Should Urdu speakers learn to give up linguistic chauvinism?

Arts & Culture Culture, Arts, Literature & Linguistics
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This article is based on imposing Hindi to entire India. Would it be applicable to Pakistan where Urdu is imposed at the expense of regional languages like Sindhi, Punjabi, Seraiki, Hindko, Pushto, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali etc.

Hindi belt must learn to give up linguistic chauvinism

By M V Kamath

We might fret and fume at what the British had done for India and we might quote everyone from Dadabhai Naoroji to Jawaharlal Nehru to show how what they did to impoverish our country, but for one thing we might as well be grateful to our erstwhile rulers: they taught us English and probably that has done more to unify the country than many are willing to admit, let alone admire. At this point in time more Indians speak English than the citizens of the British Isles.

Article 345 of our Constitution says that “until the Legislature of the state otherwise provides by law, the English language shall continue to be used for those official purposes within the State for which it was being used immediately before the commencement of this Constitution”. And Article 348 says that all proceedings in the Supreme Court and in every High Court the authoritative tests shall be in the English language. Hindi, of course, is India’s official language.

Article 351 says that it shall be the duty of the Union to promote the spread of the Hindi language, to develop it so that it may serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India. What steps the Union has taken in this regard is a matter of opinions, but probably Bollywood has done more to spread Hindi or, perhaps, Hindustani throughout the country than any government agency. Which is just as well.

There is no question but that Hindi is a beautiful language, but then so are Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam among the so-called `Dravidian’ languages and Marathi, Gujarati or Bengali among the so-called ``Atyan" languages derived largely from Sanskrit. Large numbers of South Indians those especially living the down side of the Vindhya Mountains are conversant with Hindi, in part because the language is taught in many schools but in part also because South Indians want to be part of the larger Indian economy and realise only too well that without an adequate knowledge of Hindi they cannot make it elsewhere in India.

It is not patriotism alone that makes them learn Hindi; it is sound economic sense. But the reverse is just not true. Hardly any North Indian bothers to learn any of the South Indian languages. Hardly any school makes the study of a South Indian language compulsory. Patriotism, it would seem, is a one-way street. Heads I win, tails you lose. This is not only not fair, but it is unjust.

The South Indian, if only as a matter of survival, will learn Hindi, but the Hindi belt does not in any way feel obligated to learn a South Indian language any of the five. It was at one time presumed that students will be taught three languages: One’s mother-tongue, English and Hindi and it was presumed that where one’s mother tongue was Hindi, the student would be taught one of the Dravidian languages. This has never happened.

The third language taught has invariably been Sanskrit. Insistence on learning Hindi has led to disturbances in past years especially in Tamil Nadu. That has been taken as an `imposition’ which has been silently endured.

But isn’t it time for the northern states to change their approach to the study of languages? They have five languages to choose from and it will be a unique contribution to the genuine enhancement of integration if the millions of school children doing their high school graduation in North India are familiarised with a South Indian language. And may it be remembered that South Indian states are rapidly making their mark in the field of industrialisation and technology.

It is not Allahabad or Lucknow or for that matter even Kolkata that is making ways in Information Technology. The two cities that are increasingly getting into the news are Bangalore and Hyderabad. Andhra Pradesh’s Chandrababu Naidu says: "if I get re-elected, I will turn my state into another Singapore’’ and for all one knows, he will do so and what is more, he’ll beat Singapore, considering that there is more technical talent available in Andhra Pradesh than in little Singapore. Singapore’s prosperity has its limits because of its size. For Andhra Pradesh as for Karnataka it is the sky that is the limit. And the more firms in the United States, Britain and elsewhere decide to outsource their accounting and allied work, the more Bangalore will burst in prosperity, leaving the citizens of the Hindi belt to bite their nails. This is not to say that north Indian citizens will not catch up.

