. From these humble beginnings, Malaviya was able to branch out into a somewhat bewildering number of fields and leave his mark on them.

He started his political career in 1886 with a widely appreciated address to the Indian National Congress session in Calcutta. Malaviya would go on to become one of the most powerful political leaders of his time, managing to be chosen Congress President on four occasions. Impressed by Malaviya’s 1886 address, an Awadh taluqadar, Raja Rampal Singh, offered the editorship of his Hindi newspaper, Hindustani to Malaviya. Later on, Malaviya would go on to rescue the Hindustan Times from financial ruin and launch its Hindi edition. He would serve as the Hindustan Times’ chairman for more than 20 years, building it up to be the foremost nationalist newspaper of its time.

Linguistic Politics

In spite of his achievements in politics and journalism, maybe Malaviya’s greatest impact lies in the sphere of language. The late 1800s saw mobilisation around the issue of Hindi and Urdu—till then, the courts and bureaucracy of the Raj used Urdu written in the Persian script as the official language. Malaviya submitted his famous Memorandum (“Court Character and Primary Education in North-Western Provinces and Oudh”) to the Lt Governor of what is now Uttar Pradesh. The Memorandum was masterfully framed and was one of the principal arguments which convinced the British Raj to pass an order in 1900 which permitted the use of Nagari characters alongside Persian in the courts of the North-Western Provinces.

While his overall achievements are obviously a factor, the primary reason this BJP government feels the need to honour Malaviya is of course his contribution to the Hindu nationalist cause. Malaviya was a staunch conservative both socially and politically. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur (Independent India’s first woman cabinet minister) writes that Malaviya “would never take food or drink from the hands of anybody other than a Brahmin of his own caste”. He set up a Hindu university in Banaras which along with “Aligarh Moslem University” would produce men “true to their God, their King and their country”. As the reference to the King shows, politically, Malaviya believed in constitutionalism and was one of the few major Congress leaders to oppose Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement. Carrying on with this strand of thought, the party Malaviya founded, the Hindu Mahasabha did not participate in the Quit India movement of 1942.

Malaviya’s position on the integration of Dalits in order to prevent their conversion to other religions, formed the basis of how the Hindu Right saw this issue and is played out till today in instances like the Shivpuri conversions and the fact that the Indian state takes away “scheduled caste” status from any person who converts away from Hinduism. Malaviya also played an important role in introducing the concept of “reconversion” to Hinduism, an issue which seems to be on the top of the Sangh Parivar’s agenda today. A fear of reduced Hindu numbers—a pet peeve of today’s Hindu Right—drove his thinking on “reconversion”.  Presiding over a Hindu Mahasabha convention in 1932, Malaviya argued: “When now we are so badly treated with a numerical strength of 22 crores, what would be our condition in future with a much reduced Hindu population, if we allow this rate of conversion from Hinduism and do not allow reconversion into Hinduism?”

Muscular Hinduism

Malaviya also championed a muscular Hindu identity which often jostled violently for space with urban India’s Muslim minority. In Allahabad, the annual Ram Lila procession was organised by the Malaviya family. In the fractious politics of North India, this procession would often trigger off communal violence, the immediate catalyst being music being played outside mosques. When the British demanded that the procession stop playing music whenever it passed outside a mosque, Malaviya refused, arguing that this would make it a “mourning procession, not a Ram Dal”. As a result, the British banned the Ram Lila procession in Allahabad and it was only resurrected in 1937 when a Congress government came to power in UP under the 1935 Government of India Act.

Organisationally, Malaviya also had a seminal role to play in the Hindu nationalist movement. He set up the Hindu Samaj in 1880 in reaction to what he thought were Christian missionary attempts to stop the annual Magh Mela. But of course, his biggest contribution was the setting up of the Hindu Mahasabha along with Lala Lajpat Rai in 1915. The Mahasabha was the largest Hindu nationalist party in British India. Mahasabha leaders such as Savarkar played a key role in crystallising Hindu nationalist thought and one of the party’s tallest leaders, Syama Prasad Mookerjee would go on to found the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the predecessor of the ruling BJP today.

Given how Malaviya contributed, both ideologically and organisationally, to the Hindu nationalist cause, it is not surprising that the BJP now seeks to honour him with a Bharat Ratna.

