August 30, - 2013

Punjab Governor Muhammad Sarwar Chaudhry declared some time back that an imposition of education emergency was on his agenda with the express objective of achieving a high literacy rate in the shortest possible span of time. One wonders how he is going to sell the idea to Mr Shahbaz Sharif, our chief minister who seems to be occupied with his dream of building modern material infrastructure in his province which is no doubt a step forward in the right direction. Without the modern infrastructure contemporary life would come to a grinding halt. But is that all the people of Punjab need? No sir. It could be just one of the things on our wish list. After the World War-II poet Brecht wrote:

“I knew that cities were being built I haven’t to any, a matter of statistics, I thought, not history What is the point of cities, built without the people’s wisdom?”

Is there someone to tell our hardworking chief minister that the people who are going to use the roads, the bridges, the under-passes and the flyovers constructed by his government are equally important if not more? He needs to invest in the projects designed for the social and cultural uplift of people. His overriding concern with the visible projects which obviously give him a political windfall will make greater sense if those seemingly invisible masses using them come to know how to benefit from them. And that will not be possible without a process of social and cultural transformation initiated by political leadership with a holistic vision of human development. The holy Bible thousands of years ago said: ‘Man does not live by bread alone’. What it hints at is the need of multi-dimensional human development.

If you are serious Mr Governor, get a brief report on education in Punjab from 1849 to 2013. Make a team and include in it some scholars who know Punjab’s history. Remember the year 1849 sir? The year is watershed in the modern history of Punjab. That was the year when the administration of colonialist East India Company occupied Punjab that ultimately proved to be a clean or unclean break with our past spread over thousands of years. It was the year that saw the introduction of a new education system which within a few decades made us illiterate from being highly literate people in the Sub-Continent. Find hard to believe it? Just get hold of a copy of the famous ‘A report on education in the Punjab’ based on an extensive survey conducted by Dr GW Leitner, one of the great linguists. After the occupation or what the East India Company called the ‘annexation’, the question of language to be used for the educational and administrative purposes prompted a debate. “In 1849 the Governor General of the Company, based in Calcutta, formed a three member Board of Administration in Lahore, who were to follow Act 29 of 1837, which made it mandatory on them to use vernacular languages in the administration in the lower and middle courts, as well as lower public offices,” quotes Majeed Sheikh in his write-up ‘How a company tussle set back the language of Lahore’. Most of the British officials came from Central India. The troops mostly comprised of ‘Purbias’ whom a popular saying describes thus:’ Hindustani baray shatani, aakar aakar chalte hain’ (Satanic Hidustanis haughtily fool along). This ‘satanity’ reflected the contempt the occupiers had for the Punjabis who resisted them very fiercely. The officials coming from Central India who could understand or speak various versions of Hindi or Urdu, insisted on introducing Urdu at lower level in the administration and in the new schools they planned to set up. A number of officers like J. Wilson,

deputy commissioner of Shah Pur (now a part of Sargodha district) and Robert Cust who supported the introduction of the Punjabi language lost the battle. ‘The Persian and Urdu might be taught in all schools under the patronage of government. But other languages and characters, such as Hindi, Sanskrit, Gurmukhi, Punjabi need not be used’ says The Administration Report of the Punjab (1851-52). The political implications of introducing the Punjabi were not lost on the perceptive colonialists. Dr Tariq Rehman in his ‘The Teaching of Punjabi: A Study in Power and Prejudice’ has quoted a British officer who wrote: “If Punjabi were adopted as the court language in the Punjab the whole of our educational system would be stultified. We are teaching the population to read and write Urdu, not Punjabi. Besides, any measure which would revive the Gurmukhi, which is the written Punjabi, would be a political error” (Melvill 1875). And ‘error’ they did not commit. Years before that Charles Napier had sensed the threat the Punjabis and their language posed. He wrote in 1849: “Punjab has been occupied but not conquered. The Punjabi and his language have yet to be conquered”. Majeed Sheikh has discovered an extremely important poster published by the colonial administration which one can see even today in Lahore Museum that promised “Two annas for a sword and six annas for a Punjabi Qaida”. In other words if you returned a sword you would get one anna and if you returned Punjabi Qaida (primer) you would get six annas as a reward. The colonialists feared the Punjabi language much more than the Punjabi sword. That was the measure of power the people’s language had. The language reminded the people who they were while political need was to force the people to discard their self-image and to internalise the new image of them created by the occupiers. And the best way to destroy the people’s self-image was to create a new system of schooling. In the newly established schools the role of language was crucial to building a politically perceived new image of Punjab, the Punjabis and the Punjabi language. To alienate the people from their language and what it symbolised they first dubbed it as a ‘rustic’ language, deliberating ignoring the historical fact that since 11th century the most learned minds like Ismaili saints, Saad salmon, Baba Farid, Guru Nanak, Guru Arjun, Shah Hussain, Damodar, Nosha Ganj Buksh, Bulleh Shah, Sultan Bahu, Waris Shah, Hafiz Barkhurdar, Mian Mohammad and Khawaja Ghulam Farid employed it for their creative expression. The Punjabi language had such a prestige and potential that the last Mogul emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, whom the colonialists dethroned, also wrote poetry in it. The Punjabi language was a political threat to the colonialists and it still is, to those who inherited the colonial ethos. — soofi01@hotmail.com

