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he 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 v ehicles 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 t hese 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 hist orical evolution.

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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 th ese 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, transa cts and defines itself increasingly in a single idiom.

("   )* 

This µnew world¶ began in the 18 th 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 s eemingly
indefinite growth of the market as its cornerstones.

English is the language of this µNew 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 la nguage; 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 ab ove, 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 ³Why English?´, at least in the Indian context
and in a country that records 1652 mother tongues, and a few hundred languages (around

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X 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; µis it desirable to impart modern education in a
language other than English and especially in Urdu given the fact that knowledg e seems to
be µproduced¶ 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 discussio n on the status and future of a language invariably leads us to
the study of its speakers.

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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 
    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 U rdu and
Hindi in 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 deter mine
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 µadvance¶, the language too changes to
redefine and re -present social mores and morality.

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 A simple, but by no means indicative or restricted example, in the context of morality
is of the very acceptable and neutral word µliving 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
µcrude¶ word was µliving 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. I t 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 anonymity that urbanization a nd industrialization brought into societies.

Another potent example is the use of the word µterrorist¶, 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 &
 & , 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, th e 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.
|
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|  . |

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.

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, µmodernity¶ 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 (1837-191X) the Urdu poet, author and critic. He
lived in a time of social and cultural change, a time that molded different parallel worlds.
³One 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 th is
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 neve r 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 li terary 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 µold world¶ found itself under attack on social cultural and economic fronts.
With it, Urdu too was under attack for its lack of µmodernity¶ its µineffective 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 ð
  and    , 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 move d laterally or below it was a script
used in the ð   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 t he 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 .X

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 µreform¶ the    and to make Urdu poetry more practi cal and
utilitarian. A concomitant process was the movement of Sir Syed which identified education
in English as the only way out for the µold world¶ to survive in the future. In all, the attempts
were reactionary and immediate and tempered by the pressure s of English; a language that
had evolved in a totally different economic and cultural environment.
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-) and to the   group where we see attempts to address to the pro blems 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 µold order¶ and the latter the produce of the µEnglish¶ University of
Sir Syed.5

Other references too may be quoted in this context which brings out the inherent
incompatibility between the asym metric social development of Urdu speakers and the Urdu
language. 6

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Given the social context of Urdu as discussed above, it is now pertinent to address to
the second question framed in the paper, ³Why 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
  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 p eriod. It
was the prerogative of the privileged few ± the upper castes in the case of the Hindus and
the restricted court and   galaxy in the case of the Moslems. However, in the latter
case, there existed the 
ð   . , which were open to all b ut who offered theological
and religious education. 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 r eligion, which, in the words of Raja
Ram Mohun Roy, would ³    ð
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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 µsolemn duty¶ to
inform the ³enlightened´ and ³benevolent´ rulers of its retrograde nature and futility. What
then, we may ask, was Macaulay¶s dilemma of choosing the language when the c ase 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 ³ 

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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 µburden¶ 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. 5 / - as stipend for the 77
Arabic Students to encourage them to study that language. On the other hand, the
Government earned Rs. 1 3/ - 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
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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
³systematic 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 µliterature¶ was full of superstition, fear, gods and god desses, demons,
and  ± 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, lite rature, books etc. of
England and that of India in the 17 th / 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
µshilling 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.

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 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 wr ite. 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.

XR| ||+ +| | 

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It is in this context that the final question posed earlier in the paper has to be
answered. r


 
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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
$ 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 tu ssles for cultural ownership of the
language.

iii. The Urdu speakers are largely dis -engaged from many faucets of
µmodernity¶ which is specifically taken to mean exposure to other cultures,
ideas and thoughts and the ability to adapt to the same.

iv. This µinsulation¶ is the result of the gradual social erosion of the Urdu
speakers, both in terms of liberal education in the middle classes and a µself
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 speakers, and hence Urdu, with a religion. This is not surprising
since when the language and its speakers are shorn of multi ple 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 a rgued 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 speaker s.
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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 t o expand
much beyond the role that conventional µEnglish 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 s hould 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 school s 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 f or 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 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 suggestio ns 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 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 rightl y said ; 
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