Urdu as our national langauge

[Jolie]

Re: Urdu as our national langauge

@TLK

I don’t think that anyone is trying to politicize the debate here, but thanks for understanding my intentions. I anyway would be the last one to politicize this issue, as I belong to the 8% group that speaks Urdu as the first language. It’s just that I see the enforcing of it as a national (and now official) language being an unfair policy.

I am not an attentive reader of history; at least not as much as many of the other participants of this thread are, but believe that Urdu was forced on Pakistanis because it was promoted as the language of Muslims in subcontinent. You go anywhere in the world, and you don’t see language being used as a divider between the religious groups. Only in indo-pak it has been used as a divider. Even in today’s India, if I am Hindu and you are Muslim and even if we live in same community, you would be automatically assumed to know the Urdu script.

Amazingly, this division of language between religious groups is more noticeable in the western indo-pak. Bangladesh and West Bengal don’t see that division. Many of my Bengalis friends don’t read Quran in Arabic script. They read Quran in Bengali script

That’s why you need to read history.

English became the language of Protestant faith after England’s break with Rome. St John’s Bible changed the face of Christianity forever, and set England on the path of imperial success because it triggered a quest for new identity and glory against an all powerful Roman Catholic Church and Catholic Europe.

Urdu too became a language of religion as Islamic scriptures from Arabic and Persian started getting translated into Urdu hence it became a common perception for Muslim elite of India to know Urdu (as well as Persian) as this is where the concentrated religious knowledge was stored.

Languages thrive only when they become a source of new knowledge and innovation. If folklore and poetic traditions were enough to keep languages flourishing, then the whole of Europe would have been speaking Celtic or French today.

I belong to the 48% group, as I proud Punjabi, it will so easy for me to cheer-lead the idea of Punjabi nationalism and make excuses for riots and bloodshed and war, but I’ll stick to my principles and say religion and ethnicity when mixed with politics, and especially politics of complexes is a recipe for disaster.

I would encourage KPK style language revival in Punjab where the focus is to actually empower the local community, recognise home grown talents, and provide them with employment and leisure opportunities, than politicise the language at the expense of having a go at others to settle inter-generational scores.