By Sarwat Ali

The News:  March 27, 2016

A collection of articles and interviews on the history and evolution of the Punjabi language by someone who has been leading the charge

The making of Pakistan placed the Punjabis in a triple bind. The province was divided on communal lines and the cultural assets, both tangible and intangible, were bifurcated on the same basis. Much that was of Punjab and belonged to the Punjabis — like language, music, shared history — was thus lost to this partitioning of the subcontinent. Their language became the language of the Sikhs and their culture primarily rooted in the soil and syncretic in nature was exposed to purges.

The concept of the state that developed after independence, unfortunately, was too unitary in character to accommodate the multiplicity of subcultures that flourished in this land. The political instability and particularly the relationship with the majority population province pushed the Punjabis into a mode pigeonhole of defending the unity of the country as against the rest — countering so to say the centrifugal stresses. The imposition of military rule, by its very nature authoritarian and unitary, exasperated the situation. It labelled the Punjabis, being the dominant community in the country and in the armed forces, as villains.

The narrative of the state that was developed aligned itself to the foreign influences, conquerors and cultural practices, decrying much that was local as being heretical or outside the ambit of religion. Being the first substantial territorial unit in the subcontinent from the north west, this was often the land that was scourged and its people slaughtered. It became a battleground and thus spelled ruin for the people and its economy.

The poetry of the Punjab is full of the horrors of war, pillage, arson, rape, loot and bloodbaths. But these happened to be the saviour conquerors according to the state narrative. There was not much truck for Guru Nanak or Bulleh Shah or Waris Shah as they wrote of the destruction on an industrial scale.

The entire struggle of the Sikhs has been cast as a rebellion against the Muslims while they demanded, initially peacefully and then through militancy, their right to practice their faith and be co-masters of their land. This rebellion was crushed, resulting in greater militant backlash in the centuries after the death of Akbar. Ranjit Singh’s rule in many ways was a reaction to what had been done to them at the height of the Muslim rule. He desecrated mosques, and stripped the monuments of precious stones and probably was not very evenhanded towards all communities in his reign.

Since independence, the Punjabis have been lamenting over their dilemma and the bind, calling for acceptance of their culture and language. Leading the charge have been many including Fakhar Zaman who, being a political person and also part of some governments, has often been in a better position to enforce some correction of vision.

The Punjabis have gained economically and politically a lot by aligning themselves with the unitary model of the state, upholding Urdu as the national language. The more educated or upwardly mobile abandoned the language, switched to Urdu in their homes and sent their children to English medium schools. Since unfortunately it was posited as an either/or option, it had to be at the expense of the mother tongue, Punjabi.

As Fakhar Zaman has often confessed, the Punjabis have been the worst enemies of their own culture and language because they benefited by switching over to Urdu, demarcating the entire country as their hunting ground.

There are various articles and interviews in this collection on the history and evolution of the Punjabi language which are of great help and contain plenty of information which generally even the Punjabis do not know, as they have been taught a sanitised history of their language and culture. Similarly, the various political movements that germinated, developed and were then put down or manipulated also is of considerable interest to the reader both in the Punjab and the other provinces.

The great development in the agriculture that took place in the Punjab with the building of the canal system, the biggest in the world, also needs to be studied anew in view of its multidimensional impact. It resulted in migration of population as land was distributed in that vast area; it also resulted in economic readjustment because of the wealth generated by this agricultural produce, the realignment of the classes because of this distribution and allocations to various segments of society. It is also of great interest and seminal in nature because, in the communal divide of the Punjab, little attention is paid to the underlying causes that fuel these differences.

Another activity or cause for the Punjab retaining its peculiar set of problems was the vast recruitment of soldiers from the province. This had to have an impact on the division of the subcontinent, creation of the country and the subsequent political history of the country.

Fakhar Zaman is of the firm opinion that merely by promoting literature and Punjabi as a language, the Punjabis will not be convinced of the return to their own culture because this step is not good enough. What is needed is the political movement for getting the Punjabis to speak and write in their own language and to own their past and culture. As a first step, Fakhar Zaman has been holding conferences since the 1980s to highlight the issue and to motivate the Punjabis. The first conference was held in 1986, and since then many have been held.

One does not know what has been the outcome of the conferences, whether the Punjabis have been motivated enough to change their direction. The enemy within is the hardest to fight but, as has been often said, it is the struggle and the effort that is more important than the end result. Fakhar Zaman has been consistent and unflinching in pursuing the cause.