Discourses From the East
It is a peculiar sociological tragedy when a nation forgets the name of the language it speaks. In a fervent literary session at the Jashn-e-Rekhta festival in New Delhi, poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar offered a diagnosis of this Indian condition that was as clinical as it was poetic: “As long as they understand it, they think it is Hindi. When they stop understanding it, they suspect it is Urdu.”
This statement captures the heart of the politics of language in India today. We have allowed the fluid, organic evolution of our speech to be hardened into rigid, communal silos. The conversation between Akhtar and Saif Mahmood, themed “Urdu in India, India in Urdu,” served not just as a celebration of poetry, but as a critical dismantling of the “Two-Nation Theory” as applied to linguistics.
The Myth of the “Foreign” Script
The most persistent political weapon used against Urdu is its branding as an “invader’s language,” primarily due to its Perso-Arabic script. This is a lazy conflation of script with soul. As Akhtar sharply pointed out, English, French, and German share a Latin script but remain distinct languages. Punjabi is written in Gurmukhi, Shahmukhi, and Devanagari, yet it remains Punjabi.
To view Urdu as foreign is to ignore geography. Urdu developed in North India, within the subcontinent, and its primary home remains South Asia. It is, by all definitions, an indigenous Indian language, born from the same Khari Boli dialect that birthed Modern Hindi. They are, in Akhtar’s words, “twins” separated by a few centuries of development, not by DNA.
The politics of exclusion relies on the “Othering” of vocabulary. Yet, if we strip away the nouns—the makaan (Arabic), the kamra (Italian), the auto (Greek), the rickshaw (Japanese); the grammar that remains is undeniably Indian. By politicizing vocabulary, we are effectively fighting a war against our own syntax.
However, this linguistic indivisibility was deliberately fractured by political machinations. The late 19th and early 20th centuries in North India witnessed fierce battles over scripts, specifically in the United Provinces. The movement to replace the Persian script with Devanagari in courts and administration sowed the early seeds of communal differentiation. What was once a difference of style was engineered into a difference of identity, effectively creating a linguistic partition long before the physical one.
Language Has Regions, Not Religions
This historical fissure birthed the fallacy that persists today: the conflation of Urdu with Islam and Hindi with Hinduism. It is perhaps the greatest deception of modern South Asian history. It is a colonial construct solidified by the partition of 1947, yet history repeatedly debunks it.
If Urdu were the language of Islam, the separation of East Pakistan (Bangladesh) would never have occurred. The Bengali Muslim rejected Urdu in favor of their mother tongue, proving that language belongs to a region and a culture, not a religion. Conversely, for centuries in North India, the Kayastha and Khatri communities were the custodians of Urdu. To label Urdu as solely “Muslim” is to erase the history of the Munshis, the Premchands, and the Firaq Gorakhpuris.
The Archive of a Shared Civilization
But to reduce Urdu merely to a casualty of partition politics is to overlook what is actually being lost. The most poignant argument for the preservation of Urdu is not linguistic, but cultural. When we allow Urdu to atrophy, we do not just lose a language; we lose an alternative history of India; one that documents our pluralism.
Akhtar’s recitation of Ganga Ke Teen Roop by Nazir Banarasi or the holi verses of Nazeer Akbarabadi reveals a startling truth: Urdu poetry has often been the most eloquent chronicler of Hindu festivals and deities. From the Aartis of Varanasi to the Raas of Lord Krishna, Urdu literature is replete with deep reverence for the Sanatan tradition.
When we see a Muslim poet writing a kavit for Krishna with names as Sanskritized as Kansa-Vinashak or Murlidhar, we are witnessing a syncretism that modern politics tries desperately to erase. This is the “India in Urdu”; a mirror that reflects a time when culture was fluid and faith was personal, not political.
The Way Forward
Despite this rich legacy, the modern reality of the language is grim. Today, Urdu faces a strange paradox. It is dying in the classroom but thriving in the concert hall. It is erased from signboards but lives in the Bollywood ballads that the nation hums. The script is vanishing, leaving the language “homeless” in the visual landscape, surviving only as a ghost in the oral tradition.
The solution, as Akhtar suggests, is deceptively simple: ownership. We must stop viewing languages through the prism of vote banks. If we claim to be a civilization of continuity, we cannot cherry-pick our heritage. Urdu is not a “concession” to a minority; it is a testament to the North Indian genius for synthesis.
To save it, we must teach it; not as a relic of the past, but as a vibrant, living testament to the fact that while politicians may partition land, they cannot easily partition a tongue that shares the same grammar of love, loss, and longing.