Intelligence is not the monopoly of South Indians but the fact is that they have made a good start and are at an advantage. The Hindi belt is still wallowing in casteism and has such mindless leaders as Laloo Prasad Yadav and Mayavati. What kind of progress can we expect under the leadership of such casteist nonentities? They are a standing menace to the future of the country. National unity comes through frequent inter-mixing of people, differing to language, ethnicity and religion. Today practically the only thing that binds India is Hinduism. From Kashmir to Kanyakumari there is not one who does not know Siva, Vishnu and Brahma, Laxmi or Saraswati, Hanuman or Ganesh. But that is not enough. There is need for linguistic assimilation.

An average Maharashtrian with a high school leaving certificate would know Marathi, some English and surely some Hindi. In many ways Andhra Pradesh has been lucky. During the reign of the Nizams, study of Urdu had been compulsory in schools with the result that most educated Andhra-ites of an earlier generation were familiar with English, Telugu and Urdu. A typical example is P. V. Narasimha Rao who is credited with being a multi-linguist. But can one name one North Indian leader familiar with a South Indian language?

The first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was blissfully ignorant of a South Indian language. And not one of India’s north Indian Prime Ministers had a better record. Neither Indira Gandhi nor Rajiv Gandhi, neither Lal Bahadur Shastri nor I. K. Gujaral, neither Chandrashekhar nor Charan Singh knew a word of any South Indian language. What does that convey? Atal Behari Vajpayee is a great orator in Hindi; he is a poet, besides. But if only he could speak a smattering of Tamil or Telugu, Malayalam or Kannada, how much would that not be appreciated? Poor Deve Gowda didn’t know a word of Hindi but at least he had the good sense to say that he was going to learn Hindi and before long would dare to address an audience assembly at the Red Fort in Hindi. He may not have got the opportunity, but there is a different story. But one frequently hears the question being asked in the Hindi belt: how many languages can a child possibly learn? Truth to say a child can learn many languages.

A Dutch student will get to learn not only his own language but German, French and English as well. There are people in the Kanara district of Karnataka who speak Konkani, Tulu, Kannada and English with equal felicity. There are students in cosmopolitan Mumbai who can speak Malayalam (or Tamil or Kannada) at home but outside their homes speak just as fluently in Marathi, Hindi and English. What is needed is the will. In the Hindi belt that will is totally lacking. In part, one suspects, the season why is that the Hindiwallah seldom seeks a job outside his territory. Therefore he sees no need to learn a south Indian language. He is culturally isolated. It is easier to find a Tamilian or a Kannadiga in Varanasi or Patna than a Bihari or an Uttar Pradeshi in Mysore or Tinnevelli. The South Indian is enterprising, generally speaking. The Hindiwallah is more often not. And there’s the rub.

There are of course, always exceptions to the rule. Marwadis, for instance, are to be seen practically anywhere in the country where business opportunities present themselves for exploitation. There are large and influential numbers of them in Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai or Bangalore and they quickly make themselves at home wherever they settle down. But, as has been said, one swallow does not make the summer. And, at any rate, it does not question the importance of an insistence of teaching a south Indian language at the high school level in north Indian schools.

Gandhi was frequently aware of the need to know more than just Hindi. At least he is known to have taken the trouble to learn the Tamil and Kannada scripts and sign his name in them. India is multi-lingual and it is humanly impossible for Indians to speak in more than two or three languages though some one like George Fernandes or P. V. Narasimha Rao are exceptions. George, for instance can speak in Konkani, Kannada, Tulu, Hindi, Marathi and English and possibly in Tamil and Gujarati as well.

It is important to know Hindi. That is readily conceded, just as it is even more important to know English which is rapidly becoming an international language and the language of commerce. If so much work is being outsourced to India by American firms, it is because Indians know English and are better placed, for instance, than the Chinese or the Japanese. Indians, it may even be said, have a natural talent to learn languages. And the more India’s literati are literate in interregional languages the greater the prospects of national integration.