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September 13, 2013

Apart from declaring the Punjabi a ‘rustic’ language, the colonialists after the introduction of Urdu as official language at lower and middle level, initiated a politically motivated scholarly endeavour, subtly urging the different religious communities in Punjab, particularly Hindus and Muslims to search their identities based on the languages which were not theirs.

It was a classic tactic to divide the people speaking the same language. The Hindi-Urdu controversy is a good example to study. Both the Hindu and the Muslim Punjabis spoke Punjabi but the underlying historical conflict, a product of long Muslim rule, was exploited to make the Hindi the legacy of Hindu Punjabis and the Urdu that of Muslim Punjabis negating the historical fact that neither of the language belonged to the Punjabis not withstanding their religious differences.

So under the banner of half-baked divisive nationalism a communal sense of identity born of a false historical consciousness induced the elites of the communities to own what was not theirs and to disown what was legitimately theirs. As a consequence of such a huge distortion, the Punjabi was made out to be exclusively a Sikh language. No doubt the Sikhs proudly owned the language but it was not their exclusive preserve to say the least.

Dr G.W Leitner who along with some other officials supported the cause of Punjabi, revealed in his report that the Punjab had a high literacy rate, both male and female, before and immediately after the advent of colonialism due to a vast network of Maktabs, Madrassas, Patshalas, Gurmukhi and Mahajani schools.

Leitner wrote: “Among Muhammadans nearly all girls were taught the Koran; nor could a Sikh woman claim the title and privileges of a ‘learner’ unless she was able to read the Granth (1882: 98)”.

Another officer, J. Wilson, Deputy Commissioner of Shahpur (now a part of Sargodha), in his note on Primary Education in Punjab and the teaching of Punjabi in the Roman character, dated 21st April 1894 wrote: ‘Is it to be imagined that we can in the course of several generations teach any large proportion of this vast number to read and write a language so foreign to them as Urdu?

It may be objected that there is no one Punjabi language, but several distinct dialects. This is true, but it was also true of all written languages before a particular dialect was ultimately adopted because it was specially favoured by the literate.

Modern English was originally only one of many dialects; so were modern French and modern German. Similarly, there can be little difficulty in adopting one dialect of Punjabi and developing it into a language which will be readily understood by all Punjabi speakers, and at the same time capable of expressing their ideas with as little admixture of foreign words as possible’.

Yet another officer, W.S Talbot, Deputy Commissioner of Jhelum, commenting on the note of J.Wilson, wrote: ‘It cannot be doubted that if it were possible to make Punjabi the medium of education, our system would be more attractive to the agricultural classes and would in all probability bring to the schools a considerably large proportion of boys of those classes---.’

Such a rational and lucid thinking went unheeded because the imperative was to school the children in a colonial mode with the express intention of creating ‘educated’ men and women in a large number among the indigenous people who, as Franz Fanon said in his famous book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, were little more than the shadows of their masters, supportive of the imposed exploitative colonial structure.

Though oppressed they aped their oppressor with the eye on the left-over of colonial harvest.

