Saving Urdu in India--its Birthplace


Popular Bollywood filmmaker MAHESH BHATT, known for films such as Arth, Saaransh, Janam, Naam, Inteha, Jism, Murder and Woh Lamhe, makes an impassioned appeal to save Urdu from extinction in India, the birthplace of the language, in an article published by the Hindu:

Man is memory, and memory is sound. The first sound that resonates in my heart is the Urdu word “Shireen”, meaning sweet; the name of my mother, who was by birth a Shia Muslim and remained one till the end of her days.

Shadowing that sweet memory is a bitter one. My mother couldn’t marry my Hindu father because my father couldn’t go against the wishes of his staunch Brahmin family in post-Partition India. She concealed her Muslim identity in the predominantly Hindu area of Mumbai’s Shivaji Park where we lived because, in spite of the Nehruvian vision of India as a plural and diverse nation, the rising Hindu fundamentalist movement looked upon the minority Muslim community as the enemy within. So, to arm herself from a possible Hindu backlash, she tried her best to fit in by submerging her true identity. “Do not call me by my Muslim name,” she would caution us in private. “I do not want the world to know about my Muslim identity.”

Suspect loyalties

Those were the days when Urdu was looked upon as the language of those who partitioned India. The Indian Muslim’s loyalty was always suspect; he had to regularly re-affirm his Indianness and patriotism to quell the nationalist anxieties of the majority, whose Partition-inflicted wounds had not healed.

Is it any wonder then that this Shia woman who was ‘living in sin’ with a Brahmin filmmaker gave all her children Hindu names, hurled us into Christian Schools run by Italian priests where we learned good English and absurd nursery rhymes and brought us up as Hindus?

At the same time, this same Shia woman who masqueraded as a Hindu, ushered me into the magical world of the Hindu mythology of Shiva, Ganesh and Parvati, Ram, Sita and Hanuman, as well as the great epic of the Mahabharata. “You are the son of a nagar Brahmin… you belong to the Bhargav gotra” she would say. And in the next breath, in chaste Urdu, give me a Kalma while telling me to chant “Ya Ali Maddat” if confronted with an adversary ! What a paradox !

A memory bubble bursts... The year is 1958. I am barely nine years old. The atmosphere in our house is sombre. One of the finest flowers of Indian renaissance, Maulana Azad, is dead. My mother is listening to a live relay of his funeral procession on the All India Radio Urdu service. Suddenly my father, who is equally upset by the death of this great nationalist, storms into the house. On hearing the Urdu relay, he angrily says, “Put this Radio Pakistan off! I want to hear this news in Hindi, not in Urdu!” My mother meekly does so, but I can see that she is deeply hurt.

Personal is political

They say the personal is the political. This incident explains the tremendous odds that lay in the path of Urdu, just as the first decade of Independent India was coming to an end. My father, who was a secular Brahmin, taught me a lesson through that action. That ‘tolerance’ implies superiority... where the majority community, very condescendingly, ‘ puts up’ with the very existence of the minority. But it is always ‘thus far and no further…’ an implied limit on their so-called tolerance.

My mother’s language was dying, and there was nothing that I could do as a child to keep it alive! As the years deepened, the only place I heard Urdu being spoken was on the sets of my father’s films. My father used to make enchanting Muslim fantasy movies like “The Thief of Baghdad” or “Sinbad the Sailor”. Or during secret visits with my mother to the Majlis during Moharram, where the blood-soaked history of Karbala was enacted with passion. Or, in the dark comfort of the cinema hall, watching “Mughal-e-Azam” or “Chaudvin Ka Chand”... and at the home of my actress aunt Poornima who, unlike my mother, was a successful actress. Poornima Aunty felt no need to hide her Muslim identity. And I loved her for being brave and audaciously speaking Urdu.

By the time I became a teenager, I realised that Urdu was the language of the ‘other’; and it also dawned on me that, in spite of all her attempts, my Muslim mother continued to remain an outsider in her own homeland. She would shoot down my rebellious attempts to unveil her real identity by saying, “It’s their country, and we have to get along with them.” But I could never seem to see it her way.