South India is making giant strides. As a matter of fact in many ways it outperforms the so-called South East Asian tigers and can take on any country. Somewhere down the line the Hindi belt must learn to give up its linguistic chauvinism, for its own good as for the good of the entire country.

Linguistic chauvinism

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This author such a hate monger and his article is full of lies. I know many North Indians who are fluent in South Indian languages. My brother who went to school in Southern India is fluent in TAMIL. One of my cousins who lives in Mumbai is fluent in Marathi and Gujrati.

On the other hand many of my Tamil friens who lived in North India never learnt to speak Hindi and they now blame me for not teaching it to them. Every language is great and we should not make it an ego issue or try to force it on others. Looks like Mr. Kamath is looking for some serious attention.

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Applying this to Pakistan, I can see the sense in teaching English or Urdu in all regions because it would be of some use to all citizens of Pakistan. Now although I'm a Punjabi I don't really see what gain there would be for everybody to learn Punjabi in schools - it might make sense on a regional level.

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If you look at the developed world, the MOST successfull countries such as USA, UK, France, and Germany have one dominant national language that is spoken by 90% of it's citizens. It provides for a levelled platform in developing a nation. The fact that countries like India and Pakistan have tens of hundreds of languages is an obstacle for mass marketing strategy. A uniform population is more adapt to moving ahead together hand in hand.

This multi-lingual demographics may bring cultural variety but it's a hinderance in the developmental process.

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Having specific regional dialects does more harm than good to a country for the exact reason that funguy gave - it also hinders the development of a sense of unity in a country.

As long as regional dialects exist, a strong regional identity will exist. Regional identity will give people a feeling that they do not neccessarily have that much in common with the rest of their country.

For example, if you look to the West, the only area of Canada that still have ongoing separatist sentiment is Quebec, which has a strong sense of regional language (and thus identity).

In the UK, ever since Gaelic and Scottish were re-introduced as official languages in Wales and Scotland, seperatist parties have slowly begun to re-emerge.

In France, Brittany's historic breakway sentiment was brought to heel by outlawing the teaching of that land's local language.

In Spain, the areas with a primarily basque-speaking populace are wracked by a terrorist separatist movement.

The only languages that should be taught in a country are national level languages, that place all on an equal level. Teaching Punjabi, Sindhi, Pushtu etc in schools does absolutely nothing other than highlight differences between Punjabis, sindhis and pashtuns. Instead, the differences between constituent regions should be brushed over and attempts should be made to confine regional identity to history.

One country - one identity.

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^ Factually UNICEF has stated, children suffer when taught in other languages other than there Mother tongue. Linguistic discrimination is a very common trait in Pakistan, it was directly responsible for the separation of East Pakistan because of attempts to suppress regional languages.

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There was a time when most people of northern India — from Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s Peshawar to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s Calcutta to Bapu Gandhi’s Sabarmati — spoke a language all Indians down to Andhra Pradesh could understand and speak in their regional accents.

It was not Hindi; it was not Urdu; it was known as Hindustani. I have little doubt that if Hindiwallas had not tried to ram Hindi as the national language down the throats of Tamilians, Kannadas, Konkanis and Malayalees, they would in due course have willingly accepted Hindustani as the lingua franca for the entire country.

Hindustani is by no means dead. But it’s very sick and unless put on a life-support system, it may succumb to the assaults of linguistic purists of both Hindi and Urdu. It is described as the ‘Ganga-Jamni Tehzeeb’, the culture of the doab of the Ganga and the Yamuna. Its language is best described as ‘Hindustani Awaaz’ — the Voice of Hindustan. It has found a crusader in 40-year-old Rakhshanda Jalil. Starting mid-July and going on till the end of this year, she has organised a series of readings of Hindi and Urdu poetry, prose, humour, satire and short stories at the India International Centre. So far, the response has been heart-warming. She means to round it off with a Hindi-Urdu (‘Hindustani’) mushaira) on the lawns of the Centre.