In twentieth century the colonial edifice started showing cracks due to a host of historical factors, specially the emerging nationalist consciousness of the colonised and crises in Europe over the ‘territories’ i.e. the grab of lands and resources of less powerful nations which lagged behind in the spheres of science and technology.

The rise of independence movement in the Indian-subcontinent was marked and marred by conflicting revivalist streaks. The diversity and plurality of the subcontinent which reflected its immense richness emerged as a big stumbling block in the way of forming a united national front against the foreign rule.

Dead weight of history weighed heavily on the minds of those supposed to liberate their people who professed different faiths.

Their inability to overcome their communal prejudices and go beyond the narrow parameters of caste, creed and class created a comfortable space for the revivalists of all colours and hues who with their obscurantist agendas, instead of confronting the complex historical situation, sought to transform the present into dead but ‘glorious past’; the imagined and imaginary that was thought to be ‘pure’ though it was nothing more than a chimerical product of their warped mind.

Consequently in their bid to carve out exclusive faith-based identity ‘Hindu Punjabis’ though unable to speak Hindi declared it their mother tongue in the census while ‘Muslim Punjabis’ the majority of whom did not know Urdu declared it their mother tongue.

The Sikhs had no option other than owning Punjabi as their religion had its origins in Punjab and its founder Baba Guru Nanak wrote in the Punjabi language.

The Pakistan Movement ideologically spearheaded by the upper crust of the Muslims of UP in central India presented Urdu as their mother tongue that they shared with the Hindus as a mark of separate Muslim identity.

Such a move was possible in the wake of introduction of Urdu in Punjab, an important Muslim majority province. The notion of Urdu as a common heritage of the Muslims was forged to serve the interests of Muslim separatist movement, which it did.

But if we look at the flipside, two facts stand out; Urdu was never the language of any of the territories that ultimately became part of Pakistan. The people of present Pakistan, somehow, were persuaded to accept Urdu as one of the instruments to gain a new state but the Muslims of East Bengal, the biggest Muslim majority province, who actively advocated the case for Pakistan, never accepted Urdu as a mark of Muslim identity.

They showed intellectual maturity by not confusing language with religion. They were rightly proud of their language that had already produced a poet and writer, Rabindra Nath Tagore, who was the first in this part of the world to win the Noble Prize for literature.

Colonial enterprise in Punjab and the consequent soft political struggle waged against it with the help of communally conceived ideological tools devastatingly changed the linguistic and spiritual landscape of Punjab beyond recognition in less than a century.

Gain and loss for the Punjabi Muslims were equally big; they got rid of colonial rule and ‘majoritarian’ threat but lost their literary and intellectual heritage which their predecessors had fashioned over the last thousand years. Muslim Punjabis became a part of Pakistan but at the unbearable cost of losing their language.

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September 20 - 2013

Apart from declaring the Punjabi a ‘rustic’ language, the colonialists after the introduction of Urdu as official language at lower and middle level, initiated a politically motivated scholarly endeavour, subtly urging the different religious communities in Punjab, particularly Hindus and Muslims to search their identities based on the languages which were not theirs.

It was a classic tactic to divide the people speaking the same language. The Hindi-Urdu controversy is a good example to study. Both the Hindu and the Muslim Punjabis spoke Punjabi but the underlying historical conflict, a product of long Muslim rule, was exploited to make the Hindi the legacy of Hindu Punjabis and the Urdu that of Muslim Punjabis negating the historical fact that neither of the language belonged to the Punjabis not withstanding their religious differences.

So under the banner of half-baked divisive nationalism a communal sense of identity born of a false historical consciousness induced the elites of the communities to own what was not theirs and to disown what was legitimately theirs. As a consequence of such a huge distortion, the Punjabi was made out to be exclusively a Sikh language. No doubt the Sikhs proudly owned the language but it was not their exclusive preserve to say the least.

Dr G.W Leitner who along with some other officials supported the cause of Punjabi, revealed in his report that the Punjab had a high literacy rate, both male and female, before and immediately after the advent of colonialism due to a vast network of Maktabs, Madrassas, Patshalas, Gurmukhi and Mahajani schools.

Leitner wrote: “Among Muhammadans nearly all girls were taught the Koran; nor could a Sikh woman claim the title and privileges of a ‘learner’ unless she was able to read the Granth (1882: 98)”.