Emotional syntax

I felt Urdu and Islam were a part of my heritage and, as the years went by, I felt this burning surge within me to express who I really was. I couldn’t be myself by denying a part of me. My consciousness resonated with the chants of Hassan Hussain during Moharram; the bells of Mangal Murti Mauriya during the Ganesh Utsav, and the memories of Ave Maria of my Christian school. The only language that could give expression to a paradox like me was Urdu. And though I do not have an arsenal of words in my vocabulary, the emotional syntax of Urdu is my inner melody.

After the 93rd Amendment to the Constitution of India, the right of Urdu speakers to obtain education in their mother tongue has to be recognised as a fundamental right. Therefore to promote the teaching and learning of Urdu at the primary and secondary levels of education is the responsibility of the State. I feel that all Urdu lovers must compel the state to act with a sense of urgency and make this fundamental right a reality.

I wonder when it will dawn on our nation that Urdu is the language of India. I wonder what will it take for those who oppose Urdu to see that this fight to preserve Urdu is a fight for India!

© Copyright 2000 - 2008 The Hindu

Related Links:

An Indian's View of Iqbal, Jinnah and Pakistan

Sir Syed Day Urdu Mushaira in Silicon Valley

Shakespeare in South Asia

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Comment by Riaz Haq on October 15, 2014 at 9:33pm

KARACHI: Apple implemented the Urdu language keyboard across mobile devices in its iOS 8 update in mid-September. But persistence of a few Urdu speakers has now forced the IT giant to consider adopting the native typeface of Urdu language, Nastaleeq, along with the current Naskh font.
The Cupertino-based company had launched iOS 8 on September 17 in what was termed their biggest software update to date, boasting a whole host of features for those using modern Apple mobile devices. Hidden among those upgrades was the implementation of the Urdu keyboard across the system. This enables users of Apple’s popular iPhone, iTouch and iPad devices to type in Urdu while using texts, email, social media and other interaction. This functionality was previously available only through language-specific apps such as Urdu Writer.
The downside for some in this new feature, though, is that it follows the Naskh typeface derived from Arabic Unicode, rather than Nastaleeq. This prompted the creator of Urdu Writer, Mudassir Azeemi, to start a social media campaign. In writing a letter, emailing and tweeting to the CEO of Apple CEO, Tim Cook, Azeemi urged, explained, even pleaded about how easy it would be to implement the Nastaleeq typeface for the Urdu keyboard in iOS 8.
The effort paid part dividend when on October 13, Azeemi got a phone call from Cook’s representatives. Azeemi was initially fretting whether there are lawyers on the other end with a cease and desist notice over his campaign. Instead, the representative assured him that Apple will consider implementing the typeface.

The road thus far
Azeemi, a Pakistani who works out of San Francisco, says the roots of his campaign germinated well before his email to Cook on October 5, and subsequent snail-mail on October 8.
“When my daughter was growing up, I saw that she was learning alphabet through YouTube,” the app and user experience designer tells The Express Tribune. Hoping that his child could use technology to learn about her heritage and the Urdu language, Azeemi started work on building an app about Urdu.
“We started wondering if we can implement it on iOS. We then designed an entire keyboard for Urdu Writer in 2010.”
Urdu Writer met with great success as it allowed people to type in Urdu and share their writing through email, SMS, Facebook and Twitter. Most importantly, Urdu Writer allowed users to access the Nastaleeq font.
Why Nastaleeq?
Nastaleeq is a Perso-Arabic script. It is the preferred writing script for Persian Kashmiri and Punjabi – languages which contributed in the creation of Urdu.
“We asked around and a lot of people said that they could not read Naskh,” Azeemi says before explaining that readability of Urdu is better in Nastaleeq rather than in other members of the font family, including the widely implemented Naskh, or the lesser used Kufic font.
This was echoed by Ahsan Saeed, who divides time as an Urdu localization moderator for Twitter and his day job at a digital agency. “People used to tell me that Twitter should have the Nastaleeq font.”
Saeed says that his own mother, too used to the Nastaleeq font, can’t read Urdu posts on Facebook or Twitter because they are in the Naskh typeface, but can read Urdu newspapers in the Nastaleeq font online.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/776214/e-urdu-how-one-mans-plea-for-nas...

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 18, 2016 at 9:27am

Decline movie watchers in #India force #Bollywood to target #Pakistan market @firstpost


http://www.firstpost.com/bollywood/waning-audiences-limited-stars-a...