Why purists like Batra are Hindi’s biggest enemy

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First published on Scroll.in

The past two decades have seen Hindi grow vigorously throughout India, on the back of commerce and the arts. Batra’s diktats will only harm the spread of Hindi as India’s lingua franca.

A few years back, I was on the Delhi Metro with a friend, an American on a 6-month transfer to our company’s Gurgaon office. He was also, as it so happened, an amateur linguist and had resolved to learn Hindi by the time he went back to the US.

As part of his education that day, he listened intently to the Metro announcements. “Kisi bhi sandigdh vastu ko haath na lagayen,” Shammi Narang’s voice announced followed by Rini Khanna’s, “Please do not touch any suspicious objects on the Metro”.

“Sandigdh,” he Googled. “Suspicious”.

For the next week or so, he used “sandigdh” wherever he could, during coffee-breaks with colleagues or with his chauffer. With disappointing results. No one seemed to know what it meant.
Later on I had to explain to him that formal Hindi is rather a different animal from what Hindi speakers actually speak.

“So you mean to say that the Delhi Metro gives out warnings against a terrorist bombing, using words that no one really understands?!”

I nodded and shrugged a we-are-like-that-only shrug.

I was reminded of this little illustration of linguistic folly when I read Dinanath Batra’s pronouncements that Hindi text books should carry no words with foreign origins. "Use of Urdu, Persian and English words has created a challenge for students," Batra opined, blissfully unaware that the word “Hindi” itself is a Persian word.

Batra might have seen some “acche din” after the BJP gained power but, as the Metro example shows, linguistic puritanism is tough and carries costs.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that people haven’t tried. Batra is actually one in a long line of people who have looked down upon spoken Hindi and tried to contort it to suit their own political ends.
Modern Standard Hindi (Shuddh/Maanak Hindi) starts its journey from 1898, as Madan Mohan Malviya submitted his famous Memorandum to the Lt Governor of the North-Western Provinces, asking to introduce the Devanagri script alongside the Urdu script in the province’s courts. Malviya wanted to help the rural populace, since Urdu was confined to only the urban elite.

At the time, in the matter of Hindi, things were moving fast. 1888 saw the publication of the first work of literature in Modern Hindi: the novel Chandrakanta (later on made into a TV show). Organisations like the Nagari Pracharani Sabha were founded to promote the Devanagri script. Moreover, Modern Hindi adopted the base dialect of Urdu, Khadi Boli rather than take up the much older Braj. Khadi was already popular while Braj was largely a literary plaything. This allowed Hindi, Christopher Shackle and Rupert Snell write in their book, Hindi and Urdu since 1800, “to establish itself as a genuine vehicle of communication”.

Much against the wishes of early Hindi pioneers such as Bharatendu Harishchandra or Malviya, this new register got excessively Sanskritised. Part of the reason was to differentiate Modern Hindi from its older Siamese twin, Urdu since both were based on the same dialect. Part of the reason was to elevate Hindi’s status, a putative direct descent from Sanskrit helping it leapfrog in rank over much older literary traditions such as Bengali or Marathi. This is similar to why Urdu stuffs itself with words from Persian or, once upon a time, English crammed itself with Latin. And of course, the third reason (and the one driving Batra) was religious nationalism, given Sanskrit’s status as Hinduism’s liturgical language. In fact, one of the motives given by Maharashtrian, Nathuram Godse for murdering Gandhi, was that the Gujarati did not support Sanskritised Hindi.

Gandhi’s death for supporting simple Hindi was quite symbolic. Partition and the polarisation that followed meant that any voices in support of Hindi as it was spoken (notably Nehru and Azad) were drowned out and Sanskritised Hindi appointed as India’s official language with a temporary changeover period for English.

The State put its might behind Hindi, appointing commissions to coin new words in order to prepare itself for taking on the mantle of India’s official language. By 1965, Hindi was sought to be imposed as India’s exclusive national language and English confined to the dustbin of history.

Of course, we know that that never happened: English is still here. In fact, post-1947, curiously, the State’s backing actually led to no great increase in the status of Hindi. English still dominated. More than ever, in fact, bureaucrats were recruited from elite institutions like St Stephen’s, prominent amongst them being Mani Shankar Aiyar, probably one of the last speakers of English to pronounce “issue” as “is-yoo”.

