Urdu literature on brink of cessation

KARACHI:

Anxious parents shortlisting the ideal career path for their maturing child, amidst growing economic uncertainty and rising unemployment in the country, hope to miraculously pinpoint the ultimate academic degree, which will lead their kid and their family to a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Yet, where this rat race for financial prosperity is the sure-fire recipe for destroying any individual passions or career aspirations of the child, it also shoes away a huge proportion of students from pursuing a career in vernacular linguistics like Urdu literature, which is believed to have little or no scope left in society.

This increasing lack of interest in pursuing the study of Urdu linguistics among native speakers is evident in the dropping rates of admission to the bachelor and third-year programs in Urdu at the University of Karachi (KU), which is the largest higher education institution in the port city.

According to data obtained from the University of Karachi, admissions to the undergrad and third-year (formerly grad) programs at the Department of Urdu have decreased by 50 and 75 per cent respectively during the last year, with 45 students enrolled in the bachelor's program and just seven students admitted to the thirdyear program in the current session, 2023-2024.

“These days, students prefer to opt for degrees which are associated with the job-oriented sectors and allow them to land a decent job soon after graduating. As a result, degrees involving linguistics are often neglected.

On a separate note, the writers and poets of today have failed to attract students towards cultural literature and foster academic connections with them. Hence, we see how most students these days have a lack of interest in prose and poetry,” opined Dr Khalid Irani, Vice Chancellor at KU.

While the above-mentioned situation has been plaguing other fields of linguistics including Arabic, Sindhi and Persian too, English and Urdu had initially appeared to be safe from this wave of decline.

Where English being an international language, escaped the jolt of this shift, the mother tongue Urdu crippled to the ground under its effect.

Dr Hilal Naqvi, a renowned poet and writer, sharing his two cents on the apparent decline of interest in social sciences, particularly Urdu linguistics, believed that the moral inclinations of our capitalist society prioritized the acquisition of money over intellectual growth.

“Since studying Urdu does not ultimately pave the way for a high-paying job, students have no interest in studying the language. Our nation as a whole is obsessed with lucrative professions like banking and pays no heed to other fields like the pure and social sciences, which might not be as financially rewarding,” assessed Dr Naqvi.

In an attempt to prove his point, Dr Naqvi amusingly hypothesized the case of a young graduate in Urdu literature, who approached a prospective wife’s family for marriage.

“I doubt whether any girl’s parents would easily accept such a proposal in today’s time,” he shrugged. “Therefore, the day is not far when the departments of linguistics and social sciences in our universities will shrink to a few rooms in a building,” concluded Dr Naqvi.

Admissions to undergraduate, third-year programmes in Urdu at KU fell sharply over the preceding years Urdu literature on the brink of cessation No dimes for rhymes?