Language as Identity and as Social Power:

The Problems and Prospects of Modern Education in

Urdu Today

Dr. Ali Raza Moosvi*

1.1 Introduction and Conceptual Background

The relationship of a people with their language is intricate,
complex and deeply intertwined with their culture. Language makes
the mind, controls and defines it. And this is not surprising given the
fact that the words we use are vehicles to convey meaning, which is
directly related to our perception of things in the way we understand
them. Our understanding is tempered by our learning, social milieu,
culture, religion and exposure. The more we are involved into either, or
all, of these things the more our need to understand and express
them. Thus the human mind and languages grow simultaneously, each
complementing the other in one of the most fascinating processes of
the development and growth of human cognition, expression and
historical evolution.

Language and the Processes of History

History has seen many worlds in terms of geography, culture,

economic processes and languages from the times of the Egyptian and
Mesopotamian worlds till today. The processes involved in making
these worlds have changed over time and language was one such
major process. It defined the Greek and Roman worlds, the Orient and
the Occident, the New World of the West and today tends to define the
world as one mono-lingual unit that trades, meets, transacts and
defines itself increasingly in a single idiom.

The Language of the New World

This ‘new world’ began in the 18th century, a world whose

geography was initially European but now encompasses the globe. It is
a world that began with the process of Colonialism operated through
imperialism and controlled by the progress of Science and technology
that increasingly harnesses earth’s natural resources to generate more
and more surplus of raw materials and goods. It is a world that has
capitalism and the seemingly indefinite growth of the market as its
cornerstones.

*
Reader (Geography), Directorate of Distance Education, Maulana Azad National Urdu University,
Hyderabad-India

1
 English is the language of this ‘New World’.

It is thus only natural that the best of talent expresses itself

through this language. The finest human thoughts and ideas may be
penned in any language; their proliferation and sustenance depends on
their translation into English.

What is the place of Urdu, or for that matter any other language,
in this world of English? This question forms the first conceptual point
of this paper. As is noted above, the language makes a world and
prorogates it. It is thus natural to include the social context of the
growth of Urdu in the ambit of this paper for a fuller understanding.

The second question to be framed is “Why English?”, at least in

the Indian context and in a country that records 1652 mother tongues,
and a few hundred languages (around 400 languages or so), all under
the four major language families of India (Indo-Aryan, Dravidian,
Austric, and Tibeto-Burman).1

The final question is quite practical and deductive in its nature

and depends on the outcome of the answer of the earlier one; ‘is it
desirable to impart modern education in a language other than English
and especially in Urdu given the fact that knowledge seems to be
‘produced’ in English in today’s world?’

This paper attempts to answer these questions by framing issues

at a theoretical and discursive level. The basic premise is that a
language and its people are intricately intertwined and any discussion
on the status and future of a language invariably leads us to the study
of its speakers.

2.1 Issues in Identity

Language
is social identity. Thus a study of Urdu today is a
study of the identity of its speakers.

What is Urdu identified with in India today? Politically the

language is under pressure by right-wing politics as a language of the
Muslims and, therefore, Islamic thoughts. Its speakers are unilaterally
typified as prone to discontent and strife. Culturally, it is identified as a
language of art and poetry and high thoughts. Economically, Urdu is
the lingua franca of the Indian bazaar; a language that forms the basis
of inter-regional trade throughout the country with varying degrees of
intensity (It is immaterial to go into the niceties of Urdu and Hindi in
1
Linguistic Census of India – 1962

2
this context since speakers of both these languages are comfortable in
either of them.). Socially the language has many dis-contents since it
has an astonishingly wide array of speakers in terms of socio-economic
backgrounds, cultures and geographies. Urduwallahs are found in
nearly every major city of the world.

When we argue that language is identity, it follows that its

speakers are a social unit which may or may not be homogenous. It is
an ordered setup where the ordering is on religious, racial, economic
and even political lines. It is perhaps the most intricate and complex
model of power, ever changing and ever responding to shifts and
tussles for power.2 Society, it seems, is ordered on the principles of
political economy which determine not only who the users and what
the resources are but also the mechanism of control and access of
these resources.

What are the resources of a society? They are abstract and

material and range from civilization to education to culture and to
language. Language is one of the most powerful resource for a society
given its relationship with the mind. It defines the power of a society as
well as the access to that power. In short, language is the primary
lever of, and for, power worldwide. Thus languages too rise and fall
with power from Latin and Greek to Arabic and Persian and English and
Urdu.