Like all things in India, Hindi grew not because, but in spite of the government. Principally, Bollywood pushed it, a process that was greatly accelerated post-liberalisation, as the Hindi film industry grew quickly. In Bangalore today, the biggest movie in town is Salman Khan starrer Kick. And the latest Bengali film to be released is called Bindaas. Of course, the language that Bollywood spread was not the stuffy sarkari argot of train announcements but the tumultuous Hindi of everyday speech.

In many ways, this is only natural. All vibrant languages borrow words; puritanism is linguistic death. Modern English, the planet’s most successful language ever, takes most of its words not from older versions of English but from French and still borrows liberally every chance it gets.

This renaissance, so to speak, has given new life to Hindi. Apart from Bollywood, Hindi news channels tower over their English counterparts and unless you can write copy in Hindi, you won’t be making it too far in the ad world. And, of course, our current Prime Minster is far more comfortable in Hindi than in English.

Remnants of the old statist approach to Hindi still remain, though, as both Batra’s fatwas and the agitation over the UPSC language issue show. The UPSC prelims exam can only be taken in Hindi and English, greatly disadvantaging a Bengali or Tamil speaker. Unhappy with even this privilege, Hindi speaking aspirants refused to answer even a few questions in English.

The issue of the elitism of English—the agitation’s underlying complaint—is real but it is hardly a problem that can be solved by changing the language of a few questions in an exam. Especially since once chosen, bureaucrats would do most of their work in English anyway. As the blurb for Chetan Bhagat’s new book shows (a Bihari boy who didn’t speak English well fell for a girl who did), the aspirational status of English is deep-rooted and real.

Nevertheless, Hindi is one truly one of the world’s great lingua francas, understood in some measure, by a fourth of the world’s population, trailing only English and Manadarin.

No matter how secure English is now, sometime in the medium term, Hindi has a good chance of replacing it. Remember, at one time, Latin, Sanskrit or Persian also seemed invincible but now lie buried, replaced by vernaculars.

Of course, this is a gradual process. As has been seen, any forced measures only end of hurting Hindi and making non-Hindi speakers intransigent. Hindiwallahs like Batra need to leave the language well alone and let it grow organically, as it has been doing so for the past few centuries.

Why Both Englishwallahs and Hindiwallahs are Making a Mountain Out of a Molehill

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First published in Mint

The brouhaha over the two government circulars is quite needless. Neither change anything, leaving undisturbed the status quo of English being India’s official langue and Hindi being the lingua franca of its masses.

In the iconic Dev Anand-starrer Guide, Raju, who is now a vagrant, is taken by gullible villagers to be a mahatma and invited into their village. The village pandits, however, do not take kindly to this intrusion into their spiritual space. To expose Raju, they propose a simplest test of comprehension. One of them reads out a Sanskrit shloka and asks Raju what it means. Raju looks on unfazed and does reply, but in English (a language he picked up as a tourist guide). He then mockingly asks the pandits if they understood what he just said. At this turning of linguistic tables, the whole village (who, it must be noted, understood neither) bursts out laughing and the defeated priests slink away, firmly crowning Raju as the village mahatma.

This scene does a fantastic job of illustrating just how powerful English is, not a as a prosaic means of communication, but as a mark of prestige and power. Indeed, there could be no better parallel than Sanskrit, and much like it, English acts almost brahmanically to exclude people from its charmed circle.

Indeed a small illustration of the language’s awesome power was on display last week, as the English media went into apoplexy over what turns out to a complete non-issue. The central government passed two circulars. One was related to social media, which read, “In keeping with the existing policy of the Government regarding use of Hindi, Government of India communication in ‘A’ category States i.e. Hindi speaking States must give equal importance to the use of Hindi in their social media platforms”. The second one, farcically, announced a prize money of Rs 2,000 to two babus for doing their official work mostly in Hindi.