A few weeks ago, the famous producer Karan Johar was interviewed on the business of cinema and he said something that insiders have known for a long time, that the number of people watching movies in India was actually falling every year.
Some of the reasons for this are to do with infrastructure. India has only one screen per lakh of the population. The United States, the world's biggest film industry, has 12. China, which through Hong Kong has the second biggest film industry, has about 2.5 screens per lakh.
As cities in India begin tearing down old cinema halls and build malls, the number of screens is set to go down even further. The other problem is that the multiplex screens in new malls are too expensive for most middle-class families. Tickets are around Rs 250 and taking a family to see a movie regularly would severely dent household incomes. Service tax and entertainment tax rates are high and there is not that much scope to reduce the prices of the tickets.
And it is not as if the producers and studios are being greedy. In fact, one major producer, Walt Disney, announced recently that it would exit the Bollywood movie production business after it made big losses.
Some of the reasons for the decline in movie watchers have to do with the industry. A friend of mine said to me that the big Bollywood stars did not make enough movies and there was little to watch. Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan now acted in only about one film each year and made money through advertisements and television. This meant that many people, even if they had the money to spend on a movie and wanted to go, often had nothing available for them to watch.
Bollywood is one of only three major film industries, along with Hollywood and Hong Kong and each of these three has a star system. This means a list of famous and recognisable actors who can guarantee a film will attract a certain number of viewers.
The problem has been that Bollywood, though it makes the most movies (if we include the films also made in the south Indian languages of Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam) per year, has a limited number of big name stars. Hollywood has many more people who can star in a big movie.
The other issue is that unlike Hong Kong's movies, Bollywood's are not universal. Why do I say this? Hong Kong's martial arts movies are quite physical. Their stars like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan have become famous heroes in America and also in India. The Hongkong movies, because they are action-oriented, do not lose much of their quality when they are dubbed.
Indian movies are not action oriented, and the quality of the action is not as high as in Hongkong movies. Because there is music and dancing, the dubbing is not as easy to do and the loss of quality is much more. This is the reason why the export earnings of our movies is much less than Hollywood and Hongkong movies. It is mostly people of South Asian origin which like and watch our movies.
Even here, the audience may be narrowing. In Pakistan, there is a big market for Indian movies in their multiplexes. For decades this revenue was lost to Bollywood because the movies were pirated. Under former president Pervez Musharraf, the official screening of movies was allowed, benefiting both nations. Today all Bollywood movies are shown there. Unfortunately, the current state of ties between the two countries has been allowed to deteriorate so much that we should not be surprised if Musharraf's wise decision is reversed.
It is because of all of these reasons that Bollywood is not growing though it has great potential. It seems destined, along with the rest of India's economy, to be showing promise that it cannot match through delivery.

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 18, 2016 at 8:42pm

Could this year end up being the worst for growth in India?

In April 2013, PVR's five-screen multiplex at Grand Mall in Chennai's Velachery was ready for business. It was, however, only in December 2015, under a court directive, that the licence to open was issued. The interest costs, that of keeping the property fully-staffed in anticipation of the licence and the opportunity cost is not something anyone at the Rs 1,485-crore cares to discuss. "Capital is not a constraint (for growth), the ecosystem is," is all Kamal Gianchandani, CEO, Pictures, says.



There are dozens of theatres like PVR, ready in various parts of the country, awaiting a licence to start. Getting permission to open a multiplex remains "the single biggest challenge to expansion," says Rahul Puri, managing director, Mukta Arts, which owns 38 screens across the country.

In a country where more than three-fourths of the Rs 13,000-crore film industry's revenues come from the and where single screens have been shutting down at an alarming rate, this delay in opening new properties is almost criminal. While have been doing a good job, adding 150-200 screens every year, single screens have been shutting at twice that rate. From over 12,000 screens five years ago, there are now just about 10,000 left in India.

The result: in 2014, growth in revenues screeched to a halt. While the numbers are yet to come in, 2015 is not expected to have done much better. This is simply because there aren't enough screens around.

Over the years, multiplex chains like and have grown at a fast pace. The initial growth that came from metros and large cities is now plateauing. More recently, the chains' growth has come from consolidation, rising ticket prices and higher contribution by food & beverage sales and advertising. Average occupancy at remains 30 per cent. For more than five years now the number of Indians watching films has fallen consistently - from 82 million in 2010 to just about 78 million in 2014.

