india

Updated: Mar 20, 2019 22:18 IST

Urdu aficionados are aghast for two reasons. One, the government plans to enlist Bollywood stars to promote the language they cannot read or write. Two, those being considered are all Muslims.

The National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language (NCPUL) is an autonomous body under the ministry of human resource development (HRD). The artistes it has reportedly shortlisted to carry the banner of Urdu are: Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif.

“Their lack of familiarity with the language is well known in film circles,” an Urdu scholar told this writer. Unwilling to go on record for “personal” reasons, he regretted that the NCPUL considered Urdu the language of a religion. If star value, and not the felicity of language, is the guiding impulse, then why Katrina, why not Deepika Padukone?

“Languages are of regions, not religions,” argued a popular UP-based poet. Proof of that were circumstances that led to the creation of Bangladesh, where Muslims considered Bengali their language, not Urdu that was sought to be imposed on them by the political elite of West Pakistan. The Bengali cultural nationalism the language controversy stoked had its genesis in Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s March 1948 speech at Dhaka University, in which he declared Urdu as the official language of Pakistan.

In this backdrop, to associate Urdu with any religion or faith amounts to forgetting history apart from ignoring the language’s syncretic origin: Persian script, but the grammar of North India’s Khadi Boli dialect.

Moreover, in our subcontinent, Urdu has been the chosen language of progressive thinkers, the legion of its ambassadors including such famous names as Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ismat Chugtai, Kaifi Azmi, Kunwar Mohinder Singh Bedi, Sahir Ludhianvi, Jagannath Azad, Sardar Jafri, Jan Nisar Akhtar, Krishan Chander and Raghupati Sahay Firaq--- better known as Firaq Gorakhpuri.

In fact, the “Fasana-e-Azad” by Ratan Nath Dhar Sarshar (1846-1903) is hailed as a novel written in “most perfect” Urdu of the Lucknow school. Inspired by Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and Cervantes’s Don Quixote, it was translated into Hindi by Munshi Premchand.

Practitioners and connoisseurs of Urdu, the language of poets, do not come from any one community. That the language’s eclectic following has sustained generational shifts is evident from the oeuvre of Javed Aktar—and that of Gulzar. The list won’t be complete without a mention of the scholarly Gopichand Narang “who brought the beauty of Urdu to India.”

There’s no dearth of non-Muslims even among the upcoming Urdu writers: Vikas Sharma RAAZ, Jayant Parmar, Swapnil Tiwari, Bakul Dev, Abhinandan Pandey and Ranjeet Chauhan to name a few. Many among them have been heard and appreciated on platforms afforded by Rekhta Foundation, a non-profit body devoted to the preservation and promotion of Urdu language and literature.

As for the NCPUL’s choice of Katrina and the two Khans, it’ll be instructive for the HRD ministry’s arm to know that two Bollywood thespians read and write in Urdu: Dharmendra and Manoj Kumar. The latter, as we all, know is a self-proclaimed right-winger. His love of Urdu is another proof of its secular appeal.