Urdu as Punjab's Mother Tongue
By: Safir Rammah
Dawn: May 13, 2004
The article "Urdu as Punjab's mother tongue" by Mushir Anwar (Dawn, May 7) attempts to frame the demand of Punjabi writers and intellectuals for the introduction of Punjabi as medium of education in Punjab's schools in terms that portray it as a conspiracy against Muslims, Islamic culture, the Holy Quran and Islam.
According to the claims of Fateh Mohammad Malik as referred to in Mushir Anwar's article, adoption of Punjabi, "...could only be a folly or a conspiracy against the Muslims... once Punjabi had been introduced as a medium of instruction, it would be heavily Sanskritized... and then its Quranic script will be changed to Gurmukhi.
That would ultimately... divest it of its Islamic identity... the Muslims of the Punjab would slowly but certainly lose all contact with the wellsprings of their culture."
These negative sound bites present Punjabi language as the mother of all evils. They can easily be ignored as a laughing matter except for the fact that besides being an attempt to reduce the serious debate on language policy in Punjab to a spitting match, these ideas are being promoted by a few notable Urdu writers.
Even more laughable than the irrational fear of Sanskrit and Gurmukhi, obviously based on a total ignorance of robust West Punjabi literature, is the astonishing hypothesis that since Punjabi writers have made some contributions to Urdu literature, just as one must point out they did when Persian was the official language, all 80 or so million West Punjabis should disown Punjabi.
Nothing can justify replacing a living language with another, especially Punjabi which is among the most viable languages in the world based on all pertinent criteria that are used to judge the viability of a language, including different stages of its natural development over more than two thousand years, number of native speakers - 120 million worldwide - vastness and depth of vocabulary, richness and variety of literature and much more.
Depriving schoolchildren from learning their mother tongue amounts to breaking a vital link to their rich heritage through deliberate social engineering.
The diverse and unique living experience of humankind is codified in the diverse languages they speak, and loss of any language is a loss for all of us, as Marianne Mithum noted in her recent survey of North American Indian languages:
"The loss of a language represents a definitive separation of a people from their heritage. It also represents an irreparable loss for us all, the loss of opportunities to glimpse alternative ways of making sense of the human experience...
"When language disappears, the most intimate aspects of culture can disappear as well: fundamental ways of organizing experience into concepts, of relating ideas to each other, of interacting with other people. The most conscious genres of verbal art are usually lost as well: traditional rituals, oratory, myth, legend, even humour."
It is with this desire to preserve their language, culture and heritage that all Punjabi activists and writers have agreed on a single platform: Punjabi must be used as medium of instructions in Punjab's schools, while Urdu should be taught as a second language and should continue as the national language of Pakistan.
Regarding the most ridiculous idea referred to in the article that Punjabi is somehow incompatible with Islam, I invite the readers to read the Punjabi translation of the Holy Quran by Sharif Kunjahi (http://www.apnaorg.com/quran/) to judge for themselves that Urdu doesn't have a monopoly on Islam, and the Holy Quran can be translated into Punjabi as beautifully, magnificently and accurately as in any other language of the world.
SAFIR RAMMAH