When the Supreme Court ruled that there was nothing unconstitutional about according Urdu the status of second official language in Uttar Pradesh, I was shocked to learn that the litigant who challenged the State Government’s decision, appealed against the court order at every stage and took the matter right up to the highest court of the land was none other than the Uttar Pradesh Hindi Sahitya Sammelan. I also failed to understand how granting Urdu this status could do any harm to Hindi and why the Hindi versus Urdu battle was still being fought in independent India.
Perhaps, the real reason had nothing to do with the real or imagined interests of Hindi and everything to do with communal consciousness, as Urdu has willy-nilly become the language of the Muslim community.
According to the 2001 Census, there are 50.1 million people in the country who have registered Urdu as their mother tongue. While all the Muslims living in India are not Urdu-speaking, all those who registered Urdu as their mother tongue are Muslim. In Uttar Pradesh alone, more than one-fourth of India’s Urdu-speaking population lives. This makes Urdu unpalatable to those who view the language issue through communal lens and are not prepared to shed the baggage of the past two centuries when the proponents of the two languages fought pitched battles in which script played a crucial role.
However, the fact remains that Hindi and Urdu are perhaps the only two languages in the world that share the same basic word stock, syntax, nouns, pronouns and verbs and have Khadi Boli, the language of Delhi and surrounding areas, as their linguistic base. No wonder Christopher R. King chose to name his book on the Hindi movement in 19th Century North India as One Language, Two Scripts. As Hindi scholar Lakshmidhar Malaviya has pointed out in his articles, many prominent Hindi writers of the late 19 and early 20th centuries were scholars of Urdu, Persian and Arabic. Yet, they fought against Urdu to promote Hindi, that is, Khadi Boli written in Devnagari script. Here, one must point out that the association of Devnagari with the Hindus and Persian script with the Muslims was made by even Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. Alok Rai, in his book Hindi Nationalism , quotes one of his private letters of 1869 wherein Sir Syed has expressed the view that Urdu written in Persian script is part of the Muslim identity.
It’s really ironical that the popularity of Urdu and its great literature increased manifold after the country became Independent and Hindi was anointed as the official language of the Indian Union. Concerted efforts were made by those who were in favour of bridging the chasm between Hindi and Urdu.
In Bombay (now Mumbai), V. Shankar ICS, Lala Yodhraj and Syed Shahabuddin Dasnavi formed the Hindustani Book Trust to “promote emotional unity between Hindiwallahs and Urduwallahs” by publishing great writers of both the languages in both Devnagari and Persian scripts and decided to run its non-commercial activities without receiving any grant. Mulk Raj Anand and Ali Sardar Jafri were the General Editors of the series. The Trust brought out beautifully printed editions of Diwan-e-Mir and Diwan-e-Ghalib in both the scripts. These were critical editions prepared by Ali Sardar Jafri, who also wrote scholarly introductions and prepared a glossary of difficult Urdu words for the benefit of Hindi readers.
Hindi publishers such as Rajpal & Sons too brought out a series in Devnagari script that included almost all the prominent Urdu poets right from Mir, Sauda, Zauq and Ghalib to Firaq, Faiz, Josh Malihabadi, Majrooh Sultanpuri and Sahir Ludhianvi. They were edited by Prakash Pandit who also wrote informative introductions and provided Hindi equivalents of Urdu words in footnotes. Ayodhya Prasad Goyaliya and Ramnath Suman too wrote scholarly books on Urdu poetry in Hindi.
When famous Hindi short-story writer Vijaymohan Singh was Secretary of Delhi’s Hindi Academy, it published Maulana Altaf Husain Hali’s Yadgar-e-Ghalib and Mir Taqi Mir’s autobiography Zikr-e-Mir in Hindi. Fiction writers such as Manto, Ismat Chughtai, Qurratulain Hyder, Intizar Husain, Krishan Chander and Rajender Singh Bedi have also been widely published in Devnagari script. Today, Hindi readers, though unable to read Urdu in Persian script, are quite familiar with Urdu literature.
(The author is a noted literary critic).
