Fading Urdu

After reading some interesting analyses of the dominance ofthe Hindi-belt in India, I thought about my work on culture, language, andpolitics, specifically the decay of Urdu litearure in post-Partition India andits impact on national politics.

In Custody by Anita Desai highlights the impoverishment ofthe cultural and linguistic forms of Muslim identity in post-1947 India, aswhen one of Nur Shahjenabadi’s cronies says, “Urdu is supposed to have died in1947. What you see in the universities—in some of the universities, a few ofthem only—is its ghost, wrapped in a shroud” (56). In reference to thecomplicity of the Congress leadership in giving preference to Hindi inpostcolonial India, the Urdu poet Nur Shahjenabadi declares in the novel,”Those Congress-wallahs have set up Hindi on top as our ruler” (42).

   

As Prabhu S. Guptara reminds the student of Indian history,the recognition of English and Hindi by the Constitution of independent Indiaas the nation’s two official languages enabled Hindi to make “significantstrides, and the number of publications has been growing steadily” (24). Thenation and nationalism that were defined by the politics of the Partition needto be analyzed in order to account for the volcanic eruptions caused by thishorrific event.

Beyond the rifts that were brought to the surface in thesubcontinent in 1947, the forces of communal violence and fundamentalismcontinue to wield their power with unabated vigor.

In the context of these historical ruptures, poems by Faizand similar narratives describe the experience of the disenfranchised Muslimsand Hindus who were uprooted during the Partition, and require the reader toconsider their experiences. The insistence on a nationalist rhetoric thatprevents a nation from retrieving and performing a critical examination of itsculture, social customs, its gender divisions is rendered more urgent by suchnarratives.

In post-colonial and post-Partition India, Urdu finds itselfabandoned by its wealthy and regal patrons of pre-Partition era, who are stillreeling under the disorienting effects of dislocation. In the era of thedecrepitude of the glorious tradition of the Urdu language, there is “no placefor it to live in the style to which it is accustomed, no emperors and nawabsto act as its patrons” (15).

Historically, the Partition did fragment the writingcommunity by redistributing its members into two separate territorial nations.One of the significant consequences of the Partition was the migration of Urduwriters of Muslim origin to Pakistan. So the chime of Independence was, as AijazAhmad puts it, “experienced in the whole range of Urdu literature of the periodnot in the celebratory mode but as a defeat, a disorientation, a diaspora”(Lineages 118).

In the modern world, religious and cultural differences aredeliberately fostered by many nation-states in their efforts to constructhomogenous subjects of state. So Chandra Chatterjeetells the reader about theredefinition of Hinduism in pre-Independence India, which was engendered inreaction to colonial rule in India and also in reaction to the nation by ethnicand religious groups in post-independence democratic and secular India:

“However, democracy in India is itself protest-ridden. Theethnic and religious minorities protest against the singular definition of”nation.” The politically marginalized groups protest against inadequaterepresentation in government policies. Numerous insurgencies all over thecountry relate their revolts to wars for independence at the subnational levelwhich the dominant national ideology has been unable to either outwit orneutralize” (7-8).

The decay of the Urdu language and its literature andculture in post-Partition India is an effect of the imposition of the singulardefinition of nation against which ethnic and religious minorities continue toprotest in present-day India.

But hearkening to the call of the present should notnecessitate a rejection of a rich cultural heritage and traditions—Urduliterature and Muslim culture should not be neutralized within a nationalistpolity that threatens to remove differences cultural and linguistic differencesin post-Independence India.

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