India's box office growth runs into a screen problem

Without faster addition of screens, especially in small-towns and rural India where single screens are shutting down fast, the is up for some tough times, say analysts.

China had about 9,000 screens in 2011 when the government decided to push investments into building screens. By 2014, China had over 24,000 screens and itsrevenues - 90 per cent of all revenues - had more than doubled to $4.8 billion. It is now the world's second largest film market after the United States.

The, "speed of (screen) growth has to increase," says Alok Tandon, CEO, Leisure. A jump of 10,000 screens will mean more than doubling of revenues and a more equitable distribution of money, especially among different genres instead of just Hindi, English, Telugu and Tamil.

Devang Sampat, business head, India strategic initiative, Cinepolis, points to Pune, Kochi or Thane where it has megaplexes, theatres with 10 or more screens. Cinepolis has seen the share of regional and Hollywood films in its revenues rise in these markets because there are enough screens to play them long enough for word-of-mouth publicity.

It is easier for studios to take any film national because of digitisation, points out Rajkumar Akella, managing director, Rentrak India, a global audience measurement firm. The cost of a print is a fraction of what it was, so releasing across 1,500-3,000 and more screens is doable.

This creates tremendous pressure on each screen. At over 1,700 films in 2014, there were about 30 releases every week. The pressure then means that for every Bajrangi Bhaijaan that grossed Rs 411 crore in theatrical revenues, there is the critically acclaimed Masaan that does not get enough time.

Attacking piracy
The second thing that more screens could do is improve the spread of revenues. According to a Rentrak report, Mumbai, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh account for over 60 per cent of the total revenue for Hindi films largely because functional screens are concentrated in these markets. The other markets simply watch pirated versions killing potential revenues.

"If 9,000 single screens are converted into three-screeners, 27,000 screens can be added, in six months," claims Nitin Datar, president, Cinema Owners and Exhibitors Association of India.

Retrofitting or turning single screens into two- or three-screen costs Rs 40-75 lakh at the low-end, says Rajesh Mishra, CEO, UFO Moviez. The money, says Datar, could come from a tax holiday or subsidy or allowing single screen owners to have extra floor space index that can then finance the retrofit.

Plus, "not all single screens can be converted into multiplexes. They are usually on a single plot of land, and underground parking, open areas around are all requisites. Often, they belong to families with splintered shareholding," says Tandon.

Multiplexes, with three and more screens are the only way forward, say analysts. The cost is about Rs 2.5 crore per screen in the metros and under Rs 2 crore in the non-metros, reckons Tandon.

"are the core of malls. The difference in average ticket price between a multiplex within and outside of a mall is 10-15 per cent. So there is pressure unless enough and more supply of malls is there," says PVR's Gianchandani.

Not everyone agrees. "A multiplex could come up next to a local supermarket or shopping area, next to a marriage hall. And it need not be a multiplex, could be a twin theatre system too," says Saurabh Saxena, chief operating officer, Carnival. Of Carnival's 327 screens, 60 per cent are in Tier two and three towns. And it liberally uses the non-mall approach wherever needed. The result: while average ticket prices are lower at Rs 126 in non-metros versus Rs 170 in the metros, the margins are the same. That is because the cost of running the multiplex is lower in small towns.

Ratan Jain, director, Gold Cinemas, which has 65 screens, says small towns need the twin-theatre approach - two screens with small capacities and lower prices. Gold, he claims, makes the bulk of its money from ticket sales and almost nothing from food & beverages. Its whole premise is offering the single screen audience a slightly better experience for a slightly higher price.

Licensing, uneven entertainment tax (a state subject) and other issues remain critical.

http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/india-s-box-offi...

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 13, 2016 at 10:40am

Indo-#European languages (#English, #Hindi, #Urdu, #Spanish) originated in #Anatolia (#Turkey) http://po.st/JwmUiV via @SmithsonianMag

..there's about a 50 percent chance that any given person speaks a language from the Indo-European family, as Shoaib Daniyal recently reported for Quartz. Indo-European languages, a family that includes about half the languages spoken today. But there are still a lot of questions about who founded that original tongue, and when, and how it spread. Linguists do know that Proto-Indo-European was a language unique to a tribal culture in ancient Eurasia. They know that these ancient humans only spoke their language, they never wrote it down, and today it's extinct. (Of course, that hasn't stopped linguists from trying to reconstruct the language.) But they don't know exactly when and where the language truly began, or how it came to birth so many of our modern tongues. 