In everyday use, language signifies a cultural identity in its use

of idioms, sayings, creation of stereotypes and in expressing morality –
as to what is acceptable in society and what is not. When societies
change, develop or ‘advance’, the language too changes to redefine
and re-present social mores and morality.

A simple, but by no means indicative or restricted example, in

the context of morality is of the very acceptable and neutral word
‘living together’ in the English language. It is generally applied to
cohabitation of a man and a woman outside, or without, wedlock. This
expression would be unintelligible maybe five-six decades ago and the
baser and more ‘crude’ word was ‘living in sin’ since such cohabitation
has the underpinning of a sexual relationship – the pivotal dispenser of
morality in society. However it is a freely used and, I daresay,
accepted social unit today especially in Western society. It is shorn of
its moral baggage and immorality since the speakers of the language
have redefined their social structure. To stress the point further, the
word also conveys a cultural identity – the culture of individualism and
2

See Power and Moral Codes in Bertrand Russell’s ‘Power: A New Social Analysis, (George Unwin & Allen
Ltd., London, 1938) wherein the need to legitimize the means for attaining, and retaining, power at a social
level are discussed in detail.

3
anonymity that urbanization and industrialization brought into
societies.

Another potent example is the use of the word ‘terrorist’, a word

that signifies the political culture in the international arena today. It is
a word used to delegitimize, at a very basic level, opposing ideas and
institutions and is the outcome of a society that is trying to live in
times of great assimilation and change with the breakdown of
distances through the media and technology. Cultures and civilizations
are exposed to each other at a pace, level and intensity never
witnessed in history before and the chaos arising due to such
unregulated exchange instills fear in those who hold power and hope in
those who want it. The clash is thus imminent – not of civilizations or
cultures as is wrongly assumed, but of interests. And language comes
up with old words and new connotations, or vice versa, to help its
speakers deal with the situation.

The stresses and strains of a people are directly the stresses and
strains on their language. If a people lose power, the opposing power
launches the first attack to wipe out the language. The reasons for loss
of power are generally the inability of a people, or their opposition to
adapt, to changes brought by technology and / or politics. Over time
the people dis-engage from these processes and stop contributing to
them. The language too follows suit. Though polemic in nature, it
would be well worth to try to understand as to who begins dying first;
the language or the mind of its speakers!

Once we understand the relationship between language and

power we can delve into how language operates within the society,
who owns it and why and how does power transfer with language.

2.2 Modernity and language: The Social Context

Following identity, the greatest challenge is to modernize; to

adapt to change and adopt it to retain power. Languages that become
flexible in their rules of grammar and syntax survive though not
necessarily in their original form or script. This change is possible only
when the people are willing to adopt a new identity, when their
economic and social processes are confident of coping with it in
transmutation with continuity.

4
 German, French, Spanish and other European languages are a
case in point where all these languages have the roman scrip in
common with English. The societies are largely homogenous and this is
a contributing factor that has been turned into a great strength for the
speakers. But this change had a concomitant process to it; the
modernization of the people themselves and mass education at the
lowest levels.

As is evident, ‘modernity’ is a culture and context specific idea. It

is directly related to social attitudes and social morality and is the
outcome of changes over time; changes that may be both external
and/or internal and affect social and economic structures. It is
essentially the resultant outcome of people’s perceptions and their
engagement with such changes. When people change, their language
changes! It changes to adapt to the new thoughts and situations and
attempts to express new ideas.

It is in this theoretical context that the status of Urdu in India

today has to be appreciated. It is thus necessary to look at the social
history of the language over the last century and a half to prepare a
background for further study.

