Urdu: A Paradise Lost!
By Dr. Basheer A Khan
Garden Grove , CA
A conference of literary figures in Urdu took place in Karachi recently. Several literary figures highlighted the contribution of Urdu literature and lamented the decline in the readership of Urdu periodicals and impending extinction of this great language.
The history and the fate of a language reflect the history of people speaking the language. Urdu is perhaps the most recent of the modern languages which bloomed to its maturity in a short period of time by the efforts of our forefathers and is on the verge of extinction due to our neglect in a much shorter time.
Languages are not just the spoken and written words of man but a creation of God. Like all other things, language is also gifted to people by the Creator through His own mysterious ways so that people can communicate their life experiences with each other to understand the true nature and purpose of our life and enrich it. That is what it means when Qur’an says in this verse: We created man and taught him to speak (Ch 55 V 3-4). Further it says: We taught man through pen what he knew not (Ch 96 V 4-5).
Travel was the only means of acquiring knowledge in bygone era when schools and universities did not exist to clone minds. Inclination of people to migrate from one place to another for adventure, conquest and trade was nature’s way of enriching and enlightening the migrating people and the people of the land to which they migrated through their interaction. As language was an important medium for this interaction, languages started to develop. From early days of human civilization when sign, body language, emotions and some unintelligible noises were a mean of communication to the present day when complex and abstract matters are cogently expressed in many languages, history of languages is intriguing.
When Mughals invaded India and extended the border of Muslim rule to the borders that existed during the time of great Indian rulers like Ashoka and Chandargupta, they needed a common language to communicate with the ordinary people of the land. For this they used the local Braj Bhasha as the base and introduced words of Persian and Arabic into it. This became the language of the Mughal army. The Turkish word for army being “Urdu” this amalgam of Braj Bhasha, Persian and Arabic came to be known as Urdu. When the British ruled over India they introduce English words into this language, but their attempts to change the script from Persian to Roman did not gain acceptance as they did in Turkey later.
Linguistics experts tell us that language evolves with the passage of time. Urdu also evolved from its primitive form, and this process of evolution is continuing to this day. From the time of its inception when it was created out of necessity for foreigners to communicate with locals for their daily interaction, Urdu rapidly developed into a language capable of effectively expressing the most complicated and abstract issues of consciousness in rapid strides. In this journey it received contribution from every culture and class of society in India.
As old and established languages Braj Bhasha, Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian had a vast array of beautiful expressions and their amalgamation in the form of Urdu gave a huge canvas that accommodated every input to enrich itself and had the mind of its own to discard what restricted it from the contributing languages. Beyond this the eagerness and the effort of individuals to convey their life experiences in this new and vast medium created a literature that is the envy of any language.
Interaction between the old Indian and Persian civilizations with the Islamic thought in the peaceful and serene atmosphere of Indian soil gave a great boost to human consciousness. This consciousness had to be recorded for posterity so that it was not lost like the consciousness of the previous eras of history. For this there was the need of a language which had a great vocabulary and greater agility, and nature created conditions that gave birth to this new language of Urdu.
When mature consciousness finds expression in a language that is abounding with beautiful expressive and rhyming words from different languages its rhetoric and eloquence stir not just the mind but move the soul to a higher consciousness. A picture may be better than a thousand words, but in the days when photography was not so common accomplished writers in Urdu created a prose that expressed the scene better than the picture. They created a poetry where two short sentences of a couplet ignited imagination beyond words and sent the listener into ecstasy not felt under the influence of any intoxicant; and the critics through their incisive critique constantly whipped the writers to raise the bar of their achievements.
As we are reviewing the history of Urdu language we should also glance at the difficult circumstances in which Urdu literature was created. Barring few, most of the Urdu writers and poets lived a life of abject poverty while creating these gems for us. Many of them were harassed by the governments of their time. The best of art is always created under the greatest adversity. Art of Michael Angelo is a proof of this. When governments are afraid of literacy amongst their people and alternate thinking, they do not promote cheap mass printing facilities to promote things that do not promote their interest. In these circumstance lovers of Urdu language put long hours in scripting the manuscript of writers for litho printing at negligible cost. I was grief stricken to see in Urdu Bazaar of Delhi emaciated men looking much older than their age doing this job while subsisting on tea and some crackers. It was a labor of love. Urdu would not have developed the art of calligraphy or the books of literature that have inspired millions without their sacrifice. We owe the preservation of Urdu literature to these humble people who have lived and died unnoticed.
As a consequence of all these factors joining together by the providence of destiny a language and a literature came into existence which surpassed many of the old languages in its beauty and utility. Just one slogan Inqilab Zindabaad (long live the revolutionary sprit) is enough, a contribution of Urdu language to contemporary civilization. This slogan has inspired many a revolutionary movement of the subcontinent to this day including the movement of Independence. Even though Mahatma Gandhi opted for Hindi as the official language of India, his praise of Urdu language for its contribution to struggle of Independence is on records. The song which inspired Indians in their struggle of Independence after the massacre of Jalian Wala Bagh was the one by Bismil Azeemabadi: “Sarfroshi Ki Tamanna Ab Hamare Dil men Hai. Dekhna hai Zor kitna Bazoo e Qatil men hai. (We are ready to embrace death, let us see how powerful are the hands of our killers.)
On the eve of the Golden Jubilee Celebration of Indian Independence when Lata Mangeshkar rendered the famous poem of Allama Iqbal: Sare Jahan se Achcha Hindustan Hamara one could feel the energy inspiring the love of motherland not just in the hall of Indian Parliament but even in my room here in America where I saw this event on the Internet.
Tarakeshwari Sinha was an important leader of Congress and a member of Indian Parliament and a Cabinet Minister in the sixties and seventies. She was famous for punctuating her speech with couplets from Urdu poetry that used to send the parliamentarians and people alike into rapture. In early seventies, when she visited Muslim Hostel in Mysore, I thanked her for keeping the banner of Urdu aloft in the Indian parliament through the use of couplets from Urdu poetry in her speeches. Her reply was: I don’t do this as a favor to Urdu. It is a favor of Urdu upon me. Through these couplets I can convey to my audience in moments what I can’t convey in hours.
For the fear of omitting some of the more useful and beautiful works one always shudders to make a list of literary masterpieces. Mohammed Tufail, the Editor of Nuqoosh Lahore, has compiled under various titles the masterpieces of Urdu literature and published several special issues in the sixties. Those who have these copies should hand them over to big libraries so that they are preserved for posterity. In this electronic age governments and philanthropists should consider transferring the gems of Urdu literature into e-books so that archaeologists don’t have to dig out evidence to construe the missing links to an important part of human civilization which they are ignoring now in their arrogance. This task will serve the cause of Urdu better than conferences to generate awareness about the impending death of Urdu.
Loss of Urdu will not be a loss for the people speaking this language and their progeny alone, but for entire mankind because of the reformative capacity of its rich literature which is influenced by the rich cultural heritage of the subcontinent and the true values of Islam. Progress of a language may be impeded by lack of governmental patronage and by the bias of its opponents, but it will not die because of these. A language dies when the people speaking the language do not have respect for their own culture and are eager to adopt the ways of alien cultures. A language dies when it fails to produce literature that inspires its readers and starts to present trash as literature. A culture and a language may die by the neglect of its people, but every culture needs true and time-tested values for its survival and I am sure that this need will keep Urdu alive for a long time to come.
