‘Pakistani families abroad don’t teach Urdu to their children’

Poet Ishrat Afreen says foreigners are learning Urdu while Pakistanis abandon it

KARACHI: Stressing how it is the ‘job of the mother’ to teach Urdu to her kids, Urdu poet based in the United States (US), Ishrat Afreen, lamented how Pakistani families based abroad are not teaching Urdu to their children.

She was addressing the session, titled ‘Urdu ki Nai Bastia, Naya Adbi Manzarnama’, on the third day of the ninth Aalmi Urdu Conference at the Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi, on Saturday. According to her, no institute or school in the US can teach the new generation Urdu. “It is job of a mother,” she said. “Our children must be taught Urdu.”



In US, she said, mushairas [poetic symposiums] are more a part of culture and less linked to literature. “In the poetic symposium we arrange in US, around 500 to 600 people show up,” she said.

According to her, foreigners are learning Urdu but Pakistani children are not. Every child in the US has to learn at least two languages but they cannot choose Urdu as it is also their mother tongue, she said.



“Our children question why they should learn Urdu and what advantage it will provide to them,” she said, adding that children listen to Urdu at homes but they have zero output as they don’t speak the language.

United Kingdom (UK)-based Urdu writer Najma Usman talked about a shift in fiction writing of foreign Urdu writers. Earlier, writers used to reflect the streets of Karachi or Lahore instead of the situation of Pakistanis there in their writings as they used to miss their homeland. However, she said, with the passage of time, they realised that the country they are actually living in is not theirs. “This evoked a bias in them,” she said, adding that writers started writing stuff about Pakistanis based in UK. One such example is a recently published book of Mohsina Jeelani, titled Han Mein Dehshadgard Hun.

According to her, the issues of the third generation that is rearing in the West need to be addressed through writings.

Another scholar and poet based in Germany, Arif Naqvi, pointed out that if we need to propagate Urdu, the new generation should be focused. Whatsapp and internet, according to him, are most common mediums that the new generation uses and these are the mediums in which they write Urdu incorrectly.



Panellist Saeed Naqvi was of the view that the new generation born in the West is not that familiar with Urdu. No big poet is among those who have born in the West, he said.

Yashab Tamna from UK said that the new generation reads, writes and speaks English.

Ghazal Ansari from the US disagreed with this and said that the situation in the West in now changing as people are spending money to teach their children Urdu.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 5^th, 2016.