We could choose to begin at the dawn of rising British

Imperialism in India and look at the times of Maulana Altaf Hussain Hali
(1837-1914) the Urdu poet, author and critic. He lived in a time of
social and cultural change, a time that molded different parallel worlds.
“One of these worlds was molded by the interaction between British
rulers and Indian subjects. This world was in a time of change, of
conflicting currents of ideas and of assaults on old attitudes and
institutions. It is a measurable world: the meeting of the two cultures
can be seen as a series of causes and effects marching forward on a
time-line, from the Bengali Renaissance to the events of 1857 to the
Aligarh Movement. Altaf Husain Hali dwelt in this world; he helped
define and form it. But he lived in another sphere as well as that of
Ghalib and Bahadur Shah Zafar and Dagh. Their world went on along
side the British presence. It ignored or reluctantly confronted that
presence, but it certainly never formed a systematic response to it. In
this particular world, coming to grips with and acting upon the
meaning of the British occupation was irrelevant. The many worlds of
the nineteenth century are underlined time and again in the lives of
individuals: for example, while Sir Saiyid was visiting England and
attempting at home to arouse Islamic India through essays modelled
on those of Addison and Steele, the poet Dagh was reciting his verses
in a wealthy court and leading a life comparable to that of a literary

5
figure of the seventeenth century. Hali lived and worked in all these
worlds”3

The traditional and the modern worlds collided in 1857 and the
modern world triumphed. The ‘old world’ found itself under attack on
social cultural and economic fronts. With it, Urdu too was under attack
for its lack of ‘modernity’ its ‘ineffective social message’ and its
consumptive culture. Before proceeding further, the discussion could
be animated with an issue of the political economy of the language in
that it was a language of the elite and the courts, a script used for
mushairas and gazal, a language that was not much in script apart
from its chief uses of poetry. Urdu was a language understood by all
but read and written by the upper classes. When it socially moved
laterally or below it was a script used in the madarsahs for religious
education.

However this is not to say that Urdu was not linked with modern
education at all in India. Even as early as 1825, there are instances of
Urdu being the medium of college and University education in Delhi
with books in Social Sciences, Philosophy and Literature being
translated into Urdu. Urdu also became the language for education in
medical and engineering sciences in 1835 with the Calcutta and Agra
Medical Colleges and the Thomson Roorkee Engineering College
offering medical and engineering courses in Urdu. The idea came to its
fulfillment in 1917 when the Osmania University, Hyderabad,
embarked on a bold experiment to integrate and offer all branches of
knowledge in Urdu.4

Notwithstanding this, the language was identified chiefly with

poetry or religious education. Quite understandably, two movements
began to salvage the situation. The first, led by Hali, set out to ‘reform’
the gazal and to make Urdu poetry more practical and utilitarian. A
concomitant process was the movement of Sir Syed which identified
education in English as the only way out for the ‘old world’ to survive in
the future. In all, the attempts were reactionary and immediate and
tempered by the pressures of English; a language that had evolved in
a totally different economic and cultural environment.

3
Steele, Laurel: Hali and his Mukadammah: The Creation of a Literary attitudein 19 th century India in
Annual of Urdu Studies (Vol.. 1, 1981)

4
The whole gamut of modern education, from pure to applied sciences, social sciences, arts and
humanities, logic, philosophy and mathematics – all these and many more were taught, understood and
examined in Urdu. The graduates of this University found acceptance and employability not only within the
state of Hyderabad but all over the country. Seldom before had such a large-scale experiment in offering
modern and progressive education in an India language succeeded as it did in the case of the Osmania
University.

6
 This reaction had its impact on writing right from Hali’s
Muqadammah to Iqbal’s Shikwa and to the Angare group where we see
attempts to address to the problems of the Urdu speakers by either
reliving past glory or trying to expose them to rather alien cultural and
social trends through literature. One possible reason for the latter
could be in terms of political economy, there has been a group that is
elite and upwardly mobile – the former being the remnants of the ‘old
order’ and the latter the produce of the ‘English’ University of Sir
Syed.5

Other references too may be quoted in this context which brings

out the inherent incompatibility between the asymmetric social
development of Urdu speakers and the Urdu language.6

3.1 Macaulay and the Minute on Indian Education

Given the social context of Urdu as discussed above, it is now

pertinent to address to the second question framed in the paper, “Why
English?”

The possible answer begins when T.B. Macaulay arrived as the

new legislative member of the Council of India and was subsequently
appointed as the President of the Council of Education. And the first
fact that faces him is not of education per se but the medium of
education, as he records in his Minute on Education in 1835.

Why does Macaulay face this difficulty? It would serve well to

step back a little and try to gain a theoretical perspective of the mass
education scenario in India at that period. It was the prerogative of the
privileged few – the upper castes in the case of the Hindus and the
restricted court and durbar galaxy in the case of the Moslems.
However, in the latter case, there existed the deeni madarsa’s, which
were open to all but who offered theological and religious education.

