Mulayam Singh Yadav is old school. Craftiest of the lot, not for nothing does he enjoy the distinction of having ruled India’s largest state for three terms. A fourth one was passed over in favour of his son.
Now Mulayam seldom says or does something without a considered motive underpinning it. His fixation with Hindi and fulminations against English, however, are a recurring phenomenon. Like a bored child, he sends up this balloon about throwing out the Queen’s language and promoting ‘rashtra bhasha’ (national language) from time to time.
Which for most South Indians is nothing short of a call to arms. Let’s not forget that the Tamils not long ago threatened to break away from India over the imposition of Hindi. A similar approach to language split Pakistan, a nation founded in the name of faith. Emotions and languages go together.
Now despite coming from a tribe that depends critically onthe English language to keep the wolf from the door, I have no qualms in sayingthat Macaulay’s gift may have been directly or indirectly responsible for thedecline and in some cases total decimation of hundreds of rich languages andcultures around the world. Ancient languages like Arabic, Persian, Latin, Greekand even the traditional rival next door, French, find themselves overwhelmedby the all-conquering power of the language from a tiny, cold island.
If this is the predicament of powerful languages withhundreds of millions of speakers, you can imagine the fate of tongues anddialects that are less fortunate. With no state patronage or loyalty of theirfollowers, they are doomed.
Language is perhaps one of God’s greatest gifts to us. Thefirst word revealed to the Prophet, peace be upon him, was Iqra (read). Spokenword is what distinguishes us from animals. Languages are the collectiveheritage of mankind. They belong to us all.
Each language spawns a whole culture and its own distinctvalues and etiquettes. A whole way of life revolves around it. It defines ouridentity and in some cases, as in secular Europe, linguistic identity is moreimportant than a religious one.
This is why it is a human tragedy when a language quietlydies, for whatever reason. And they are dying fast. According to the Unesco, anancient language dies every 14 days somewhere on the planet. And if nothing isdone, warns the world body, half of 6,000 plus languages spoken today maydisappear by the end of this century. “With the disappearance of unwritten andundocumented languages, humanity would lose not only a cultural wealth but alsoimportant ancestral knowledge embedded in indigenous languages,” cautions theUN agency.
Most of these endangered languages are in the developingworld. Rapid globalisation and the total hegemony of Western civilization andculture over the past few centuries has ensured the complete global supremacyof the English language. Like it or not, it has become the global lingua franca— a language the world does business in.
And this global order is unlikely to change in theforeseeable future. Doubtless, it is a rich and versatile language and hashelped bring together cultures and nations of the world. But must its successcome at the expense of other equally great languages and cultures?
Being a student of the English language and literature, Inaturally love it. Not just because I love my Shakespeare, Shelly, Keats,Frost, Dickens, Jane Austen and Hemingway but also because after all theseyears of association with it, I find myself at home with the language. And thisis the case with most people of my generation and succeeding generations. Aboveall, it has helped people like me who come from a humble ‘Urdu background’discover a global audience.
M J Akbar, the veteran scribe-turned-politician known forhis extraordinary penmanship, insists on calling it as an “Indian” language.According to him, India is the largest English-speaking nation today. Fellowpolitician and brilliant author and rhetorician Shashi Tharoor would probablyagree.
And so would hundreds of millions of young Indians enrolledin the so-called English medium schools across the country where a comfortlevel with the language is seen as a passport to prosperity and perhaps abetter life abroad.
I have nothing against Hindi. If it was not for the heavy dose of Sanskrit that is routinely forced down one’s throat by the dreary Doordarshan and various ministries and arms of the Government of India in the name of Hindi, it is a sweet language.
Indeed, Urdu and Hindi are inextricably linked to each other, thanks to their shared Indo-Aryan base and “khari boli” heritage. They indeed sound like twins, the only and critical distinguishing difference being the script. This is why at the height of the raging Hindi-Urdu row before the Independence, Mahatma Gandhi ingeniously came up with the term called Hindustani to cool tempers on both sides.
Be that as it may, it is rather strange that after spendingof hundreds of billions of rupees in concerted campaigns by successivegovernments all these years to promote and push Hindi, Mulayam and otherchampions of Hindi should be concerned about its future. In fact, if anything,the promotion of Hindi has been done at the expense of all other Indianlanguages, especially the exquisite Urdu.
If any language really faces an existential crisis today, itis Urdu, the eclectic language that came into being following an encounterbetween the Arab, Persian and Central Asian Muslims and Indian civilization.Heavily drawn from Persian, Arabic and Turkic languages because they formed thelinguistic roots of the new arrivals, Urdu is essentially Indian in spirit andcharacter because its base of khari boli, Hindi, Prakrit and Sanskrit is rootedin this land.
The result is a language that for centuries served as thelingua franca of Mughal India and still does, widely understood and spoken asit is across the length and breadth of the country. After being elbowed out asthe language of power and courts — and from virtually everywhere else —Bollywood ostensibly remains its last bastion — an industry once looked downupon by good Muslims.
Urdu is slowly dying in India today. Starved of statesupport and weighed down by the apathy of its own speakers, it issystematically being squeezed out from across the country. Do not let all thosemediocre mushairas fool you.
Urdu is in dire straits in the land of its birth. InPakistan, I understand, things aren’t any better either although the languageenjoys the state patronage. A young Pakistani blogger recently bemoaned thefact that most young Pakistanis today see Urdu as the “language of servants”and naturally turn to the Queen’s English to express themselves.
Ludmila Vasilieva, the gifted Russian translator of FaizAhmed Faiz, recently pointed out that while she often sees Indian officialsspeak in Hindi even in an international setting, Pakistanis fastidiously stickto the language that Mulayam insists belongs to the empire. As authors of theUnesco report on the endangered languages note, “a language is endangered whenparents are no longer teaching it to their children and it is no longer beingused in everyday life.”
So the future of our language is in our own hands. The Jewskept their language alive in the face of great adversity and exile of more than2,000 years. It would take far less to keep ours alive.
Aijaz Zaka Syed is an award-winning journalist and former newspaper editor.
aijaz.syed@hotmail.com
Aijaz Zaka Syed