The vexed issue of Hindustani

Recent events have revived the Hindi-Urdu controversy

December 05, 2019 06:16 pm | Updated 06:16 pm IST

All hell broke loose when Jashn-e- Rekhta, an annual festival devoted to promote Urdu language and culture, put up a poster on its website announcing that its 6th edition would take place from December 13 to December 15, 2019 and describing it as a celebration of Hindustani language and culture. Many lovers of Urdu language and literature viewed it as a change of stance and dubbed it as an attempt “to kill Urdu”. Very soon, the original poster was restored on the website although no explanation or clarification was offered.

On social media, people debated the issue for and against the new description, thus reviving the controversy around Hindi-Hindustani-Urdu and reopening the history of the vexed language question. From time to time, politicians too have been vexing eloquent on this issue, generating more heat than light in the process.

Demystifying the myth

For a long time, it was the commonly accepted view among liberals that Hindi and Urdu were the two ‘styles’ or ‘registers’ of the same language. Writing on the Hindi movement in the 19th century North India, scholar Christopher R. King chose the title for his well researched book “One Language, Two Scripts” .

However, this view seems to be a little too over-simplified and one would tend to agree with the views expressed by eminent Urdu scholar and critic Prof. Shamim Hanfi recently at a launch function of a collection of Hindi poems held at India International.

Prof. Hanfi clearly stated that while there was a grain of truth in the assertion that Hindi and Urdu were two styles of the same language, one could not ignore the reality that by now both have evolved into two distinct literary languages.

While Hindi looks towards the Sanskrit word stock, Urdu leans on its Arabic-Persian heritage and both become largely unintelligible to most people in their Sanskritised and Persianised forms. After Hindi was adopted as the official language of the Indian Union by the Constituent Assembly that put the official seal on a language that was heavily laden with Sanskrit words, the hiatus between Hindi and Urdu became permanent.

Mahatma Gandhi had tried to circumvent the problem by putting forward a proposal for the so-called Hindustani that would mostly use those words that are commonly used by people, thus avoiding a surfeit of either Sanskrit or Arabic and Persian words. Premchand, who began as an Urdu writer and continued to write in it even after migrating to Hindi, was a votary of such a language.

Makhanlal Chaturvedi, a well-known Hindi writer and journalist from Madhya Pradesh, wrote in 1943: “When we destroy Hindi’s natural fluency by forcing difficult Sanskrit words into it, then we put obstacles in the path of the language remaining simple like the language of the saint-poets, and thereby provide ideological support to the demand for Pakistan.”

Stance on Hindustani

However, the proposal did not find much favour with either the Hindi or the Urdu enthusiasts.

Not many people might be aware that one of the reasons behind Nathuram Godse’s decision to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi was the latter’s stance on Hindustani.

In his statement to the trial court, Godse, whose mother tongue was Marathi, said, “Gandhi’s pro-Muslim policy is blatantly in his perverse attitude on the question of the national language of India. It is quite obvious that Hindi has the most prior claim to be accepted as the premier language…But in his desire to please the Muslims he insisted that Hindustani alone should be the national language of India.”

A lot of water has flowed since then and sincere efforts have been made to bring Hindi and Urdu closer to each other. Instead of creating a hybrid language, various Hindi and Urdu scholars have performed yeoman service for the cause of promoting understanding of each other’s literature and concerns. In this context, the name of Janki Prasad Sharma, who belongs to that rare breed of scholars who are equally at ease with Hindi, Urdu and Persian, readily comes to mind. His book “Urdu Adab Ke Sarokar” (Concerns of the Urdu Literature) offers a panoramic view of the Urdu literature and its prominent writers while at the same time underlining their popularity among Hindi littérateurs and readers. He has also written a short book on Wali Dakani, the 17th century poet who is considered to be a father figure in Urdu poetry, as well as a booklet titled “Ramvilas Sharma aur Urdu” that discusses the differences among the leading lights of the Progressive Writers’ Association such as Ramvilas Sharma and Ali Sardar Jafri, and other scholars like Shams-ur-Rahman Farouqi on the twin issues of language and script.

Earlier, Prakash Pandit and Ayodhya Prasad Goyaliya edited a series of volumes on Urdu poets whose poetry was rendered in Nagari script while Ramnath Suman wrote scholarly books on great poets such as Mir and Ghalib. It will not be an exaggeration to say that Urdu poets and fiction writers are read equally, if not more, widely in Nagari script as in the Urdu script without any change in the language.

The writer is a senior literary critic

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