5
The Angare group consisted of Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Dr. Rashid Jahan and Mahmuduzzafar who were
all under thirty; educated through the medium of English at India and abroad and shared a fondness for
"sombreros, bright shirts and contrasting ties, collecting candlesticks and gargoyles. Bach and Beethoven,
and an admiration for James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence and the New writing poets, as well as Chekhov and
Gorky."! (Copolla Carlo: THE ANGA^RE GROUP: THE ENFANTS TERRIBLES OF URDU LITERATURE in Annual
of Urdu Studies (Vol.. 1, 1981)

6
For a further discussion on this issue, please see REJECTION OF 'MODERNISM, by ZENO (Annual of Urdu
Studies, v. 1, 1981), THE GHAZAL, A MUFFLER AND INDIA, Saleem Ahmed (Annual of Urdu Studies, v. 2,
1982), THE MUSH’AIRA, Munibur Rahman, (Annual of Urdu Studies, v. 3, 1983), HOW NOT TO WRITE A
HISTORY OF URDU LITERATURE, Ralph Russell (Annual of Urdu Studies, v. 6, 1987) and IMAGES IN A
DARKENED MIRROR: ISSUES AND IDEAS IN MODERN URDU LITERATURE, S.R. Faruqui (Annual of Urdu
Studies, v. 6, 1987).

7
The medium of instruction was largely Sanskrit (in case of the Hindus)
and Persian / Arabic (in case of the Moslems). The language of
common social conversation and of trade and commerce was none of
these. Added to this was the vast multitude of local dialects, different
syntaxes, local vocabularies and, indeed, different languages and
mother tongues. Thus there were maybe a few thousand people who
could read and write in a country of hundreds of thousands. The
language of knowledge and education of the Hindus was Sanskrit;
Arabic and later Persian were the languages of the Muslims. It was
later that Hindustani and Urdu referred to as one or variously, became
the language of a more broad-based, secular and modern education
system.

Though general in content, these observations will provide us

with the prevailing picture of public education in India. And, moreover,
the subject matter of education was not the sciences, humanities, or
arts. It dwelt heavily on religion, which, in the words of Raja Ram
Mohun Roy, would “load the minds of youth with grammatical niceties
and metaphysical distinctions of little or no practicable use to the
possessors or to society”. The pupils will acquire what was known two
thousand years ago, with addition of vain and empty subtleties since
produced by speculative men. Nor will youths be fitted to be better
members of society by the Vedantic doctrines, which teach them to
believe that all visible things have no real existence; that as father,
brother, etc., have no actual entirety, they consequently deserve no
real affection, and therefore the sooner we escape from them and
leave the world the better. Again, no essential benefit can be derived
by the student of the Meemangsa from knowing what it is that makes
the killer of a goat sinless on pronouncing certain passages of the
Veds, and what is the real nature and operative influence of passages
of the Ved, etc. Again the student of the Nyaya Shastra cannot be said
to have improved his mind after he has learned from it into how many
ideal classes the objects in the Universe are divided, and what
speculative relation the soul bears to the body, the body to the soul,
the eye to the ear, etc. The Sanskrit language, so difficult that almost a
life time is necessary for its perfect acquisition, is well known to have
been for ages a lamentable check on the diffusion of knowledge; and
the learning concealed under this almost impervious veil is far from
sufficient to reward the labour of acquiring it. In order to enable your
Lordship to appreciate the utility of encouraging such imaginary
learning as above characterised, I beg your Lordship will be pleased to
compare the state of science and literature in Europe before the time
of Lord Bacon, with the progress of knowledge made since he wrote…
the Sanskrit system of education would be the best calculated to keep
this country in darkness…In representing this subject to your Lordship I
conceive myself discharging a solemn duty which I owe to my

8
countrymen and also to that enlightened Sovereign and Legislature
which have extended their benevolent cares to this distant land
actuated by a desire to improve its inhabitants and I therefore humbly
trust you will excuse the liberty I have taken in thus expressing my
sentiments to your Lordship”.7