Rakhshanda is a product of Delhi Public School, Mathura Road, and got her MA in English Literature from Miranda House. She taught English in Khalsa College, Delhi and Aligarh Muslim University before taking to free-lance editing for publishing houses. Her translations of Hindi and Urdu into English include stories of Munshi Prem Chand and Saadat Hasan Manto, satires of Rasheed Ahmad Siddiqui and Asghar Wajahat. She is currently engaged in translating the poetry of Shahryar and stories by Phanishwarnath Renu and Intezar Husain. A few more Rakhshanda Jalils round the country and Hindustani may once again become the Voice of Hindustan.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_347597,00120002.htm

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The very fact that english has been the strongest of languages in India is paying off. All one has to do is to call MCI. SOmeone in Bangalore would answer.

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Important points about Language diversity have been pointed out here.

SYNDICATED REVIEW: SOS for language diversity

http://www.dawn.com/weekly/books/books6.htm
Reviewed by Michael Dirda

People have long believed that the world would be a happier, more peaceful and altogether better place if we all spoke one language. According to Genesis, God confounded our speech at Babel so that the descendants of Noah would be unable to work together harmoniously. By this stratagem “did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth”. The dispersed tribes soon grew into rival nations, and since they could no longer communicate readily to settle disagreements, wars broke out and faster than you can say “shibboleth” you suddenly have mini-holocausts because your neighbour doesn’t pronounce that word the way you do.

Over the centuries, various languages - in the West, chiefly Latin and French - rose in prominence and achieved a kind of global acceptance as common tongues, if only among the educated. But their heyday has come and, alas, pretty much gone. More and more, everyone either speaks or is learning to speak English. It turns out that we didn’t need Esperanto or any of those other artificial lingos cobbled together by utopian dreamers. All the world can now smile and say Coke and blue jeans and “Do you want fries with that?”

But Andrew Dalby, author of A Dictionary of Languages, persuasively demonstrates that this is by no means a good thing. To make his point, Language in Danger provides an engrossing account of how languages evolve and interact, and of how much is lost - culturally and epistemologically - when the last speaker of, say, Cornish or Chamorro or Occitan or Powhatan dies.

First, Dalby puts paid to the notion that any lingua franca will inhibit global conflict: “The fact that in the twentieth century a greater proportion of the people in the world could communicate with one another, using English or just a few other languages, appears not to have stopped any wars, nor to have reduced the frequency with which wars have broken out, nor to have made the wars that have broken out less brutal. In fact several murderous wars have been fought recently among people who speak the same language in real terms: that applies to the civil war in Rwanda, to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, to the war in Bosnia and to the endless stand-off between North and South Korea.”

His main point, however, is this: People will always educate their children in what they perceive as the power language. "Success… means belonging to the elite; to belong to the elite you must speak the official and international language. As soon as they can, that is what even the most downtrodden of minority language speakers will aim at for their children even more than for themselves.

One generation may arrive in the United States rattling away in eloquent Slovak, their children will be somewhat bilingual but the grandchildren will speak, like uh, you know, totally pure American. What’s more, “relatively few of those who happen to speak a language of high status as a mother tongue find it necessary to learn one of lower status later”. Over time, more and more people cluster to the power language. Who needs that Old-Country mumbo-jumbo? Gets you nowhere.

Sometimes a minor language survives for a while through its use in ritual or ceremony, or may be employed by the practitioners of a traditional craft. But “once a language has fallen into such limited use, it may no longer matter whether anyone, at least any human being, still understands it”. Even bilingual education seldom helps. The use of Gaelic has steadily declined despite efforts in Ireland to keep it vital. Only the national language - English - matters, because that’s what people really use to advance and improve their lives.

English has grown into everyone’s second language not because it possesses any inherent virtue, but simply because it’s the most useful language to know. In the past a lingua franca such as Latin might have split into Spanish, Italian and the other romance dialects, but in a world increasingly global, connected by computer technology, international companies and television, the required isolation for this is unlikely to recur.

