Languages are basically
a means of communication, expression of emotion, attitude and mood. But they
are also associated with identity in various degrees. Identity is
nationalistic, sub-nationalistic (ethnic) and, in some rare cases, also
religious. In India, it so happened that Urdu got associated with the
Indian-Muslim identity between the late 18th and the early 20thcenturies.
Despite the fact that this language is spoken by both Hindus and Muslims and
Muslims themselves speak a number of languages, mainly Bengali, Punjabi,
Pashto, Sindhi and Gujrati. Moreover, in the villages of UP and Bihar, both
Hindus and Muslims actually speak the dialects of Hindi such as Awadhi,
Bhojpuri, Braj Bhasha, Maithili etc. And yet, modern is associated with Islam in India in
both India and Pakistan. How did this happen? This is explained in two parts.
The first part deals with the movement for the purification of Urdu between
1750 to the early 1900s.
The movement for
linguistic purification — which I call the ‘Islamisation of Urdu’ for reasons
given below — started in the middle of the 18th century. The ancestor of Urdu was an
Indic-oriented language. By this I mean that it had words of the local
languages (bhaka or bhasha) and
Sanskrit, and its allusions were to India and the local culture. Even though
the script of some writings in this language is Perso-Arabic (Urdu), as opposed
to Devanagari used in the Rajput writings, the language is similar. This change from the 1750s onwards which is
the theme of this article.
In this purification
movement, the Indic element was purged out by Muslim poets who, it appears,
wanted a class-identity marker. Among the changes which occurred were: the
removal of local (bhaka) and Sanskritic words, the
substitution of Iranian and Islamic cultural allusions and metaphors in place
of Indian and Hindu ones, and the replacement of the Indian conventions about
the expression of love (woman to man) by Persian ones (man to woman or
adolescent boy). Among the more than 4,000 words purged out were nain (eye),prem (love), mohan (dear one) etc. They do exist in songs
and some other forms of poetry, of course, but they were banished from the ghazal. The grounds
given in the writings of the poets who did all this — such as Shah Hatim
(1699-1786), Imam Baksh Nasikh (d. 1838), Insha Ullah Khan Insha (1752-1818),
etc — are not communal. They said that certain words are obsolete,
unfashionable and rough. However, the end result was that words of Indic origin
were the ones which were purged. That is one reason why I call this movement
‘Islamisation’. To take one concrete example, Hatim made a small extract of his
voluminous poetic work calling it Divan Zada (1756).
In the preface of this compilation, he writes in Persian that he “had stopped
using the local idiom which was called ‘bhaka’” (bhaka goend mauquf karda). In its place, he tells us,
he had started the refined idiom of the gentlemen of Delhi. And what was this?
For an answer we have to go to Insha who defined it precisely in his Persian
bookDarya-e-Latafat (1802).
For Insha, this was the language of the Muslim elite of Delhi and Lucknow. Such
notions about linguistic excellence were in circulation from the 14th century at least, as Amir Khusro’s own
notions illustrate. However, during the 1750s the ideas of Sirajuddin Ali Khan
Arzu (1687-1756), a Persian poet and linguist, had a stronger impact on Hatim
and the other reformers. Arzu corrected an existing dictionary naming it Navadir-ul- Alfaz (1751). In this he indicates at
several places that the standard language he had in mind was that of the elite
of Delhi. And this idiom was far more Persianised and full of Islamic cultural
references than the other styles of the language spoken elsewhere. So it was
this Persianised language which became a marker of the educated, mostly Muslim
but also Hindu Kaesth, identity during British India.
The impact of this
movement was that it changed the identity of the common language of north India
to two languages: Persianised Urdu and Sanskritised Hindi. The process of
Sanskritisation started from 1802 onwards and it was a consequence of political
awareness, incipient nationalism and reaction to Muslim cultural dominance. But
this dominance had been contributed to; by the same movement of the
Islamisation of Urdu so that a Hindu poet had to use Islamic phraseology in order
to be appreciated. And yet, ironically and most unjustly, Azad’s book Ab-e-Hayat ignores
both Hindu poets as well as women. There is no doubt that this process of
Persianisation was a class movement meant to strike out an independent path
rather than to write in Persian itself as the Iranians made fun of
Indian-Persian. Moreover, from the 1830s onwards, Persian was being phased out
from the domains of power. Both the Muslims and Kaesth Munshis were interested
in using Persianised Urdu to retain their monopoly over jobs in
UP and the Punjab. But the apprenticeship (ustadi-shagirdi)
tradition, the poetry recitation sessions (Mushairas) which
were assemblies of rivals and the cultural capital given to language was such
that the allusions, references and the atmosphere, at least in the ghazal, was Persian
and Muslim. That is why the movement alienated Hindus and that is why I call it
the Islamisation of Urdu. Its greatest harm was that it began the division of
Urdu-Hindi into Urdu and Hindi and this was continued by the Sankritisation of
Hindi later. And yet, the spoken language of ordinary people remains undivided.
It is only by recognizing this history and resolving to build upon common
themes and continuities of this common language of north Indian cities that we
exorcise the ghosts of the past from this subcontinent.