3.2 The ‘Inevitability’ of English

The rather lengthy excerpt from Roy’s representation brings to

light the facts that a class of Indians themselves was averse to
education in their native tongue. They were fiercely critical of the
religious content to the extent that they saw it as a ‘solemn duty’ to
inform the “enlightened” and “benevolent” rulers of its retrograde
nature and futility. What then, we may ask, was Macaulay’s dilemma of
choosing the language when the case for English is so substantially
stated by the Indians themselves? He is faced with this dilemma when
he records in Sections 19.5 and 6 of the Minute that “All parties seem
to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among
the natives of this part of India, contain neither literary nor scientific
information, and are, moreover, so poor and rude that, until they are
enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any
valuable work into them. It seems to be admitted on all sides, that the
intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the
means of pursuing higher studies can at present be effected only by
means of some language not vernacular amongst them. What then
shall that language be? One-half of the Committee maintain that it
should be the English. The other half strongly recommends the Arabic
and Sanscrit. The whole question seems to me to be, which language
is the best worth knowing?”

Macaulay confidently moves ahead to solve this dilemma by

proposing the case of English as the language of public education in
India (Section 19.7 of the Minute) “English is the language spoken by
the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats
of Government. It is like to become the language of commerce
throughout the seas of the East. It is the language of two great
European communities which are rising, the one in south of Africa, the
other in Australasia; communities which are every year becoming
more important, and more closely connected with our Indian empire.
Whether we look at the intrinsic value of our literature, or at the
particular situation of this country, we shall see the strongest reason to
think that, of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is, that which
would be the most useful to our native subjects.”
7
Appeal of Ram Mohun Roy to William Pitt in 1823, to lay it before the Governor General of India, with an
ardent request that the British Government should not spend the money for education on Sanskrit or
Arabic.

9
 Needless to say, the British perceived the communal nature of
the Indian languages – Sanskrit was the language of the Hindu’s and
Arabic / Persian of the Muslims. There has to be a unifying language
and what better role could be there for English with its alien nature, its
secular content and the force of the Empire than to be the arbitrator
and the vehicle for modern education!

It is not just the imperial ambition or colonial ‘burden’ that makes

Macaulay propose English. He goes on to present numerous examples,
which show that it just does not pay to study in any native language.
He quotes the accounts of the Bengal Madarsa for the year 1833 and
brings to light the fact that the Government spent Rs. 500/- as stipend
for the 77 Arabic Students to encourage them to study that language.
On the other hand, the Government earned Rs. 103/- from a college
teaching in English there. Coming to the case of Sanskrit, he quotes
from a petition received by the Education Council from ex-students of
the Benaras Sanskrit College; “The petitioners stated that they had
studied in the college ten or twelve years; that they had made
themselves acquainted with Hindoo literature and science; that they
had received certificates of proficiency: and what is the fruit of all this!
'Notwithstanding such testimonials,' they say, 'we have but little of
bettering our condition without the kind of assistance of your
Honorable Committee, the indifference with which we are generally
looked upon by our countrymen leaving no hope of encouragement
and assistance from them.' They therefore beg that they may be
recommended to the Governor General for places under the
Government, not places of high dignity or emolument, but such as may
just enable them to exist. 'We want means,' they say, 'for a decent
living, and for our progressive improvement, which, however, we
cannot obtain without the assistance of Government, by whom we
have been educated and maintained from childhood.' They conclude
by representing, very pathetically, that they are sure that it was never
the intention of government, after behaving so liberally to them during
their education, to abandon them to destitution and neglect.”

Continuing on the theme, Macaulay says, “All these petitions,

even the most unreasonable of them, proceeded on the supposition
that some loss had been sustained-that some wrong had been
inflicted. These are surely the first petitioners whoever demanded
compensation for having been educated gratis, -- for having been
supported by the public during twelve years, and then sent forth into
the world well furnished with literature and science. They represent
their education as an injury, which gives them a claim on the
Government for redress, as an injury for which the stipends paid to
them during the infliction were a very inadequate compensation. And I
doubt not that they are in the right. They have wasted the best years

10
of life in learning what procures for them neither bread nor respect.
Surely we might, with advantage, have saved the cost of making these
persons useless and miserable; surely, men may be brought up to be
burdens to the public and objects of contempt to their neighbours at a
smaller charge to the state. But such is our policy. We do not even
stand neuter in the contest between truth and falsehood. We are not
content to leave the natives to the influence of their own hereditary
prejudices. To the natural difficulties, which obstruct the progress of
sound science in the East, we add fresh difficulties of our own making.
Bounties and premiums, such as ought not to be given even for the
propagation of truth, we lavish on false taste and false philosophy.”

