Urdu hai jiss ka naam

The failure of Urdu in India is understandable; ignoring it after decades of investment in Pakistan is criminal.

The staggering growth of technology should have created more opportunities to read, learn and write. However, the literary scene in Pakistan suffers with each passing day. The biggest victim is Urdu, our national language and the language that played a pivotal part in the creation of Pakistan, since the days of the Hindi-Urdu controversy. It is the language that is understood and often spoken, even by the most ferocious opponents of the idea of Pakistan, like the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and Dr Allah Nazar Baloch of a Balochistan separatist movement. Even in terms of utilitarianism, it is not wise to give up such a powerful tool of communication. And yet, we have abandoned it. Now trees are killed not to publish books or even literary supplements but to publish daily rags without any shelf life. The bellies of these papers are filled with the contribution of geniuses, who unite rocket science and religious orthodoxy in one column. Not an ideal mix if you ask me.

Aesthetically speaking, too, ignoring Urdu is nothing short of murder. This is the language that gave us some great poets such as Ghalib, Faiz, Jalib and Faraz. Of course, Ghalib was before the creation of Pakistan; he is buried in India, so you may ask why try owning his ghost. The answer won’t come to you unless you visit his grave in the Nizamuddin area of Delhi. The greatest poet of the Urdu language lies there ignored like a stranded refugee in a Bangladeshi Bihari camp. Victim of a partition that left no future for his beloved language in his own beloved land. The experience of visiting his tomb brought such a crippling feeling of helplessness that I have never come so close to a nervous breakdown seeing a grave, and trust me, I have seen quite a few graves. Such a great legacy lost in such petty identity issues. We cannot have his tomb, but we sure can do some justice to his legacy.

And that’s not all. Great fiction and non-fiction writers. Lost. Now when you go to book stalls, you do not find great books of Urdu literature but cheap translations of Western books and a few how-to-do guides. Of course, there is an Academy of Letters (Akadmy Adabiyat) in this country and a National Language Authority. And yes, a National Book Foundation too. But for all practical purposes, they are missing in action and have become a dumping ground for political appointees. Then, there is the Federal Urdu University and there is no crueller joke than that its graduates find a hard time adapting to a market so dominated by the English language.

When you abandon a language and its literature, it is natural that only reactionary elements will benefit from the resulting vacuum. If you try finding Urdu books on the internet in order to download them, you will come across mostly religious titles. In the local markets too, it is easier to find jihadi and sectarian literature rather than works of Manto, Mushtaq Yousufi or Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi.

This jilting of an entire tradition is beyond comprehension for there is a big market out there. Pakistan’s population is growing, our diaspora has strong roots and a desire to connect with its motherland. And in this country, where no English news channel has ever survived for long, how is it possible that there is no space for Urdu literature.

Hollywood movies dubbed in Hindi are shown on our television channels as Urdu versions. Try looking for Urdu subtitles for movies on the internet and you will fail to find any in the huge databases that even cater to the needs of tiny African countries. Try putting one Urdu book in any ebook reader; our fonts are not recognised and only scanned copies can be read with great difficulty. Urdu word processors are perhaps, the most difficult interfaces to type in and computers usually do not come with Urdu-friendly keyboards. For a country with a youth bulge, how difficult it is to translate and create new interfaces.

The failure of Urdu in India is understandable but after decades of state investment in the language, our ignoring it in Pakistan is downright criminal.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 19^th, 2013.

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