Obviously, neither circular has any relevance to actual language use anywhere. If the Central Government’s cunning plan to trick everyone into using Hindi is by offering prizes worth 2 thousand rupees, then well, best of luck, bud. And if you are bothered with a Bihari bureaucrat posting tweets in Hindi and English, do note that Hindi states doing their official work in Hindi as well as English is a process that has continued for over half a century now. It is ridiculous to be fine with, say, laws being published in two languages but object over the same happening with something as trivial as tweets. So over the top was the reaction that Shashi Tharoor, (who has, ironically, faced considerable interlocutory difficulties communicating in English while in government) wrote an entire piece detailing the problems non-Hindi bureaucrats would have reading file notings in Hindi—a completely imagined scenario. In reality, of course, the only issue a bureaucrat who’s not fluent in Hindi would face is not having a chance to win the Rs 2,000 Hindi Prize—a not-so-grievous loss, I would imagine.

Apart from this reaction from the Anglophone classes, the other aspect keeping the pot boiling was the fact that the BJP is in power, a party for which the establishment of Hindi was once a cause dear to its heart. While the fear is understandable, till now the BJP has, it must be admitted, been rather blameless in this sphere. Not only was the note an unthinking assembly-line bureaucratic product, apparently originating with the previous UPA government, Modi himself uses only English on social media. Of course, all the actual Hindi chauvinism has been practised by the Congress in the first 20 years after independence. The GoP pushed Hindi as an exclusive national language and despotically prevented the teaching of Urdu in its birthplace of Uttar Pradesh and Delhi. Sometimes, just sometimes, our well-meaning liberals tend to forget just how Conservative the Congress Party actually was.

This episode also shows just how obtuse the Hindiwallahs are in pushing their case and why they, more than anyone else, end up harming the cause of Hindi.

By 1947, Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani (or whatever else you chose to call Delhi Khadi Boli) had, by and large, been established as the urban lingua franca of a very large part of the subcontinent. This had been a process 3 or 4 centuries in the making, as the elite classes of Mughal India started to use earlier forms of Hindi-Urdu as a conversational language, even while retaining Persian as the official language. Thus, in urban centres as far apart as Bijapur, Ahmedabad and Agra, by the 18^th century, Hindi-Urdu was now the language of the street. By the 19^th century, the language, using its standardised register of Literary Urdu, even started to replace Persian as the official language. The British were using it in UP and Punjab and during the Revolt of 1857, key communication, such as declarations and letters between rebels, was carried out in Urdu and not Persian. At about the same time, when Parsis, the originator of modern theatre in India, wanted a language for their plays, they chose Urdu, simply because it was the only inter-regional language available. Its cultural successor, Bollywood also chose Hindi-Urdu. Driven by commerce, art and a catholic approach (exactly the factors which drive English as a lingua frana today), Hindi-Urdu was doing rather well for itself.

In 1947, India gained independence and the Congress came to power—a positive move on most accounts other than for Hindi. In large parts of the Hindi-heartland, the Congress was an extremely Conservative, upper-caste body who now made the issue of Hindi into a battleground of ethnic chauvinism. They not only tried to force Hindi down the throats of non-Hindi speakers, they did it using a new Sanskritised register of the language, so far removed from everyday speech that it baffled even Hindi speakers.

Of course, the Hindiwallahs never understood that the ugly muscle of the government hurt, not helped, Hindi, instantly converting it from a utilitarian lingua franca to a symbol of oppression. It was a reverse version of Tom Sawyer’s painting-the-fence paradigm. For the first time in its history, Hindi faced a concerted opposition to its spread.

In the face of this resistance, the government backed down hurriedly. Free of government control, Hindi continued its slow but remarkable expansion. Hindi-Urdu, from being a local dialect of the Delhi region, is now understood, in some basic form, from Peshawar to Dhaka and from Srinagar to Bangalore. In fact, Hindi-Urdu is probably the 3^rd most understood language on the planet (including second language speakers) after Mandarin and English. However, even this power fails to give it unquestioned primacy in the land of linguistic wonder that is India. Understandably, powerful non-Hindi linguistic traditions resist its dominance. However, in spite of this, Hindi has expanded extraordinarily and, unless Hindiwallahs don’t mess things up, this trend looks to continue. Maybe a time will come sometime in the future when Hindi would have captured enough space to claim a natural right to be the sole official language (as well as the lingua franca it is now). However, that process is still underway and it remains to be seen what the final outcome will be. This historical process, though, has nothing to do with a Hindi Prize or a Bihari under-secretary tweeting his day’s schedule—a fact that excitable English and Hindi wallahs need to understand.

