The Ghost of Urdu

Among the issues that people often associate with Indian Muslims, Urdu figures prominently. As per the 1991 census report, it is spoken by 4.3 crore people in our country. And yet it is part of the endangered species list.

The survival of Urdu as a language is threatened in India. That is the perception, which is more or less right. I am not here to add to the polemics of Urdu’s survival or how Urdu is mistaken as the language of the Muslims only. Many have written copiously on this subject.

I am not also discussing the future of Urdu. As long as Urdu is alive in Pakistan or elsewhere, we need not worry about its future in general. I am discussing the present status of Urdu in India.

Accept it or not, the truth is today Urdu has become a ghost language in our lives. This is especially true for those of us who learnt to read and write Urdu as part of the school curriculum. I am not talking about the pre-partition days. I am talking about the 70s and 80s. Ever since my schooldays, I have been hearing laments on the fate of Urdu in India. I present myself as a case study here as I had the opportunity of studying Urdu at both the school and university levels.

I began to learn Urdu as a child, even before I began to learn the Hindi or English alphabet. If my memory serves right, I was taught the Urdu alphabet by one of my uncles. I learnt to read the Baghdadi Qaida and soon graduated to The Holy Quran. Even before I could finish reading it, let alone understanding its meaning, I began going to the local government school.

In my village, there was a maktab (madrasa) too. Unlike other parents, my father bypassed the maktab and chose to send me to the school. My father did this perhaps because he himself was a teacher in a government school. At that time I was too young to realize the significance of this move but now I do. I guess that was an important decision.

The school was an interesting place. It was housed in a thatched roof building, with two large classrooms. Our classroom was divided in two parts. One half of the room was taken by Class I and the other half by Class II. The division was not by virtue of any physical partition. One class had its back on the other, facing their respective black boards. That was it. All the students sat on the ground over a piece of sack or clothing. A teacher sat by the blackboard on a rickety wooden chair all day long, chewing paan, and often making us scurry to the headmaster’s room for chalks or dusters. The only respite from this incarceration-like state was the tiffin break when we were free to play kabaddi in the school ground.

The curious thing was there were hardly any Muslim students in that school save myself and my cousin. And the school was situated in the middle of our Muslim-dominated village. Most of the students were low caste Hindus who lived on the outskirts of our village. Out of the four teachers, two were Hindus and two Muslims. The Muslim teachers spoke in Urdu. The Hindu teachers spoke Bhojpuri. They taught us Hindi and basic maths.

Within a year or two, my father took me out of the government school and admitted me into Insan School, an experimental private school. The school was established by an America-returned educationist, Dr. Syed Hasan—a disciple of Dr. Zakir Hussain. It was, and still is, a minority institution but had its doors open to people of all communities.

Insan School offered two mediums of instruction, right from Class I. All the students in Urdu medium were Muslims. Most students in the Hindi medium were Hindus, but there were some Muslims too. I was admitted in the Urdu medium section. I studied in that medium only till my high school. The only thing that changed by Class VI was that all the text books of social and natural sciences were now in Hindi. I studied Hindi as a national language and English as a compulsory language. In Class IX and X, Urdu medium students choose Persian as an optional subject. The Hindi medium students choose Sanskrit instead of Persian. Everything else was same.

We spoke a regional dialect at home, which was akin to Bengali. My father was a science graduate who taught Biology in Bengali and also pursued an MA in Urdu for promoting his own career. My mother came from a feudal family. She knew how to read and write Urdu, but she had no formal education. My father brought Urdu magazines home. He would usually come at night after meeting his friends from the nearby town. If we would see he had brought a Biswin Sadi or Shama or Ruby or Shayar, my sister and I would fight to read it under the dim light of the night lamp. We also began to buy Khilona, a magazine for kids. At the same time we also discovered that there were interesting and colorful magazines in Hindi. We began to read magazines like Parag, Nandan, Suman Saurav, among others. Soon we also discovered Hindi comics, Hindi pocket books and novels. There were Urdu novels but no Urdu comics. However, we kept straddling the two worlds of Hindi and Urdu, without feeling any rivalry between the two languages. We were rather happy: the more the merrier.