Under one hypothesis, the ancestral tongue is 6,000 years old. It originated among tribal nomads on the Pontic Steppe, at the intersection of Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine. These nomads had significant military prowess and had domesticated horses. Such innovative feats allowed them to spread their language by travel and conquest.

Evolutionary biologists recently usurped this nomadic theory. In 2012, a team from the University of Auckland in New Zealand estimated that Proto-Indo-European is even older, perhaps originating 8,000 to 9,500 years ago. As for its geographic origins, they pointed to Anatolia, or modern day Turkey. By their account, the first speakers practiced animal domestication and agriculture. As these practices spread, so did their language.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdQwalCPNAs&feature=youtu.be


http://qz.com/425577/this-animated-map-shows-how-sanskrit-may-have-...

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 9, 2016 at 9:43am

How mystic Plato became genius Aflatoon
http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/drDC5sQ9ZIfbJOTReii4YO/How-mystic-P...

Pakistanis believe Bollywood’s language is Urdu (and what Vajpayee speaks is Hindi). Indians think Bollywood is Hindi, and what PTV speaks is Urdu. Hindi/Urdu is actually the same language, Hindustani, made alien because it’s written in two scripts. Most of Urdu’s sounds come from Sanskrit. It isn’t even possible, for instance, to write the word phool, flower, in Arabic.

This is because the letter P is missing in Arabic, which is strange, because it seems an easy sound to produce. Another basic sound Arabs don’t have is G, and McDonald’s signs in Arabic advertise the “hamburjer” in Dubai.
Arabs cannot spell Pakistan, and might pronounce it “Fakistan” or “Bakistan”. Pak is Persian and means pure.
Parsis always had P, and when Persia was conquered by the Arabs, the letter was accommodated into the Arabic script by adding two dots to ?( B) and inventing ? ( P).
Phool cannot be written in Gujarati either because, influenced heavily by Persian through trade, Gujarati uses the sound F instead of Pha. Phool is ful in Gujarati, but that word does not properly communicate the pendulous weight of a flower.
Sanskrit does not have F, and it must be modified for Hindi by putting a dot under Pha. Bollywood’s Gulzar (whose name comes from flower) writes in the Persian script and is keen that we claim all Hindustani words through active use of the dot under Devnagari letters like K, Kh, Gh, J, S and A. These sounds are only missing from the alphabet, not the language. However, only cultured Indians can properly pronounce qaaf, khay and ghain.
Plato is known to Indians by the beautiful name Aflatoon. How did Plato become Aflatoon? His name in Greek is actually Platon, meaning wide. English spells him through Latin, which drops the N.
We got the word from Muslims and, as we have seen, Arabs have no P and so his name begins with F. The reason for the A at the beginning is that “fl” (as in flower) is not a naturally occurring sound in Arabic, and the alif, or A, eases us into the word by separating F from L: Af-latoon.
Those who believe V.S. Naipaul cooks up anecdotes to fit his theories will find evidence of this in his book Overcrowded Barracoon.
He quotes a professor of literature in north India as describing his curriculum thus: “We begin with Eshakespeare” and then “the Romantics. Eshelley” and then “Esomerset Maugham”.
It is impossible that a north Indian will say Eshakespeare, Eshelley and Esomerset. Sh and S are both naturally occurring, and commonly used, in Hindi.
Naipaul quotes another man talking about his “estatus”, and this is correct. He might have picked up a couple of similarly mispronounced words, like “iskool” and “istation”, and then assumed, wrongly, that the problem was with all words starting with S. He then makes up the names that make his story entertaining.
So why do north Indians say “iskool” and “estatus”? Urdu cannot join letters to half-S because Sk and St (like Skanda in Sanskrit) are not naturally occurrent. For this reason, the spelling in Urdu of the word “school” cannot start S+K because that would produce the word “sakool”. An alif is put before the S, to ease it into the K, and this produces the easier “askool” or “iskool”.
The peasant’s inability to say F explains words like phoren and phillum, which urban Indians use with a laugh. But someone else might laugh at us.
We pronounce the word philosophy as fee-law-saw-fee. But in Ancient Greek f (phi) is aspirated like the Hindi phool and so Plato would know his work as phee-low-so-phee-aa (f???s?f?a). I think this makes the word, and the work, more rustic, more accessible, less intimidating.
Is it possible to truly understand the meaning of words you speak incorrectly? I do not think so, and Plato discusses this in his book on the sound of words, Cratylus.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 27, 2021 at 7:01pm