After carefully addressing to the question of the contribution and

effect of the Indian languages to public education, Macaulay proceeds
to the legal and administrative issues in the penultimate section of the
Minute and addresses them thus; “The fact that the Hindoo law is to be
learned chiefly from Sanscrit books, and the Mahometan law from
Arabic books, has been much insisted on, but seems not to bear at all
on the question. We are commanded by Parliament to ascertain and
digest the laws of India. The assistance of a law Commission has been
given to us for that purpose. As soon as the code is promulgated, the
Shastras and the Hedaya will be useless to a Moonsief or Sudder
Ameen. I hope and trust that before the boys who are now entering at
the Madrassa and the Sanscrit College have completed their studies,
this great work will be finished. It would be manifestly absurd to
educate the rising generation with a view to a state of things which we
mean to alter before they reach manhood.”

It is now that he presents the effects of an English education on

Indians in the following much mis-quoted, maligned and little
understood summing-up: We must at present do our best to form a
class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we
govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in
taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may
leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those
dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western
nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for
conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

Macaulay concludes by saying that the Board of Public

Instruction “is a Board for wasting public money, for printing books
which are of less value than the paper on which they are printed was
while it was blank; for giving artificial encouragement to absurd
history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd theology; for
raising up a breed of scholars who find their scholarship an
encumbrance and a blemish, who live on the public while they are

11
receiving their education, and whose education is so utterly useless to
them that when they have received it they must either starve of live
on the public all the rest of their lives. Entertaining these opinions, I
am naturally desirous to decline all share in the responsibility of a
body, which, unless it alters its whole mode of proceeding, I must
consider not merely as useless, but as positively noxious.”

4.1 Possible Reasons for this Inevitability

It is from here that we can pick up a thread of argument that no

Indian language has been able to satisfactorily cater to the educational
needs and demands of the Indian people. We could identify three
broad reasons for this.

The first is the exclusivity that the imparting and gaining of

information and knowledge has had in the country through the
centuries old caste system – a system of “systematic social
deprivation”.8 This exclusivity was maintained by various means and
carried to brutal lengths. The result was a mass that had no
indigenously produced secular literature other than the myths and
fables of the epics or the stories listened in the temple halls. Almost all
such ‘literature’ was full of superstition, fear, gods and goddesses,
demons, and churels – in fact of everything except matters of history,
geography, mathematics, sciences in whatever form they existed in
the middle or late centuries. Even a cursory comparative look at the
mass writing, contained in pamphlets, literature, books etc. of England
and that of India in the 17th / 18th century brings out this point where
we find a plethora of public output and practically none, at least at the
mass level, in India. The advent and proliferation of printing gave a
boost to such literature, be it the seminal treatises or the ‘shilling
shockers’ - there was production because a large proportion of the
masses knew how to read and write.

The second reason pertains to the content of writing. Indian

religion formed the basis of all writing. The topics, content, style and
even the language (in some cases) was set. These were improvised in
a thousand ways but the basis was the same. Such was not the case
elsewhere where, apart from religion, there were thoughts and ideas
on social and economic perspectives, on science and arts and drama –
many of whom were the product of a collective exposure,
consciousness and thought. In short, there were other fields and
subjects for expression through writing than only religion.

8
Sen Amartya (1999); Development as Freedom; Oxford University Press; New Delhi

12
 The third reason was the presence of a strong and limiting
influence that a culture of oral tradition had on India. It thrived
because many could not read and write and by its very sanctity of its
oral origins, it did not contribute to a desire to learn to read and write.
Thus the language, its metaphors and lexicon, were constrained by the
fixed imaginations of its users who would see things through a fixed
set of events and possibilities.

4.2 The Issues Involved for promoting Urdu for Modern

Education

It is in this context that the final question posed earlier in the

paper has to be answered. ‘is it desirable to impart modern education
in a language other than English and especially in Urdu given the fact
that knowledge seems to be ‘produced’ in English in today’s world?’

