By Intizar Hussain

Date:03-09-06

Source: Dawn

KHALID Ahmad’s recent comments about Urdu seem to confer a seal of failure on the fate of this poor language. What in fact prompted him to make these comments is the analysis of the situation of the language in Pakistan made by Rahat Kazmi on some TV channel. Not convinced by his analysis, he interposes his own wise words for our benefit while writing his article in Friday Times (Aug 18-24, 2006). Most hurt he was when Rahat Kazmi, as reported by him, “complained that literature had all but vanished from Pakistan and seemed to imply that this happened because enough importance was not given to Urdu, and that English seemed to dominate in an uncreative way.”

Now Khalid Ahmad is at pains to prove that it is in fact Urdu which has turned uncreative. And that if any creativity is left in us it is because of the fact that a few souls from among us have chosen to write their novels in English, “which are quite readable by world standards”. Does he mean to say that Manto’s short stories, Qurratualain Hayder’s novels and poems of Faiz and Rashid are not quite readable by world standards as compared to the English novels he has referred to?

But soon he realizes that the English novels written by Indians were in a better position to be acknowledged as ones fulfilling the requirements of world standards. So he turns to them for the confirmation of his theory of creativity. From a statement of Dr Gopi Chand Narang, he draws his own conclusion that Indian writers writing in English are more creative as compared to those writing in their national language Hindi. Now he feels perfectly confident and declares that both the national languages of India and Pakistan, that is Hindi and Urdu, “both have become uncreative”. It is left for us to conclude that the South Asians have been left with no choice but to adopt English as the medium of their literary expression.

The situation is that most of the intellectuals in Pakistan have read English novels written by Indians in recent decades, but few of us have cared to keep in touch with what is being written in Hindi. So we can hardly be a judge about their worth in comparison to English novels written by Indians. Personally speaking, with the little I have read from Hindi fiction, partly in original and partly in English translations, I am more impressed by it than by the Indian English fiction, most of which gives the impression of being written with an eye on the likes and dislikes of the Western opinion makers. So Nirmal Verma appears to me a more genuine writer than those whose English fiction has been boosted up by these opinion makers, mostly for reasons other than literary. And keeping in view Nirmal Verma and his likes, I cannot dare call Hindi an uncreative language.

With Khalid Ahmad, one reason of his for considering Urdu as uncreative is its supposed linkage with extremism, which has led to terrorism and suicide bombing. “Urdu” he says, “is the vehicle of a message that is non creative (unquestioning) and overwhelmingly ideological”. How ironic it is that the young boys now being suspected for terrorist activities are all those brought about in English environments. Urdu has played no part in their ideological education. It was left for English to play this role.

Now a few words about the creativity of the English language. At one time, Shakespeare was with us the sole guarantee of the creativity of the English language. Soon we were under the sway of the Romantics. With the advent of modern movement in Urdu, we found ourselves under the spell of post-war modern English literature as represented by Eliot and Pound in poetry, and Lawrence and Joyce in fiction. But what about now? Where has that creativity, which had brought out these giants, gone away? What an irony that at one time we were under the awe of English because of Shakespeare, Eliot, Joyce and Lawrence and now we are over-awed by it because of its domination in the global market as Rahat Kazmi has pointed out.

Even then I will not dare say that English has now turned uncreative. Khalid Ahmad is a learned man. I have always admired his scholarly writings. He should have an understanding better than myself about the way a literary tradition in any language works. A literary tradition should not be deemed as a factory, which is expected to always run on a high speed producing incessantly goods of a uniform sample. The literary tradition works in a different way. It moves on at a slow pace, guaranteeing the continuity of creative activity. A literary movement comes in a torrential way, serving as a stimulant for the creative activity. But a literary movement is always short-lived. Therein lies its effectiveness. To expect a literary tradition to move on permanently with the speed of a movement is a layman’s approach to literature.

Identifying a whole literary movement with any one single writer betrays also the same sort of approach. So it is a bit difficult for such souls to understand that Urdu poetry has not come to an end with the death of Faiz. These people forget that modern Urdu poetry owes more to Rashid and Miraji than to anybody else, and yet their deaths were never taken by our literary world as the end of modern poetry.

But Rahat Kazmi has gone a step farther. He asserts that creativity had declined right with the emergence of Pakistan and that “literature had all but vanished from Pakistan”. Of course he makes an exception of Faiz. I wonder who supplied this precious information to him? As is evident from his statements, he himself has not cared to keep in touch with the development of literature in Pakistan. He was content to limit his study to Faiz alone in accordance to the Urdu proverb Hathi kai paun main sab ka paun. According to Kazmi, that happened because of state’s indifference to Urdu. Woe to the language and to its literary tradition which relies on state patronage for its survival. But I don’t think that Urdu falls in this category. Its history tells a different story.

In the end I have one question to ask from Khalid Ahmad. He says that “the provinces (barring Punjab) do not accept Urdu as the language of official discourse”. If so, why Bazanjo’s government in Balochistan and Mufti Mahmood’s in NWFP cared to declare Urdu as their official language? They still are.

He further says that Pakistan made the mistake of imposing Urdu on the country. This statement needs a correction. The mistake had been committed only to the extent of East Pakistan. I need not go into its details.