#Hate campaign in #India against #Urdu for being a ‘Muslim’ language. #Hindu nationalist groups target #Indian-born language after clothing brand comes up with a #Diwali advertisement with Urdu words. #HindutvaTerror #Islamophibia_in_india https://aje.io/h6frnb via @AJEnglish

Last week, Hindu right-wing forces in India forced a leading firm to withdraw its festive season advertisement after it featured a couple of words from the Urdu language, which in the popular imagination in the country is a “Muslim language”.

The company, FabIndia, issued an advertisement for Diwali – a significant Hindu festival that falls next month – showcasing its latest collection of clothes. The text at the top read: “Jashn-e-Rivaaz”.

“Jashn” in Urdu means a celebration while “Riwaaz”, which is actually “Riwaaj”, means tradition. The title translated to “A Celebration of Tradition”.

But a young parliamentarian belonging to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who often makes headlines for his Islamophobic remarks, was not happy.

“Deepavali is not Jashn-e-Riwaaz,” 30-year-old Tejasvi Surya posted on Twitter, calling Diwali by its more traditional name.

“This deliberate attempt of Abrahamisation of Hindu festivals, depicting models without traditional Hindu attires, must be called out.”


FabIndia is a household name in India and sells clothes, furniture, home furnishings and food items. It has hundreds of showrooms across the vast country and abroad.

Surya said the company “must face economic costs for such deliberate misadventures”.


Soon, other members of the BJP and other Hindu nationalist groups started attacking FabIndia on social media, accusing the brand of “hurting” the religious sentiments of Hindus.

“The Hindutva project sees Urdu as a ‘Muslim’ language. And invisibilising Urdu is part of the larger project of marginalising the Muslim community, in fact, physically eliminating it,” Nivedita Menon, professor at the Centre for Political Studies at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, told Al Jazeera.

“Hindutva” refers to a century-old Hindu supremacist movement which seeks to convert India into an ethnic Hindu state.

The Urdu language was born in northern India during the Mughal rule. Linguists and historians say Urdu and Hindi originally developed from Khadi Boli, a dialect of the Delhi region, and Prakrit. It also borrowed heavily from Persian, Turkish and Arabic languages.

Until the British colonised the subcontinent, Urdu and Hindu languages were collectively referred to as Hindustani. It was British linguist John Gilchrist who for the first time classified and defined Hindustani into two broad categories – words inspired largely by Persian and Arabic were identified as Urdu, and those inspired by Sanskrit became Hindi.


However, spoken Urdu is similar to Hindi and the two share a common grammar and a large percentage of their vocabulary.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 27, 2021 at 7:02pm

Why does India’s Hindu right-wing hate the Urdu language so much?


https://qz.com/india/2079526/explaining-indian-hindu-right-wings-ha...

so complete was the communal association of Hindi and Urdu by that time, Rai recounts that “a Hindi friend” asked Nehru whose language Urdu was. “Yeh meri aur mere bap-dada’on ki bhasha hai,” Nehru replied. This is my language, the language of my ancestors. Thereupon the “Hindi friend” retorted: Brahman hote hue Urdu ko apni bhasha kehte ho, sharam nahin ati? (Aren’t you ashamed, being a Brahmin, to claim Urdu as your language?)

Uttar Pradesh, the heartland of the Hindi-Urdu fight, went even further, banning Urdu-medium schooling altogether. As Urdu writer and critic Shamsur Rahman Faruqi put it, there was an effort to “wipe out Urdu” in Uttar Pradesh after independence.



Sanskritised Hindi—which Alok Rai pointedly calls “Hindi” in scare quotes to differentiate it from its spoken forms—has a fairly restricted life outside government and is practically absent from Bollywood, by some distance the largest producer of Hindi-Urdu content in the world.