This question, as stated before, has a deductive answer based on

how the earlier questions have been dealt with. The preceding
discussion brings forth the following points:

i. Urdu, or for than matter any language, is not

incompatible with modern education per se. It is the
social conditions that govern this aspect.

ii. Urdu has the added aspect of a wide and asymmetric

social class of users both in terms of geography and
political economy. This makes any attempt at a general
theory for explaining the problem hazardous and has led
to unfortunate and avoidable internal tussles for cultural
ownership of the language.

iii. The Urdu speakers are largely dis-engaged from many

faucets of ‘modernity’ which is specifically taken to mean
exposure to other cultures, ideas and thoughts and the
ability to adapt to the same.

iv. This ‘insulation’ is the result of the gradual social erosion

of the Urdu speakers, both in terms of liberal education in
the middle classes and a ‘self imposed exclusion’ among
the lower classes.

These social processes are intricate and complex and warrant a

more serious and detailed study. The most obvious outcome of this
situation has been the intense and quite exclusive profiling of Urdu

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speakers, and hence Urdu, with a religion. This is not surprising since
when the language and its speakers are shorn of multiple social
identities, the irreducible identity is that of religion. The erosion of
other identities has been due to the above processes and it would be
unfair to lay the blame at Urdu as being a language incapable of
empowering its speakers. As has been argued earlier, a language is
made up by its users and speakers. Urdu today faces natural dis-
advantages for growth and change because its speakers face the same
due to the above reasons. Hence a change in Urdu has to begin with a
change in the Urdu speakers.

5 In Conclusion: Prospects of Modern Education in Urdu-

The Role of the Urdu University

If we take the above points as an agenda for change, then the

role of the Maulana Azad National Urdu University becomes extremely
important and critical and has to expand much beyond the role that
conventional ‘English Medium’ Universities play of imparting education
and awarding degrees. The Urdu University will have to emerge as a
special purpose institution, a specific purpose university, and its basic
mandate should evolve as an institution that has to empower the Urdu
speakers by providing as wide an academic exposure as possible,
imparting vocational education and providing the essential continuity
to higher education in Urdu by establishing Urdu medium schools
which will be the feeder channels for the University.

While the university is actively involved in the last two

endeavours (and has added teacher training and distance education
through the Urdu medium as some of its unique initiatives) there is
need for a focused plan regarding the first point. Such a plan could
have the following components:

a. The University should have intense collaborations with other

Universities that involved extensive staff and student
exchange programmes. These will have a general effect of
inter-cultural exposure for the Urdu speakers, the lack of
which is a great debilitating force.

b. The future of the Urdu language, and of the Urdu speaker, is

directly intertwined with its relationship with modern
information technology. This is not just scanning, digitization,
the development of fonts or Urdu web pages but also the
development of excellent translation software that will allow
translation to and from Urdu. This step will lead to a great

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 ventilation of the Urdu mind and will bring in fresh ideas and
thoughts to the language.

c. The Urdu script has to be made compatible with the internet.

This process should follow the above two so that there is
worthwhile material to be written and uploaded on the net for
future browsers.

d. The future growth of the language will depend on the strength

of its literature, which has to evolve and explore newer genres
and types.

e. A very sensitive point is that of the retention of the Urdu

script, that is the Persian script. There is no harm if Urdu is
also begun to be written in the Roaman script, not with the
ultimate aim of replacing the Persian script but as a healthy
parallel medium that will go a long way in keeping future
generations of Urdu speakers engaged with the rich and
beautiful repository of its literature. The University could
initiate a pilot project by publishing models of Urdu prose and
poetry in the Roman script.

f. The research in Urdu carried out in the university should be

multi-dimensional. While traditional themes should be studied,
original research on Urdu and its speakers should be
encouraged. The departments should adopt a strong multi-
disciplinary approach, especially amongst the Urdu
department and the social science departments.

g. Lastly and most importantly, the University could institute

special Fellowships and Scholarships that encourage
independent research, action research and collaborative
research on identified topics in Urdu teaching methods,
research methodologies, sociological studies and data
collection studies. These will go a long way in the creation of
fresh knowledge in Urdu.

While general in content, the above suggestions would go a

long way in reviving the language and are offered with the basic
premise that empowering the speakers will directly empower the
language.

The challenge is immense and the work arduous but the effort
will be well worth it since it will not only mean the sustenance of

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a beautiful language in a meaningful and contributory way but
will also mean the active engagement of hundreds of thousands
of India’s citizenry with the affairs of the state, the mind and the
country. Because, as has been rightly said “the limits of a
language are the limits of its thoughts”.

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