Faiz is Beautiful but Can You Really Call Him a People's Poet?

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I recently came across a short debate I had with Mr Sohail Hashmi on Kafila. I found rereading it quite interesting so thought I’d post it up here for posterity.

Mr Hashmi, of course, is a writer I much admire and I have, especially, read his writings on the architectural heritage of Delhi with great interest. In this instance he wrote a lovely piece on Faiz, Urdu’s greatest poet of the modern era. What I took issue with, though, is Mr Hashmi’s characterisation of Faiz as a “people centric” poet and one whose “ideas glisten with the truth and democratic ideals that enlighten the hearts of the overwhelming majority of our people”

My first comment on the article was:

“Thanks for this fascinating account Mr Hashmi.

Although, personally, I’ve always battled with the notion that Faiz’s poetry was “people centric”. If it was, it was in a very top-down, almost patronising sort of way. Can any poetry, written in Rekhta (and here I make a very stark distinction between Urdu and Rekhta as should be done) ever be truly “people centric”? Are “people centric” themes enough to award Faiz with the honour of the subcontinent’s most imprtant poet, this hardly a handful people in the sub-continent could actually understand his overtly Persianised Urdu? You must admit, to claim to talk on behalf of the people, when the people can’t even understand you is a bit rich.

Urdu is one of the few languages which exhibits such extreme literary diglossia that the literary form (at least in poetry) is almost incomprehensible to its native speakers. Bengali is another sub-continental language which did exhibit a similar trait with an artificially sanskritised form of the language (shadhubhasha: cholit bhasha :: Rekhta:Urdu) but thankfully, that elitist trend has died out and almost all literature in Bengali today is in cholit bhasa (i.e. the normal spoken language).”

To which Mr Hashmi replied:

“You have touched upon some very complex issues and no simple explanations are possible.

Between the time that Faiz began writing to the time that he died, Urdu ceased to be a language of public discourse in large parts of the subcontinent, at least in the parts where it was born as Hindavi, that is the Ganga Jamuna doab and in the parts where it grew into a full fledged language that is Deccani .

The language became a victim of the divisive politics of language equals religion that began with the Fort Williams college in 1825 and culminated with the adoption of the resolution to make Sanskritised Hindi as the national language of India instead of Hindustani written in both the Nagri and the Persian scripts, the latter had the backing of Gandhi but the constituent assembly went against the old man’s wishes and voted against Hindustani.

URDU became the official language of Pakistan where it was the mother tongue only of the Muhajirs and was banished from the land where it was the language of Prem Chand, Kanhaiyalal Kapoor, Krishan Chand, Ram Lal, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Tilok Chand Mehroom, Firaq, Arsh Malsiyani and also of Josh,Sahir, Shakeel, Jazbi, Majaz, Majrooh and Kaifi. Faiz could only write in the language that he was comfortable in, his mother tongue might have been Sialkoti Punjabi but all his initial education was in Urdu, Persian and Arabic and this is the linguistic discourse that he was familiar with.

The other issue is do you have to , of necessity, write in the language of the people if you are writing about issues that concern them? I don’t know how many blacks had access to the English in which Langston Hughes wrote his anti racist poems, how many Russians understood Yevtushenko or Maykovsky, when they wrote on issues that concerned the working class of Russia.

We had a literacy rate of 13% when we became independent, so 87% of our population was illiterate in all languages, which language should the writers have written in. Tulsi’s Ram Charit Manas written in Awadhi,because he wanted the image of the ideal being to be presented before the people, has had to explained to Awadhis for the last 400 years, the same is true of Jaisi’s Padmavat and Rahim’s Dohas.

some of what a great poet writes about the people is understood by them immediately, some takes a while to be understood and some is understood after a couple of generations. it is this that makes him/her a great poet. the only way a poet can be understood totally by the people is for the poet to write not only in the language of the people but also write only about the here and now. This way lies 15 minutes of glory and impermanence and an absence of literature that speaks to generations. you can not demand that literature that lives beyond its time and deals with issues that go beyond the immediacy of now must also be understood totally, fully and completely by those who live at the moment of the creation of that literature.

