How to kill a language

No year-enders this time. I have not recovered enough from what this year inflicted on me to write dispassionately about it. But as the name promises, I am writing the next worst thing: the decline and imminent fall of Urdu.

Recently, Hasan Minhaj and Kumail Nanjiani, two brown men at the top of their Hollywood game, struggled to explain a feeling to an English audience. In a viral video titled 'A Deeply Unserious India-Pakistan Summit with Kumail Nanjiani', they discussed how English lacks an equivalent to the Urdu concept of Ishq or to the specific pain of separation. As they briefly explained the idea of 'yearning', they too were yearning for a language that, for them, is already a ghost. A vibe without a vessel.

As you read this, the 18th Aalmi Urdu Conference is underway in Karachi. While the audience claps, the patient is dying in the cloud. The conference is a ventilator for a body the digital world has already rejected.

Call this melodrama? You just spoke to your child in Urdu, so how is it dying? Look at the evidence. The murder is happening in the code.

Amazon's Kindle treats Urdu like a contagion. It claims it cannot handle the script's reflow, forcing authors to upload books as static images or PDFs. This technical barrier effectively kills the Urdu e-book market before it can be born. Try finding a native Urdu e-book on Kobo or Apple Books. You will find blank space.

Streaming giants are no better. Netflix and YouTube aggressively centre Hindi, serving Devanagari titles or Roman gibberish for Urdu content. Even when the audio is Urdu, the platform categorises it as Hindi, subsuming it into the dataset of the majority. We are told that ligatures, the complex vertical connections of Nastaliq, are simply too hard for modern rendering engines.

I have told you before how I stumbled upon Mirza Ghalib's hapless tomb in Nizamuddin Basti during my visit to Delhi. Seeing Urdu's greatest poet lying abandoned in a cage of neglect, open to the harsh sky and the indifference of passing flies, broke something inside me. But it was just foreshadowing. He lies exposed in the soil of Nizamuddin, just as his script lies exposed and unsupported in the silicon bedrock of the internet.

We comfort ourselves with Hanlon's Razor: 'Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.' We tell ourselves Big Tech's failure is just a glitch.

This is a lie. When companies that have mapped the human genome and perfectly digitised Hebrew, a language revived from the dead, claim they cannot render a living font, it is not stupidity. It is malice.

And we must ask: Why? Consider the boardrooms making these decisions. With the ascent of Indian influentials in Silicon Valley, we see a systematic erosion of Urdu's utility. Is it a coincidence? One concludes that Indian soft power is being used to deplatform a rival script. It is a calculation that we simply do not matter.

To understand this, look back. We are living in the aftershocks of the Hindi-Urdu controversy of 1867, the forgotten origin of the Batwara (partition). That movement was the beginning of erasure, framed as a Shuddhi, a purification. They disowned the organic, local-born Hindustani, whose urbane and official version was Urdu, for an artificial, Sanskritised Hindi constructed from imported dead roots. Ergo, this nativism is an illusion. India has a history of rejecting the truly local for imperial import, exiling indigenous Buddhism for Steppe-born Vedic Hinduism.

The hypocrisy extends to the script. They champion Devanagari as the vessel of purity. Yet dig deep enough and you find the ghosts of Aramaic traders in its DNA. If geography is the sole measure of legitimacy, then the only truly indigenous script of the subcontinent is found on the seals of Mohenjo-daro. And the irony is terminal. They cannot even read it.

Confident nations embrace all aspects of their being; every birthmark, every scar. This self-effacing project, then, betrays profound self-loathing. Under Modi's India, even the lip service once paid to Urdu has vanished. It is an act of self-mutilation; a compulsion to amputate one's own limbs to fit a rigid, imported mould. Urdu, then, is just expedient roadkill.

But it is lazy to blame only the neighbour or the algorithm. The rot is deep at home. In 2015, Justice Jawwad S Khawaja wrote a Supreme Court judgment in Urdu ordering its immediate adoption as the official language. It was a constitutional command, but a car without fuel.

The bureaucracy treated it as a suggestion, but they had an alibi. The language was not ready. Institutions like the Muqtadra Qaumi Zaban and the Academy of Letters stand as monuments to extinction. They failed to enrich the lexicon, operationalise it for public use, or fight the digital battle.

Marz barhta gaya joon joon dawa ki (the disease worsened with every cure). We have reduced a language of endurance to a language of half-baked emotions. We cluck our tongues at its decline, yet do nothing to upgrade its utility for a modern economy.

This brings us to the ultimate tragedy. The dream of Akhand Bharat actually does not require conquering territory. It requires conquering the mind.

If the script dies, the wall falls. Spoken Urdu and Hindi are virtually identical. It is the Nastaliq script that holds the line of our distinct cultural identity. If we are forced to read Ghalib in Roman or Devanagari because our screens cannot handle the 'complexity' of our own alphabet, then Urdu ceases to be a language. It becomes merely a regional dialect, ripe to be scavenged by Hindi.

We are fighting for lines on a map while the border that truly defines us, our script, is being erased. One software update at a time. In 1867, they burned the books. In today's cloud, they just do not index them. The result is the same.

This is a direct appeal to the influencers of the tech world, specifically those who truly treasure diversity and are free of the pettiness of South Asian hostilities. You have solved the complexities of blockchain, 3D rendering, and AI. Do not tell us that a font is beyond your reach. The 'complexity' of Nastaliq ligatures is an engineering challenge, not a law of physics. It requires will, not magic.

If the state is broken, the burden falls on the individual. Build the rendering engines. Press the platforms. Do not let this heritage die because you were too afraid of a country's cultural imperialism.

India, like Hinduism, is far from a monolith. Its hate of a language that it exiled and whose development it wants to arrest is irrational and uncanny. If it wants to live with an identity invented by fiction writers, it is its call. But why should it try to erase ours?