The growth of nation-states leads to linguistic uniformity, and the growth of a world-state, based on digital media and supported by American internationalism, will ensure the continued triumph of English.

So what is lost? “Every language that disappears for good is likely to take a culture with it,” Dalby writes. “If you use what was already a local word, that means that you learnt something - and it may be that is was something useful, such as food or medicinal uses - from the existing inhabitants. If you use a name that comes from your own previous homeland that often means that you learnt little or nothing locally.”

From here Dalby naturally turns to the linguistic theories of Benjamin Whorf who believed “that the structure of individual languages maps different views of the world, and for that reason affects the way that speakers of those languages think about the world.”

According to ancient writers, “some things, easily said in Greek, could only be expressed in Latin with the greatest difficulty”. Dalby, acknowledging that Whorf’s thesis is controversial even now, proffers a slightly watered down version but essentially does believe that different languages embody different worldviews though they may not necessarily determine how their speakers actually perceive and understand.

As Dalby makes his points he offers concise histories of Romani (the language of the Gypsies) and Yiddish and “thieves cant” and Kome Greek and Pidgin English. He describes the disappearance of native American tongues, especially in California, the annihilation of all eight or so of the native languages of Tasmania; attempts to preserve multilingualism; and how much English owes to languages now lost - even that 20th century term “persona” turns out to be a loan word from ancient and largely unknown Etruscan.

Sadly Dalby reiterates that within 200 years the earth will almost certainly be down to 200 languages - from some 5,000 or more now in existence - and English will be picking up more and more speed on its juggernaut roll toward world domination.

There are, concludes Dalby, “three overriding reasons why we need to stop losing languages. First, we need the knowledge that they preserve and transmit. Second, we need other languages for the insights they give us into the way things may be - we need them for those alternative worldviews. Third, we need a multiplicity of languages because it is interaction with other languages that keeps our own language flexible and creative.” By the end of Language in Danger most readers will likely agree with Dalby’s analysis.

But here is the sad part: There doesn’t seem to be much we can do about any of this, barring apocalyptic cataclysm or act of God. Our world’s cultural richness is being diminished by the ongoing success of English, an English supported by international communications technology and the success of the American way of life. In other words, we have finally built the Babel tower after all and it broadcasts “The Simpsons”. - Dawn/Washington Post News Service

Language in Danger: The Loss of Linguistic Diversity and the Threat to our Future

By Andrew Dalby

Columbia University Press

ISBN 0231129009

352pp. $27.95

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Re: Should Urdu speakers learn to give up linguistic chauvinism?

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by durango: *
Should Urdu speakers learn to give up linguistic chauvinism?
[/QUOTE]

Didn't read the whole article, but the answer to your question: Yes!

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I did'nt read the article either, but a unifying language is needed in the country. This cannnot be a regional language like Punjabi, Pushto or Sindhi so it obviously has to be a "imposed" language. Urdu has served this purpose fairly well in Pakistan. Of course in the future one would think that English could be just as good an alternative as a second language. That, however, is a global phenomenon.

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Many languages may become extinct

AFP MONDAY, AUGUST 25, 2003 11:03:44 PM ]

PARIS: “Vel ny partanyn snaue, Joe?,” says the ghostly voice from the archives. " ‘Cha nel monney, cha nel monney,’ dooyrt Joe. ‘T’ad feer ghoan’." The voice belonged to Ned Maddrell, the last native speaker of Manx, the Celtic language once spoken on the Isle of Man – the island located between Britain and Ireland.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/xml/uncomp/articleshow?msid=146229

Maddrell died in 1974, leaving behind recordings of his fishing anecdotes and daily chat (translation of this snippet: “Are the crabs crawling, Joe? ‘Not much, not much,’ said Joe. ‘They’re very scarce’”.)

