India’s right-wing seems to think Urdu is a foreign import, forced upon the country by Muslim invaders. This is far from the truth. Urdu is an Indian language with deep historical roots. It is locally born and just as indigenous as other languages. It was born out of “the cultural hybridisation that happened in the Indian subcontinent,” notes Alok Rai.
Urdu is not a Muslim language, just as Hindi is not a Hindu language. Despite commonalities in semantics, no one in Jeddah or Tehran can follow sentences spoken in Urdu, just as closer home regional language speakers including Muslims in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka or Bengal, to name a just few states, cannot speak Urdu or even follow it.
The chief minister of Tamil Nadu M.K. Stalin has appositely reminded everyone that Hindi being propagated as the national language has smothered scores of local languages in the Hindi heartland. The fraught relationship between Hindi and regional Hindis is an important one which is certainly worth noting. But, perhaps more crucial is the relationship between Hindi and Urdu for understanding the politics of language which has played out on the same overwrought ideological registers of communal and ethnic nationalism.
The diversity of Hindi has been suppressed largely because of its vehement hostility to Urdu. It was linked to the concerted effort by urban upper caste Hindu elites in the upper and middle Gangetic plains to displace Urdu as the official language and replace it with Hindi in Devanagari script. Shoring up Hindi numbers became crucial to this process. Many local languages of the region like Awadhi, Braj Bhasha, Bundeli, etc., were nominally fused into Hindi as a political tactic to be counted as Hindi to bolster its numbers. Hindi and Urdu in this process became proxies for Hindu and Muslim mobilisation.
This exercise may have also clipped Hindi’s ability to think/function as a local and regional vehicle of progress in promoting literacy and education, for example, as regional languages have done in south India. The southern states have forged ahead with impressive gross enrolment rates and density of higher education institutions per capita, whereas the Hindi speaking states have lagged behind. Nor has Hindi expansionism in the post-Independence period produced liberal progressive currents and ideas advocating equality for all despite Hindi being in the forefront of the anti-colonial struggles. In the post-independence period, it is the language of power, and not resistance.
Consequently, the Hindi elite entrenched in Uttar Pradesh since the 1950s has not played the same progressive role that regional elites emerging from linguistic movements have played in the South Indian states, where it has been a vehicle of progress and also resistance. Actually, Hindi nationalism has given way to revivalism and majoritarianism in the heartland. This gives us a clue to the historical underpinnings of the politics of resentment and its Hindi-Hindu connection, which drives the project of cultural assertion and the political dominance of the present dispensation. This has provided space to political leaders who have frequently used the Hindi-Urdu controversy as a tool to promote divisiveness and sectarianism. For them, it became an issue of religio-cultural identity around which communitarian politics could be conducted.
Urdu is among the 22 languages officially recognised by the Indian constitution. It was given the respect it deserved after India’s independence by its inclusion in the Eighth Schedule of the constitution. Governments at the Union and states have taken some measures to support Urdu, such as establishing the National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language (NCPUL). However, these efforts remain limited compared to the extensive support provided to other languages.
Over the decades, Urdu has suffered from neglect as it went on to be identified with Muslims even though for centuries, it was widely spoken by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in India. Many of its celebrated poets and writers were non-Muslims. Urdu has profoundly influenced Indian cinema, particularly Hindi cinema – its dialogues, songs and music. This reflects the historical and cultural connections between Hindi and Urdu-speaking regions in the subcontinent but its role is diminishing with film scripts increasingly favouring Hindi. Broadly speaking, Urdu began to be used interchangeably with Muslims in the political arena, leading to its systematic decline in the public sphere including in Bollywood.
The politics around it has intensified further since the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014. The present regime’s ideology is defined by a strong emphasis on Hindi-Hindu nationalism as the route to political dominance. This fits into the larger narrative of creating a homogenised heartland. To advance this process, Hindi was portrayed as the language of nationalism while Urdu was seen as language of separatism. After partition of India in 1947, Pakistan adopted Urdu as its national language, further deepening the communal perception of the language in India. Urdu’s elevation in that country strengthened this misperception. This has fuelled policies and narratives that worked for the elimination of Urdu from the lands of which it is an intrinsic part. However, these lands today represent a political space where the dominant language of democratic politics is Hindi making it the political lingua franca of the entire region with little or no space for other languages.
The latest fracas over Urdu happened in February this year when chief minister Adityanath, labelled those who read Urdu, particularly Muslims, with the term “Kathmulla.” These comments came after a heated exchange in the Vidhan Sabha when the Samajwadi Party leader Mata Prasad Pandey demanded Urdu translation of assembly proceedings, after the Speaker announced translations in Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj, Bundeli, along with English. The chief minister not only rejected this suggestion, he made it clear that Urdu could not have the status of any of the other languages of the state. Adityanath’s blunt attack is a continuation of the ‘Hindi-Hindu’ politics through other means to invigorate and consolidate muscular Hindu nationalism.
Also read: Why Does Wazir-e-Ala Adityanath Have a Grouse Against Urdu?
Meanwhile, in the heartland of Urdu, if one could call it that – Uttar Pradesh and Bihar – state governments have been working to discontinue the use of Urdu, nowhere more vigorously than in Uttar Pradesh. The deliberately twisted interpretation of the three-language formula has reinforced the exclusion of Urdu in Uttar Pradesh. The three languages taught in schools, for example, included Hindi, English and Sanskrit, not Urdu, even though it is spoken by a larger number of its citizens than Sanskrit or English. The New Education Policy (NEP) will presumably retain this discriminatory formula in the state at the expense of Urdu. However, in the south of the Vindhyas, the proposal to extend the three-language formula to Tamil Nadu has raised a veritable storm in the state aggravating the perception of Hindi imposition.
The renaming of places with Urdu origins, such as Allahabad to Prayagraj, is part of a larger trend of erasing its presence, and by extension erasing any instance of the shared Hindu-Muslim heritage, in public life. In the past, politicians elected to state assemblies have been barred from taking oath in Urdu; artists have been stopped from painting Urdu graffiti; and cities and neighbourhoods have been renamed. Earlier in 2017, the Uttar Pradesh government ordered the replacement of Urdu signboards at railway stations and government buildings with Hindi, despite Urdu being the second official language of the state. Even in states where Urdu had a significant presence, such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, it was systematically phased out from schools and bureaucracy. Urdu-medium schools and colleges suffered from a lack of government funding and infrastructure. Several BJP-led state governments have either reduced funding for Urdu-medium schools or made policies that discourage students from pursuing education in Urdu.
Urdu is an integral part of India’s diverse heritage. Efforts to erase it from public and official spaces ignores its contributions to India’s rich literary, cultural, and political history. The exile of Urdu from its heartland where it was built up as a literary and conversational language by the combined efforts of both Hindus and Muslims, weakens the linguistic and cultural plurality of India. In a country of spectacular linguistic diversity such as ours, language informs our collective consciousness and composite heritage. Urdu is central to that heritage and to Indian pluralism and culture. What needs to be encouraged is linguistic diversity that nourishes it, and not linguistic discrimination that diminishes it.
Zoya Hasan is Professor Emerita, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Hasan dedicates this article to the memory of three wonderful practitioners of Urdu: her father, Mohammed Khaliq Siddiqui, her uncle, Mohammed Atiq Siddiqui, and her husband, Mushirul Hasan.
A version of this piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
