Urdu in India
By Dr. Rizwana Rahim
Chicago, IL
“What’s in a name?”
Juliet thought aloud, “That which we call
a rose/ by another name would smell as sweet.”*
Maybe, if its distinctive smell also gets proper
credit and due recognition: After all, “a
rose is a rose is a rose.” **
Urdu, a hybrid language born in united India’s
syncretic culture, has long been short-changed
in its own native land.
It is one of the 22 languages listed currently
in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of
India, but an official State language only in
Jammu & Kashmir, being the mother tongue of
about 55.5% of that State’s population.
However, only in parts of Bihar (15 districts)
and UP (13 Western districts, with Urdu-speakers
being 15% or more of the area population) was
Urdu granted the second official language status
-- not by an act of Parliament but by an ordinance
in the 1980’s and only for some purposes.
Significant populations of Urdu-speakers also
live in Andhra Pradesh (AP; Hyderabad, its capital),
Karnataka and Maharashtra but, like in UP and
Bihar, it is only in selected districts (not state-wide)
that it is recognized as the second official language
(e. g., about 13 districts in AP).
The Eighth Schedule is not cast in stone. It has
already been amended three times so far: adding
Sindhi to the original list in 1969, three more
(Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali) in 1993; and four
more (Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali) in the
100th Amendment to the Constitution in 2003. The
last expansion was unique in two respects: for
the first time, two tribal (‘spoken’)
languages were added; one (Bodos) owed its inclusion
to “a part of the memorandum of settlement
between the militant Bodos, Assam Government and
the Centre,” and “to keep the balance,”
another one (Santhali) was added from another
tribal area. During the 2003 debate, L. K. Advani
(then deputy PM) alerted the country that up to
35 more languages could be added to the Eighth
Schedule, once the ongoing discussions with the
linguistic experts are completed. So, apparently,
the list is not done yet, nor is the debate on
the Eighth Schedule and the criteria for inclusion.
With the recognition as a State’s official
language comes the government support and protection,
a major boost to the viability and growth of that
language, with facilities such as a medium of
instruction in schools, appropriate facilities,
official form of communication. This, in a way,
also helps India’s literacy programs (‘Education
for All’, like the ‘No Child Left
Behind’ initiative of the Bush administration).
However useful the opportunities may be, this
recognition will still be restricted mostly to
that State. And, these regional opportunities
are very limited, compared to English, which opens
all types of doors world wide, particularly in
the 21st century Information Technology age. Because
of this, English continues to be an increasingly
preferred educational option for the next generations.
This, in turn, decreases one’s need to depend
on regional languages (including Urdu) for a brighter
future -- globally rather than just regionally.
The government recognizes this all too well: During
the 2003 debate, Mr. L. K. Advani had also stressed
how “national unity is more important than
language issue,” and how both Hindi and
English should continue as India’s national
languages, because “de-linking [from Hindi]
from English was not a good thing as India had
its advantages in Information Technology sector
over China because of the knowledge of English.”
Given the historically multi-linguistic culture
in India and inter-relationships among the languages,
many dialects and even languages have been subsumed
in the Eighth Schedule languages. The reliability
of the linguistic census data depends critically
on such questions as who are considered the “speakers”
of a particular language: Only those who have
it as the mother tongue (first language) or those
who also use it as their ‘second’
and/or ‘third’ language? Since ‘spoken’
Urdu and Hindi are largely and indistinguishably
similar, the only way one can tell them apart
is by way of individual scripts (Urdu’s
Persian-Arabic and Hindi’s Devanagiri).
Most linguists think they are essentially the
same when spoken, the attempted distinctions being
more political than linguistic. Unless census
takers/enumerators collect the data on the (first/second/third
language) script-familiarity and script-use as
a distinguishing criterion along with others,
and use all of them uniformly, the conclusions
will always remain subject to such nagging basic
questions. And, such questions continue to follow
all other information derived/mined from the census
(regional, country-wide and global use and rank-order
compilations etc by different national and international
groups).
According to the latest figures from ‘Ethnologue’,
Urdu “speakers” in India happen to
be little over 48 million. Based on this, it is
ranked as the 6th most widely ‘spoken’
Scheduled language, after (numbers in parentheses,
million) Hindi (180.00), Bengali (70.56), Telugu
(69.63), Marathi ( 68.03), Tamil (61.5). Separate
from Urdu, Ethnologue also lists “Deccan”
language ( ISO/DIS 639-3: dcc) – with its
alternate names and dialects -- spoken by more
than 10 million people in various parts of India.
Ethnolgue (13th edition) lists ‘Hindustani’,
with 496 million “speakers” as the
3rd most widely spoken language of the world,
after Chinese (Mandarin) at over 1 billion and
English (521 million). ‘Hindustani’
was used in 1931 census (instead of Hindi and
Urdu, separately), which continued till the 1961
census (i.e., for the first 14 years after independence):
this was mostly because of the ‘spoken’
similarity between Hindi and Urdu. Hindustani
has also been listed in various databases as separate
language from both. Such tactics have made it
increasingly difficult to tease out the distinctiveness
of Urdu from Hindi, given the traditionally overlapping
(shared) cultural values, attitudes and identity
(or what’s implied in the French, ‘mentalite`’),
the Hindi-Hindustani-Urdu group. This, I suspect,
did a lot to unfairly dilute and diffuse Urdu’s
status as an independent language. Whether or
not this was also politically motivated is not
that hard to figure out.
Another wrinkle subject of debate and controversy
is the cluster of dialects (even languages) in
each Eighth Schedule language. Multilingual Indian
mosaic allows you to form various clusters among
closely related languages and dialects. For instance,
Mallikarjun in ‘Language in India’
(2004) makes it clear that while Hindi is the
mother tongue of 22% of the population, it has
“20.22% of mother tongues clustered under
it as a language”; it is the 2nd language
of “6.16%” and the 3rd language of
“2.60%” of population – “totaling
to 50.98%” – thus, it’s regarded
as the majority language, according to the 1991
Census. Since, no census was taken in J&K
in 1991 because of communal riots and other disturbances
there in 1991, a question then is: do these figures
include J&K or not?
In post-independent India, Hindi promoters, particularly
the extremists led by Arya Samaj, managed to absorb
different dialects and languages into Hindi. Several
resisted these aggressively assimilative measures
but none too successfully. Only Punjabi “speakers”
managed to retain the distinctiveness of their
language and got it included in the Schedule –
and this was after intense and prolonged battles
with Hindi promoters. What helped them was their
script (gurmukhi), which (like Urdu’s) is
distinct from Devanagiri of Hindi. (To be continued)
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