Casual, almost banal as they seemed at the time, Mandrell’s utterances are now precious beyond price. His words are the linguistic equivalent of a gene bank for dead species.

More than 300 languages have already become extinct, and “thousands” more are hurtling down the same road, say Daniel Abrams and Steven Strogatz of New York’s Cornell University.

“Ninety per cent of the languages are expected to disappear with the current generation.”

It is a linguistic loss whose equivalent in biodiversity is the mass extinction 65 million years ago. The most authoritative database on languages (www.ethnologue.com) lists 6,809 languages that are spoken in the world today, of which 357 have fewer than 50 speakers.

Evolutionary biologists are struck by similar patterns between threatened tongues and threatened biodiversity.

A language, like species, can head for oblivion if it is threatened by a powerful invader; if it no longer has a large enough, or young enough, or economically viable population to speak it; and if its habitat is destroyed or displaced by war.

Invasive languages are promoted by national governments as a unifying political force or for bureaucracy; or they are essential for work or economic activity, used in television, radio or movies; or they are fashionable.

In poor or remote communities, these newcomers work like an insidious virus, able to sicken the local language quickly and put it on its deathbed within two or three generations. “The present ‘killers’ of languages are English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Swahili, Chinese and Indonesia/Malay,” according to a study written by Margit Waas for the US journal Applied Linguistics Forum.

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Re: Should Urdu speakers learn to give up linguistic chauvinism?

Exactly my thoughts. :k:

Mujhe bhook lagi hai
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Re: Should Urdu speakers learn to give up linguistic chauvinism?

  1. I agree with funguy. Nationalistically, it's important for people in a nation to speak one language, it helps cohesion and allows many mass market education/etc events to occur.

  2. Someone i know knows an American girl doing her PhD in languages and she is studying the potwari wedding songs in the hills of Kashmir.....it is a dying language and the songs especially are beling lost.

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Re: Should Urdu speakers learn to give up linguistic chauvinism?

If Sindh had been a part of India, and not Pakistan, Sindhi would have been the official language of the province and the medium of instruction, and there would have been no demographic invasion by the Mohajer parasites.

In NWFP, the medium of instruction would have been Pashto had this region been a part of Afghanistan.

The imposition of Urdu on Pakistan has resulted in a *******isation of Pakistani culture. The elites don't want to use this language themselves, they prefer English. Had Arabic been chosen as the official language, then English would have ceased to be the language of power. Instead Arabic would have been the common link language and the medium of instruction in universities. It would have become a true official language. It would have allowed the regional languages some chance of development, because they would be used as media of instruction at the primary stage.

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Re: Should Urdu speakers learn to give up linguistic chauvinism?

^
Bollocks!

Urdu is easier to learn than Arabic for Pakistanis because it belongs to the same language family as the regional languages, we all know it has similairites with the 'Indian' languages of Pakistan but more than half the vocabulory in pure Urdu is Persian derived so it makes it easier for speakers of 'Iranian' languages to learn it too, it's a universal language, almost everyone from West/South Asia can at least understand it.

Arabic is our religious language and is very important that we learn it side by side our national language but our national identity is Pakistani not Arab.

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Re: Should Urdu speakers learn to give up linguistic chauvinism?

Creating a Paki Nation by imposing a foreign language is not only ridiculous, imperialistic, and irrational but also useless. Nations cannot be created artificailly but evolve as a consequence of thousands years of cultural processes that take place in an environment of political and economic stability. Pakistan is a political thing and nothing more than that.

The choice to be a Pashtun, a Baluchi, or a Sindhi is my natural right no one should try to take away from me.

Just tell me one thing! By becoming a patriotic Paki, am I going to be a super-human? Is Pakistan to achieve something divine or holy that I should give up my natural identity and adopt this new one? Someone convince me, please, that why such an identity is necesarry....what high goal will be accomplished, what grand purpose will be surved, and what sublime end will be achieved?

Moreover, Hindi and Urdu are different names for the same language.