Faiz has fortunately written both kinds of poetry, the time bound and the time less and that is one of the reasons of his being recognised as the greatest poet of the 20th century. He has written BOL, he has written Tarana, he has written Hum Dekhengegy, all three have become slogans of our times, he has also written hazar karo merey tan se, Nisar mein teri galiyon pe, Do aawaazen etc that need to be understood gradually. Why do you want all political poets to be political activists too. Let the political activist do what he is good at and allow the poet to do what he is good at.“

Me:

“Thanks for that detailed reply. Couple of points:

I should have done this earlier, but let me define the term Urdu (since the term means so many things). From my first post, I used ‘Urdu’ to mean the common spoken language of the urban people of much of North India. What you might call baazaari Hindustani. The term ‘Hindustani’ when used to mean a sort of middle language between High Hindi and High Urdu is fairly new. The term Hindustani was coined by the British and throughout the Raj the term was used as a synonym for what we call Urdu today. For example, John T Platts dictionary calls qaaf the “twenty-seventh letter of the Urdu or Hindustani alphabet”. In most of modern India, Hindi is also used as a synonym for Urdu. For example, Hindi Movies etc.

The language became a victim of the divisive politics of language equals religion that began with the Fort Williams college in 1825 and culminated with the adoption of the resolution to make Sanskritised Hindi as the national language of India instead of Hindustani written in both the Nagri and the Persian scripts, the latter had the backing of Gandhi but the constituent assembly went against the old man’s wishes and voted against Hindustani.

I fail to grasp how this is relevant to getting Faiz to write in a register which is widely understood but, for what it’s worth, the GoI’s attempts to invent a new standard (sanskirtised) register of Hindi-Urdu have failed rather miserably. That Gandhi anecdote is nice but only half true. Gandhi oscillated quite a bit on the language question (which was typical of him) between Hindustani in both scripts as well as only using the Devanagri script.

Faiz could only write in the language that he was comfortable in, his mother tongue might have been Sialkoti Punjabi but all his initial education was in Urdu, Persian and Arabic and this is the linguistic discourse that he was familiar with.

That might be one reason. Or it just might be that he wanted to occupy a literary space that only Urdu could provide. Either way, Faiz is not at fault. What I am wondering is whether applying labels such as ‘people centric’ etc to his poetry is not misleading.

We had a literacy rate of 13% when we became independent, so 87% of our population was illiterate in all languages, which language should the writers have written in. Tulsi’s Ram Charit Manas…

Uh-oh. ‘Literacy rate’ refers to written not spoken language, Hashmi sahib. Jaahil bhi bol aur sun paate hain. If recite Bidrohi by Nojrul to an illiterate Bengali he will understand it. Prem chand would be understood by all Dehlavis; even Krishan Chandar. I doubt that the same could be said of say ‘Aaj Bazar Mein’.

The other issue is do you have to , of necessity, write in the language of the people if you are writing about issues that concern them?

IMO, it would be crushingly patronising to not do so; reminds me of Gandhi’s pledge to not allow Harijians to run the Harijan Sabha but for it to be run by upper castes and Ambedkar’s rage at this.

Why do you want all political poets to be political activists too. Let the political activist do what he is good at and allow the poet to do what he is good at

Exactly my point; let us admire the beauty of Faiz without clouding his appraisal with terms that take his poetry beyond poetry into political activism. Art for art’s sake and all that; because as soon as we start assigning it some utilitarian function, say, we state that his poetry, to, quote Zaheer from your piece, carries “democratic ideals that enlighten the hearts of the overwhelming majority of our people” when the only a microscopic minority can even understand what he’s saying, that we start sounding rather hollow.”

Sohail Hashmi:

“you are absolutely right in using the term Urdu for the spoken language of much of North India, Urdu was the language of this region till a little after 1947, with the selection, on paper, of Hindi as The Official Language the spoken language of much of north India has undergone drastic changes in the post 1947 period and Urdu has by and large been replaced with a strange mixture of what you call the Bazaari Hindustani and the Sanskritised Hindi constructed by the Rahtra Bhasha Samitis in the post independence India.

