By Hafizur Rahman

Date:23-03-05

Source: Dawn

Some weeks ago there was an international Urdu conference in Islamabad. It became an official gathering in the sense that, apart from two top government bodies devoted to Urdu, one of the sponsors was the Capital Development Authority.

I do not know what message the government intended to convey, but the moot ended with a call for Urdu's immediate adoption as the office language. I am personally convinced that it was just hot air and no more.

Does anyone know the federal government's exact stand on Urdu? I mean that of the present regime and the previous governments which boasted about their heavy mandate and the love they inspired among the masses.

If Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto had been asked about their policy on Urdu they wouldn't have been able to say anything beyond asserting. "It is Pakistan's national language."

The reason is that nobody is really clear about Urdu's place. There used to be a National Language Committee of the National Assembly whose duty it was to decide when (if at all) Urdu was to be introduced in government offices in pursuance of a constitutional requirement.

I wonder if the committee is alive or, like so many important things in Pakistan, it has died because of indifference. But since the National Assembly is not clinically dead, I suppose the committee can be revived any time.

After more than 56 years of independence one can say that successive regimes in Pakistan had one common feature: they had been too inhibited by western influence to shed the use of English and too timid to take the plunge in respect of Urdu.

They have consistently wavered between the much-publicised importance of English in the modern world and the equally much-publicised inadequacy of Urdu as a vehicle for science and technology and the development subjects, refusing at the same time to give up its lip service to the latter.

Urdu is no doubt the acknowledged national language, the only feeble dissent being not against its status as such but the regional and provincial desires that the other Pakistani languages should not suffer because of it. Nobody can quarrel with these legitimate and even laudable aspirations.

In fact it is not necessary to muster ideological and emotional support for Urdu, because, if nothing else, it is the sole means of communication between the various people who inhabit this land.

Apart from its theoretical acceptance as the national language, Urdu is the vehicle for written expression in Punjab and Balochistan and the Frontier. It is only in Sindh that people communicate with each other in their mother tongue, and Sindhi poets and writers are virile. All others, though passionately fond of their respective languages for speaking, employ Urdu for writing letters and, to a considerable extent, for literary expression.

Add to this the fact that in Punjab, for some strange psychological reason no one has been able to fathom, the urban educated middle class and above, with pretensions to respectability and culture, have gradually taken to Urdu for oral communication also.

For them the only use now left for Punjabi is to converse with the illiterate, to enjoy the vigour and loud violence of Punjabi movies and to draw upon the language's matchless fund of vulgar invective to abuse opponents. Recently pop music has taken to it in a big way.

In Punjab, the NWFP and Balochistan, Urdu is the language of the courts, except the three high courts, and of subordinate district and tehsil offices. In these offices in Sindh the language used in Sindhi and the proceedings of the lower courts are also conducted in that language.

In the domain in education, Urdu is taught at the primary level all over the country except in Sindh. Then there is the question of the mother tongue at the primary level at least, and in the Frontier the present government has made Pushto compulsory for these classes.

The demand also exists in some sections of public opinion in Punjab but it is muted and half-hearted. Activists of Punjabi threaten to launch a campaign in its favour but strangely the common man is not interested, not even in the villages where they all now want to speak Urdu, and of course learn English.

Urdu is the medium of instruction for other subjects in Punjab, the Frontier and Balochistan but not in Sindh except for Urdu-speaking children. It is also the medium of instruction at the highest level in Karachi University, though I don't know what the students think about that.

It is here that the whole problem of contradictions starts, by saying one thing and doing another. The tragedy of Urdu as the national language is that the contradictions stem mostly from the government's actions (or inaction).

The people themselves have also contributed to the problem. Those who have a bit of money do not want to educate their children in an Urdu-medium school. This is also because the government itself has no openings in the services for young people who are not well up in English. They may be geniuses in Urdu but that's no good.

Both the federal and provincial governments foster and encourage discrimination in favour of English, and to the disadvantage of Urdu by running high-profile English-medium schools.

The vicious process starts with this and culminates at the level of recruitment to the superior services and to executive jobs in commerce and industry where the smart English-speaking candidate has an edge over his Urdu-medium rival. This leaves the latter with the feeling that he is only fit for a clerical post.

It is less easy to pinpoint causes for slow adoption of Urdu in the private sector. One may be the hesitation of the government to introduce Urdu as the official language.

There is also the complex that Urdu stands for a backward 'desi' culture while English denotes being modern, enlightened and westernized. The educated classes take pride in writing and speaking English well. Even Urdu journalists prefer to work in English newspapers.

Thus the real culprit in the issue is the government itself. Except for some laudable attempts at translating official terms into Urdu (which are never used anyway) and developing an urdu typewriter, hardly anything really positive has been done to launch the national language in day-to-day government work.

To use a metaphor from domestic life, English is the fashionable mistress who is paraded in society while Urdu is the poor wife who cannot be brought out of purdah for fear of shame. This is the state of affairs as I see it. It is not my place to suggest remedies.