A few days ago, the newly elected first woman chief minister of Pakistani Punjab, Maryam Nawaz Sharif, declared that her government will mandate the teaching of the Punjabi language in all the schools of the province. This made headlines in Pakistan and a number of commentators lauded this decision as historic. This must have confused the Punjabis on the other side of the Radcliffe Line, making them wonder why their fellow Punjabis in Pakistan did not teach their own language. After all, Pakistan has been independent for over seventy-five years, Punjab dominates the country, its military and bureaucracy, and yet, why is its language so neglected?
The answer lies in a now forgotten but critical book written nearly forty years ago. In 1985, veteran Punjabi politician, Hanif Ramay, wrote a book called Punjab ka Muqadama (Punjab’s Lawsuit). Ramay dedicated his book to the then ‘five crore’ Punjabis in Pakistan, and lamented that he had to write the case for Punjabi in Urdu because, ‘the Punjabis have discarded the Punjabi language.’ He explained that in order to become ‘Pakistani’ the Punjabis have lost their language, culture and tradition. The ‘Speak Urdu, Read Urdu, and Write Urdu,’ mantra of the Pakistani state did make Urdu the lingua franca of the country after creation, but in doing so destroyed the Punjabi language. Ramay laments that the ‘greats’ of Punjabi literature, Waris Shah’s ‘Heer’, Maulvi Ghulam Rasool’s ‘Yousaf Zuleikha’, and Mian Muhammad Bakhsh’s ‘Saif ul-Mulook,’ are now hardly understood by the Punjabis. He fears that with the language, the dance, food, clothes, arts and crafts of the Punjab are also on the verge of extinction. “If other provinces did not wear the Kurta, even that would have died out in the Punjab,” he laments.
Certainly, the homogenizing tendencies of the early Pakistani state demanded that Urdu and north Indian Muslim elite (ashraf) culture held prominence in the country. The Pakistani ‘nation’ it was claimed should only have ‘one’ language, which, of course, was to be Urdu. The founder of the country, Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, declared the hallowed status of Urdu as early as March 1948 in Dhaka where he declared that, “…let me make it very clear to you that the State Language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language. Any one who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan. Without one State language, no nation can remain tied up solidly together and function…Therefore, so far as the State Language is concerned, Pakistan’s language shall be Urdu.” The irony was certainly lost that this speech advocating for Urdu was given in English and by a person who was himself not proficient in the Urdu language.
The first Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, saw the status of Urdu as so above every other language, that even the thought of any language even being ‘co-equal’ to it was anathema to him. Speaking at the first session of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan in February 1948, where an East Bengal member merely requested that Bengali be allowed to be spoken, together with English and Urdu in the Assembly, Liaquat made opposition to this suggestion a matter of life and death—not just for Pakistan but of Muslim life and culture in all of South Asia. Liaquat retorted: “It is really the most vital question, a question of life and death for the Muslim nation not only for Pakistan but throughout this whole sub-continent that I most strongly oppose the amendment which has been moved.”
Thus, if Urdu were to become the most important language in the country, it had to become the language of its ruling classes, and those who aspired to rise in the country’s polity. With less than 10% of the population speaking Urdu as a first language, but with a large number of influential politicians and bureaucrats speaking it as a first language, Urdu fast became a language of power and upward mobility.
Where the Bengali Pakistanis were too proud of their language and tradition to accept the pre-eminence of Urdu, and even gave up their lives in February 1952 in order to achieve parity with it, the Punjabis were quick to discard their language and culture in order to become the predominant power in western Pakistan. But this love affair with Urdu had historical roots too.
A demonstration by Punjabis at Lahore, Pakistan, demanding to make Punjabi as official language of instruction in schools of the Punjab. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Punjabi parchar/CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED
Historical injustice
Urdu, like English, was brought to the Punjab formally by the British in 1849 with annexation. Not only were the lower level bureaucrats in the government Urdu speaking, as they hailed from the then North-Western provinces, the British had a particular affinity for Urdu, treating it as their ‘own’ language, as they had played a large part in popularising it. Urdu also played a major role in the Punjab as it was used by the British to replace Persian. Liberal scholarships were given for the study of Urdu by the British, while Persian was discouraged, so much so that by the turn of the twentieth century the Punjab education department gleefully noted that Persian had almost died out in the province.
Thus, when Pakistan came into being and Urdu became even more important as the upcoming language of state, the Punjabis, where already the educated classes knew Urdu, were quick to take up the mantle of being the leaders in forging the identity of this new country through religion and language. There was one further measure too: Punjabi was now seen as only rustic, only to be spoken, and never to be written, nor to be taught or used academically. This denigration of Punjabi as a ‘paindoo’ (village) language meant that people began to connect it to being uneducated, backward, and even uncouth. Henceforth, while still spoken, Punjabi almost disappeared from schools in the province, and only became the preserve of a few small postgraduate university departments. Today only one private school in Lahore regularly teaches Punjabi, and no university offers it as a regular course to its undergraduates.
When I began going to Indian Punjab regularly a decade ago, I frequently visited the Panjab University and the Punjabi University. The former claims that it is the successor of the University of the Punjab established at Lahore in 1882, while the later was established in 1962 as the first Punjabi medium university in India. My first visit to both these universities in 2013 left me speechless. At the conference I was invited to at Panjab University in Chandigarh the then Vice Chancellor, Professor Arun Grover, a distinguished scientist, started the proceedings in Punjabi, and encouraged discourse in the language at the conference. The subsequent conference at Punjabi University Patiala simply had Punjabi as its main medium, with every single person speaking the language academically as well as colloquially. Such ease with Punjabi in educational institutions is simply unimaginable in Pakistani Punjab still, and its absence creates a gaping hole not only in the educational milieu of the province, but also the identity of Pakistani Punjabis, which is simply incomplete without learning, owning and being proud of its language.
Hanif Ramay died in 2006 with an unfulfilled dream. In 2024, its seems that it is in the lot of Maryam Nawaz Sharif to correct this historical wrong, and reintroduce Punjabi to its homeland.
Yaqoob Khan Bangash is a historian based in Lahore, Pakistan. Bangsh tweets at @BangashYK. He can be reached at yaqoob.bangash@gmail.com.