Of course, Hindutva is ascendantly militant right now and is unafraid to use intimidation to try and resurrect colonial-era Hindi-Urdu debates. However, even as these political controversies break, one must keep in mind that changing language habits— especially the natural spoken tongue—of millions is a tough feat to pull off.


In fact, ironically, the Bharatiya Janata Party uses what could be called “Urdu” too in slogans such as “Modi hai to mumkin hai” (mumkin is from Arabic via Persian) or “azadi kā amrit mahotsav” (azadi is a Persian loan). Even words as basic as “Hindu” and “Hindi” are loans from Persian, being taken up by Indian languages in the medieval period. Hence, in the reductive lens of (Sanskritised) Hindi versus (Persianised) Urdu, they fit into the latter silo.

This, of course, does not mean language change cannot occur. In fact, like medieval Khari Boli absorbed Persian words as part of its everyday lexicon, much the same is happening with English today, which given its linguistic prestige and power exerts a significant influence even on non-Anglophones. Open any Hindi newspaper, for example, and it is suffused with English loan words. Informal, spoken speech will probably have even more.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 18, 2022 at 1:15pm

Where Romantic Poetry in a Fading Language Draws Stadium Crowds
That 300,000 people celebrated Urdu verse during a three-day festival was testament to the peculiar reality of the language in India.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/18/world/asia/india-urdu-poetry.html

That more than 300,000 people came to celebrate Urdu poetry during the three-day festival this month in New Delhi was testament to the peculiar reality of the language in India.

For centuries, Urdu was a prominent language of culture and poetry in India, at times promoted by Mughal rulers. Its literature and journalism — often advanced by writers who rebelled against religious dogma — played important roles in the country’s independence struggle against British colonial rule and in the spread of socialist fervor across the subcontinent later in the 20th century.

In more recent decades, the language has faced dual threats from communal politics and the quest for economic prosperity. Urdu is now stigmatized as foreign, the language of India’s archrival, Pakistan. Families increasingly prefer to enroll children in schools that teach English and other Indian languages better suited for the job market.

----------

The four designated stages inside the crowded stadium complex in the heart of the busy capital weren’t enough. So the poetry lovers also took to the footpaths and the spaces in between, turning them into impromptu open-mic platforms for India’s embattled language of love.

In one corner of the festival grounds, which had been draped in vibrant colors and calligraphy, a group of university students alternated between singing popular romantic songs, backed by a young man on guitar, and jostling to recite verses of their own.

“In your love,” one young poet began, leaning into the huddle with confidence, before forgetting the rest of his verse. “In your love ….” he repeated, unable to recall.

“Don’t worry,” someone from the crowd encouraged him, as the others chuckled. “In love, we all forget.”

In another corner, Pradeep Sahil, a poet and lyricist, handed his phone to a friend to record him as he placed a red chair at a busy spot and took a seat, crossing his legs and reading poem after poem. A crowd soon gathered, cheering after every verse. With no room on the main stage, Mr. Sahil had found a stage of his own, climbing atop his chair and reciting what felt like his entire book.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 18, 2022 at 1:23pm

Where Romantic Poetry in a Fading Language Draws Stadium Crowds
That 300,000 people celebrated Urdu verse during a three-day festival was testament to the peculiar reality of the language in India.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/18/world/asia/india-urdu-poetry.html


“In our effort to get on the gravy train, we left a lot behind on the platform,” Javed Akhtar, a prominent poet and lyricist, said at the festival. “And among those things we forgot on the platform was literature, language, poetry and other arts.”

Yet Urdu has remained the key language of romantic expression in the songs and cinema that saturate Indian life. Generations, in India as well as across the wider subcontinent and in the diaspora, have grown up humming songs from Bollywood musicals that draw heavily on Urdu poetry. Knowingly or unknowingly, Urdu has been their language of angst, heartbreak and celebration.

Urdu is a composite language. Its grammar and syntax are indigenous to India, but it draws its script — and a heavy share of its vocabulary — from Persian and Arabic influences that came on the back of Muslim invasions. The rich tradition of poetry, music and art that developed from this confluence became known as the Ganga-Jamuna culture, a meeting of the two great rivers with those names.