By the time, we were in high school, we had begun to appreciate the beauty of the Urdu language. Some of us began to compose poetry. Some others indulged in elocution contests and bait baazi (a contest of reciting couplets, much akin to antakshri). However, we were warned by our seniors about the primacy of English. Our seniors had seen the outside world. They had represented the school at various science fairs at the regional and national levels. They said Urdu and Hindi were fine in their own places but what mattered most was English. Some of my classmates took that advice seriously. We began reading The Telegraph daily without fail, along with The Sunday week after week.

Later I realized that was very practical advice. For after I entered university, everything there was in English. Our preparation stood us in good stead. Soon the realization dawned on us that the economic importance of English was above every other Indian language. Urdu titles gave way to English titles in my bookshelf. The Caliban of English literature turned my sweet Urdu into a ghost. Physically it began vanishing from my life. Perhaps it seeped into my blood and till date remains hidden.

Years later, I once again had the opportunity of resuscitating Urdu in my life. This time it was not for the love for the language alone. I needed shelter in Delhi while doing my journalism course. I wrote the entrance test for the Masters course of Urdu literature at a high profile university in Delhi. I was selected. Hence Urdu rescued me when I needed help. However, for the first time in my life I felt that I had prostituted my felicity of the language for a selfish motive. I felt sad, even ashamed. Soon I found out that most of my class fellows in that course had more or less similar reasons for joining the course. Some of them even lingered on with their studies and came out armed with their PhDs in Urdu literature, hoping to land a lecturer’s job in some provincial college.

I dropped out of the course after one year. Honestly, I did not deserve to pursue it. I had to stop prostituting Urdu for the sake of a hostel bed. As soon as I got a job, I came out of the hostel. Once again, Urdu morphed into a ghost for me.

Now, my only connection with my mother tongue is the spoken part of it. The rest has been taken over by English. I don’t read Urdu newspapers, though I might take a peek at PTV and ETV Urdu whenever time permits. Once I tried to read both Urdu and English newspapers. But there was not enough time for reading both. So I stuck to my English newspaper. I decided in favour of English because without it I felt out of place.

The Urdu magazines that I used to know have vanished from the bookstores. I guess all of them have ceased publication now. Till a few years ago, some of the magazines were available at AH Wheeler bookstalls. Now I don’t see any, not even in Delhi. I have to go to Old Delhi to buy my supply of Ibn Safi novels. Sometimes in bookfairs, I get to buy a few Urdu books. They are mostly anthologies of Urdu fiction. Most of the writers present in those anthologies have passed away. So the question I often ask myself is: where are our Rushdies and Arundhati Roys in Urdu? Where are the Urdu’s New Yorker and Granta?

My Hindu friends keep requesting me to recite Urdu couplets. I oblige them, first with the couplets, and then with their explanation. The latter takes all the pleasure away. Sometimes a friend of mine would ask: what did Ghalib mean to say in that particular couplet? I would have to give him some explanation. My friend knows Ghalib’s poetry thanks to Gulzar and Jagjit Singh. This prompts me to add another space where Urdu ruled unrivalled. I am referring to the Mushaira or the poetic symposium. Even that culture seems to have diminished over the years. Not only this, none of my friends, who learnt Urdu with me in school, ever bought any Urdu periodicals. They are happy with their Times of India, their Outlook and their John Grishams. No wonder the sale of a single edition of an Urdu book hardly exceeds 100 copies.

I seldom write in Urdu. Till a few years ago, I used to correspond with my father in Urdu. Now we don’t correspond at all as we have a phone at home now. My brothers and sisters write to me in English. Also, none of my friends write to me in Urdu save for one. This friend was with me in the Urdu class. After completing his Ph.D. he works as a researcher for an Urdu television channel. He writes emails to me in Urdu in roman script. I think that is how the ghost of Urdu is going to survive in our daily lives: Urdu emails in roman script and Urdu fiction and poetry on the internet. Thankfully, there are some good Urdu websites now, but there is hardly any new writing going on there.

The state of Urdu in India reminds me of the poet Nur from the Anita Desai novel, In Custody. This book looks at the waning fortune and talent of Nur, now an aging poet as an allegory for the death of Urdu in modern India. The poet is long dead but his spirit is left behind as a ghost. The ghost of Urdu.