Another officer, J. Wilson, Deputy Commissioner of Shahpur (now a part of Sargodha), in his note on Primary Education in Punjab and the teaching of Punjabi in the Roman character, dated 21st April 1894 wrote: ‘Is it to be imagined that we can in the course of several generations teach any large proportion of this vast number to read and write a language so foreign to them as Urdu?

It may be objected that there is no one Punjabi language, but several distinct dialects. This is true, but it was also true of all written languages before a particular dialect was ultimately adopted because it was specially favoured by the literate.

Modern English was originally only one of many dialects; so were modern French and modern German. Similarly, there can be little difficulty in adopting one dialect of Punjabi and developing it into a language which will be readily understood by all Punjabi speakers, and at the same time capable of expressing their ideas with as little admixture of foreign words as possible’.

Yet another officer, W.S Talbot, Deputy Commissioner of Jhelum, commenting on the note of J.Wilson, wrote: ‘It cannot be doubted that if it were possible to make Punjabi the medium of education, our system would be more attractive to the agricultural classes and would in all probability bring to the schools a considerably large proportion of boys of those classes---.’

Such a rational and lucid thinking went unheeded because the imperative was to school the children in a colonial mode with the express intention of creating ‘educated’ men and women in a large number among the indigenous people who, as Franz Fanon said in his famous book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, were little more than the shadows of their masters, supportive of the imposed exploitative colonial structure.

Though oppressed they aped their oppressor with the eye on the left-over of colonial harvest.

In twentieth century the colonial edifice started showing cracks due to a host of historical factors, specially the emerging nationalist consciousness of the colonised and crises in Europe over the ‘territories’ i.e. the grab of lands and resources of less powerful nations which lagged behind in the spheres of science and technology.

The rise of independence movement in the Indian-subcontinent was marked and marred by conflicting revivalist streaks. The diversity and plurality of the subcontinent which reflected its immense richness emerged as a big stumbling block in the way of forming a united national front against the foreign rule.

Dead weight of history weighed heavily on the minds of those supposed to liberate their people who professed different faiths.

Their inability to overcome their communal prejudices and go beyond the narrow parameters of caste, creed and class created a comfortable space for the revivalists of all colours and hues who with their obscurantist agendas, instead of confronting the complex historical situation, sought to transform the present into dead but ‘glorious past’; the imagined and imaginary that was thought to be ‘pure’ though it was nothing more than a chimerical product of their warped mind.

Consequently in their bid to carve out exclusive faith-based identity ‘Hindu Punjabis’ though unable to speak Hindi declared it their mother tongue in the census while ‘Muslim Punjabis’ the majority of whom did not know Urdu declared it their mother tongue.

The Sikhs had no option other than owning Punjabi as their religion had its origins in Punjab and its founder Baba Guru Nanak wrote in the Punjabi language.

The Pakistan Movement ideologically spearheaded by the upper crust of the Muslims of UP in central India presented Urdu as their mother tongue that they shared with the Hindus as a mark of separate Muslim identity.

Such a move was possible in the wake of introduction of Urdu in Punjab, an important Muslim majority province. The notion of Urdu as a common heritage of the Muslims was forged to serve the interests of Muslim separatist movement, which it did.

But if we look at the flipside, two facts stand out; Urdu was never the language of any of the territories that ultimately became part of Pakistan. The people of present Pakistan, somehow, were persuaded to accept Urdu as one of the instruments to gain a new state but the Muslims of East Bengal, the biggest Muslim majority province, who actively advocated the case for Pakistan, never accepted Urdu as a mark of Muslim identity.

They showed intellectual maturity by not confusing language with religion. They were rightly proud of their language that had already produced a poet and writer, Rabindra Nath Tagore, who was the first in this part of the world to win the Noble Prize for literature.

Colonial enterprise in Punjab and the consequent soft political struggle waged against it with the help of communally conceived ideological tools devastatingly changed the linguistic and spiritual landscape of Punjab beyond recognition in less than a century.

Gain and loss for the Punjabi Muslims were equally big; they got rid of colonial rule and ‘majoritarian’ threat but lost their literary and intellectual heritage which their predecessors had fashioned over the last thousand years. Muslim Punjabis became a part of Pakistan but at the unbearable cost of losing their language.