After Pakistan adopted Urdu as its national language with the bloody partition of India in 1947, the tongue increasingly took on an Islamic identity in India — a marginalization that has only intensified with the recent rise of the Hindu right. The governing party’s right-wing support base has long focused on “purifying” Indian culture, with the only acceptable confluence one in which it subsumes other streams.

The poetry festival, known as Jashn-e-Rekhta, which was in its seventh edition, is part of a decade-old effort to bridge the gap between the language’s wide emotional connection and its receding accessibility.

It all began in 2013 with a website, Rekhta.org, started by Sanjiv Saraf, an engineer and businessman who was a lifelong lover of music set to Urdu poetry and had just begun learning the script at age 53.

He wanted to make a small number of good Urdu poems accessible by presenting each in three different scripts — in the original Urdu; in Devanagari, the script of Hindi; and in English transliteration. Readers could click on any word to get a pop-up of its meaning.

Mr. Saraf’s organization, the Rekhta Foundation, has since expanded its mission to reviving the Urdu language. Dozens of its employees travel around India to scan and archive works from old libraries and private collections, making out-of-print Urdu books available digitally. The Rekhta website now has about 20 million users annually, two-thirds of them under 35. The site has so far made available more than 120,000 pieces of work by over 6,000 poets.

In many ways, Urdu’s poetic tradition gives it an advantage in the era of social media and short attention spans. The building block of much of Urdu poetry is a simple “sher” — two versed lines in which the first sets up an idea and the second completes it.

“The emotional power of this language — to express the deepest emotions in the shortest possible construct,” Mr. Saraf said, “you cannot help but fall in love with the language.”

The poetry festival was held for the first time since the pandemic, and there was an undertone about the fragility of life. The singer Hariharan captivated the audience with a slow meditation on life taken from a poem by Muzaffar Warsi.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 18, 2022 at 1:23pm

Where Romantic Poetry in a Fading Language Draws Stadium Crowds
That 300,000 people celebrated Urdu verse during a three-day festival was testament to the peculiar reality of the language in India.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/18/world/asia/india-urdu-poetry.html

Among the crowd that spilled out of the large tent where Hariharan performed was Snigdha Kar, an environmentalist, and her 7-year-old daughter, Shreyashri. As the singer dwelled on one line of poetry, repeating it over and over, Ms. Kar closed her eyes, letting the notes sink in.

Music and poetry provide a moment of grounding in a fast-moving world of work, travel and family obligations, she said. While Ms. Kar said she had always been moved by lyrics and poetry — “I used to pay attention to the words more,” she said — she has started classical lessons online during the pandemic to understand the music, too.

“I also bought a guitar,” she said, adding with a sheepish smile: “You know, classical music could become boring sometimes.”

The festival’s main attraction was the poetry sessions, from open-mic opportunities where budding poets nervously recited their works, trying to stick to meter and rhyme, to master classes that encouraged them to keep composing even if they were struggling with the basics of Urdu script or form.

“Poetry is not just arranging words,” the poet Suhail Azad, who took early retirement as a police officer to focus full time on poetry, told attendants of one master class. “If it reaches the heart, it is poetry.”

At the festival’s headline poetry recital, the mushaira, half a dozen senior poets took their seats on the stage, enchanting the audience in distinct styles, often to standing ovations.

Some of the poets sang their verses like melodious songs. Others, like Shakeel Azmi, brought the same dynamism as a stage performer — moving away from the lectern, building up the suspense of the second verse by repeating the first over and over.

The more senior poets, like Fahmi Badayuni, 70, brought the quiet swagger and simplicity of a bygone era, both in demeanor and verse.

Before he recited his work, Mr. Badayuni — wearing a pink sweater, fur hat and checkered scarf — acknowledged the audience’s connection with his art by noting that his poems had gone “viral.”

Those who are unaware of your scent

They make do with flowers.

The crowd roared after every verse, many standing to shout “once more!” The master of ceremonies stopped Mr. Badayuni to offer an observation: His verses were so good that people were also whistling in appreciation.

“Keep whistling like that, brother, and you may get a job in the railways,” the M.C. joked with the crowd.

Mr. Badayuni then went back to reciting another sher. He repeated the first line to the audience’s attentive silence and curiosity, and then landed its kicker to their eruption.

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