The term Urdu, used for the language that was commonly spoken in the north Indian plains itself is also a rather recent development, the prose of Ghalib when it was first published was given the name Oud-e-Hindi by Ghalib, and Rekhta that Meer and Ghalib wrote their poetry in was derisively called Rekhta – mixed Language by the Persian Ustads of the immediate post wali period. So Urdu that was known as Hindi/Rekhta written in the Persian script by and large till the time of Ghalib and a little later was transformed at Fort Williams into Hindustani/ Urdu if written in the Persian script and Hindi if written in the Nagri Script

My reference to the divisive politics that created the language equals religion discourse was to the process, initiated at the fort williams and carried forward by the votaries of Hindi/ Hindu/ Hindustan and Urdu/Muslim/Pakistan that changed the very nature of the language that was commonly spoken and understood till the immediate pre independence period. It is this changed nature of the language that has created the situation in which most of Faiz’s poetry and also the poetry of Sahir, Majrooh and Kaifi and others begins to sound unfamiliar to those whose grandparents would have had no problem in understanding it.

As for literacy and illiteracy the point that I am making is that there is a difference between the vocabulary of the illiterate and the literate and therefore written language is always a little if not very different from the spoken add to that the difference that has always existed between the language of Poetry and that of Prose, Meer in his time and Firaq much later were two poets who wrote in a language that was closest to the spoken Hindi/ Hindustani/ Rekhta/ Urdu and still there is much in their writing that an illiterate will not understand.

Faiz was writing in a language whose literary traditions and style he was more familiar with and could therefore express himself better in. to my mind He wrote in a language that he thought he could best express himself in, that was a language he inherited as the language of literary discourse and he wrote on issues that were dear to him or he felt strongly about, issues that he grew up with and held dear I think he wrote poetry with a strong political message, you might not think so. So be it.”

Hindi Nationalism

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Recounting an incident related to the formation of the Eight Schedule of the Constitution (which contains a list of India’s official languages), Alok Rai says:

“Nehru had asked him [M. Satyanarayan] to draw up a list of languages, and he came up with a list of the twelve major regional languages of India. Nehru added a thirteenth, Urdu, before putting the list to the Committee. When “a Hindi friend” asked whose language this Urdu was, Nehru replied angrily:

Yeh merī aur mere bāp-dādā’oñ kī bhāshā hai (This is my language, the language of my ancestors!)

Thereupon the “Hindi friend” retorted:

Brāhman hote hue Urdu ko apnī bhāshā kehte ho, sharam nahīñ ātī? (Aren’t you ashamed, being a Brahmin, to claim Urdu as your language?)

Nehru did not reply. The Eighth Schedule was finally approved by the Constituent Assembly with the addition of one more language, Sanskrit.”

Of course, what the “Hindi friend” didn't know is that Kashmiri Brahmins (such as Nehru) as well as other upper-class urban Hindu communities such as Kayasts and Khatris had traditionally learnt and used Urdu before the creation of Shudh Hindi and its installation as the official language of India in 1947.

In fact, it is this act of creation that Alok Rai (who, coincidentally, is Hindi-Urdu author Premchand's grandson) outlines beautifully in his book Hindi Nationalism, from where this extract is taken. To quote again from the book itself, Hindi Nationalism is “a narrative of the violence done to the people vernacular Hindi by and in the name of “Hindi” [Shuddh Hindi], the Sanskritic usurper.” It is an account of how, Indian and Hindu nationalism intertwined in the late 19^th century to produce the hyper-Sankritised register of “Shudh Hindi” which is now the official language of India and forms the core of our education system. The book charts how this “Shudh Hindi” battled the already entrenched register of literary Urdu (in which the ancestors of Nehru had made their living and was the official language of India till '47), other forms of Hindi-Urdu such as Braj Bhasha as well as everyday spoken Hindi-Urdu (Bollywood language, if you will) to emerge as the primary language of the Government of India.

If you've ever wondered why, say, the language of train announcements is so arcane or struggled with the bombastic vocabulary of Dinkar as a school student, this is a highly recommended read.

Bonus read:

A Debate Between Alok Rai and Shahid Amin Regarding Hindi: an engaging debate between historian Shahid Amin and the author Alok Rai around the book, amongst other things.