The first part of this
article dwelt on the 18th century
movement of linguistic reform (which I called ‘Islamisation of Urdu’)
which Persianised Urdu and changed its Indic-orientation to Islamic culture.
This part will take up another aspect of the same issue — the use of Urdu in education,
printing and religious debate in British India. These factors also
associated Urdu, which has an Indic base and was not associated with any
specific religious community till the late 18th century, with Islam and Muslim
identity in India.
Urdu-Hindi (the
ancestor of both modern Urdu and Hindi) was not originally associated either
with formal religious institutions or bureaucracy of the state in Mughal India.
The language of the Islamic texts and liturgical practices was, of course,
Arabic. However, religious texts were explained in Persian. Persian was also
used for formal discourse on Islamic issues by the ulema. Yet, probably to
communicate to the common people, some of the sufis used the local languages.
Thus there are references to conversation, poetry recited during musical (sama’a) sessions and wise sayings in Urdu-Hindi from
the 15th century
onwards.
Remarkably enough, a
religious reformer called Bayazid Ansari (1526-1572) wrote lines in what he
called ‘Hindi’ in the Perso-Arabic script in his book entitled Khairul Bayan (1560-1570). The book was written in
South Waziristan, in a Pashto-speaking area, but he thought this language
useful for the propagation of his religious ideas. Anyway, despite this and
other early writings, this ancestor of Urdu was not associated with Muslims.
This association grew during the British period and, apart from the reasons
given in Part-I of this article, it grew mainly because of the use of Urdu in
printing, education and religious debate.
As Muslim political
power shrank and anxiety spread about why this had happened, theulema began a movement of
education and purification. This they did by writing small books
(chapbooks) in the local languages. Thus there are nur namas, wafat namas, jang namas,lahad namas etc. in almost all languages used by
Muslims in South Asia and, as it happens, most of them are in Urdu. This
movement started in the 18th century
and accelerated in the 19th and
the 20th centuries.
Indeed, if one consults the British reports on printing, one finds that two
themes always predominate: religion and love. In some years, one may exceed the
other but, as books on history and morals also have a religious colour, it may
be true to say that religion mostly predominates printing.
This was a tremendous social change for all religious
communities in India. Thus, although there was a secularizing trend introduced
by the British also, there were more religious texts available in print than
ever before. Hence, the consciousness of religious identity grew among all
religious communities in India. And within Islam, the consciousness of
sectarian identity grew also. Thus, on the one hand the modernist secular
classes grew alienated from the religious masses. But on the other, the
religious classes also grew alienated from each other and from other religious
communities.
As for education, the
madrassas started explaining the Arabic texts of the Dars-i-Nizami in Urdu though the classical exegeses
were still in Persian. Meanwhile, Shah Abdul Qadir (1753-1827) and Shah Rafiuddin
(1749-1817) translated the Holy Quran into Urdu. Exegeses of the Holy Quran,
such as Murad Ullah Sanbhli’s Tafsir-e-Muradi (1771)
came to be printed.
Indeed, by the 20th century, Urdu came to possess an
impressive amount of Islamic literature. From the popular elegies for the
martyrs of Karbala (marsiya) to devotional poetry;
from stories read out among illiterate women (for example, Bibi Fatima ki Kahani)
to scholarly works on Islamic philosophy; from the hagiographies of saints to
the strictly monotheistic sermons of the Wahabis — all this varied literature
was predominantly in Urdu.
Moreover, the sub-sects
of Islam — not just the Sunnis and the Shias but the Ahle Hadith, Deobandis,
Barelvis and others — wrote their polemical literature in Urdu. They indulged
in debate (Munazara) in Urdu and refuted each others’ claims in
the same language. Even those who are considered heretics — as Bayazid Ansari
was in the 16th century
— published their works, attacked their opponents and defended themselves in
Urdu.
Whether one is looking
at the fundamentalists, revivalists, modernists or heretics — one notices that
their favorite medium of expression is Urdu. This incessant debate went on in
face-to-face Munazaras and
through constant pamphleteering throughout the 20th century and still continues. Even the
works of the al Qaeda philosophy and the literature of the militants which is
on sale outside mosques and Madrassas in Pakistan today is in Urdu though
hardly any of them are mother-tongue speakers of the language. Moreover, Urdu
is still the preferred language of instruction and examination in Pakistan and
India. Even some Madrassas in Bangladesh give it some space though, of course,
others use Bengali.
All these factors
associate Urdu with Islam and the Islamic identity in the public mind in South
Asia. While it is true that Urdu has also been associated with socialism (Taraqqi Pasand Adab), modernity and enlightenment (the
Delhi Renaissance), the association with Islam predominates. The official
discourse in Pakistan celebrates this in order to emphasize difference from
India. The Indian Muslims, on the other hand, emphasize the composite character
of Urdu and call it a joint product of the Hindu and Muslim civilizations. Yet,
in India, too, Urdu is part of Muslim politics and efforts to preserve it
necessarily dwell on the Perso-Arabic script and the Persian and Arabic diction
of modern Urdu. Yet, a language may have more than one association. And it is
always possible that Urdu can produce discourses of inclusiveness, tolerance
and pluralism which can make it both a rich repository of Islamic literature
and a language of enlightened, progressive and tolerant thought.
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