By Hafizur Rahman

The Nation Lahore Edition, Islamabad Edition

The land of Punjab, comprising Pakistani Punjab and Indian Punjab is the home of a linguistic anomaly, or paradox, the likes of which, at least to the best of my knowledge, may not be available anywhere in the world except in the sub-continent. The people of both the areas speak the same language, but if they write down their respective thoughts, the people of the other, Punjab are not able to read them. They can't even correspond in their mother tongue.

It is true that basically the two Punjabis are the same, but Pakistanis write theirs in the Persian script while the Hindus and Sikhs use the Gurmukhi script for the purpose. Neither is able to decipher what the other has penned down. This distinction, if you can call it a distinction, also applies to Hindi and Urdu but only to a very small extent. It was not always like this, except in rare instances. Before August 1947, there must have been very few Sikhs (at that time Gurmukhi was a strictly Sikh preserve) who could not read and write Urdu, nor would there be any Punjabi Hindu. Though their women rarely learned Urdu which otherwise ruled the linguistic roost.

Except for one or two Hindi and Gurmukhi newspapers, all the purely Sikh and Hindu newspapers, political as well as social, and even religious journals, were published in Urdu. All this changed at partition when there were no Hindus and Sikhs left in West Punjab and almost all the Muslims of East Punjab migrated to Pakistan. Well, the change was not immediate, and it took the non-Muslims of Indian Punjab some 25 years to get out of the Urdu habit and switch over to Hindi and Gurmukhi.

I still remember the amusing remark made by Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister. A baffle royal had started in East Punjab between the Hindus and Sikhs whether the official language of the province should be Hindi or Punjabi (in the Gurmukhi script), and tempers were running high. Its a miracle that riots did not break out on the subject. Mr Nehru said, "They are fighting over the two languages, Hindi and Punjabi, but strangely the fight is being carried on in Urdu." For at that time almost all the newspapers in eastern Punjab were still being published in Urdu. I may mention here that Punjabi in the Gurmukhi script is now the official and court language of East Punjab as also the medium of instruction. I was talking about the issue of one language, two scripts. This has created a gulf between the Punjabi-speaking peoples of the two countries. When they meet, they talk and discuss common topics - even the respective divergent viewpoints on the sub-continent's thorny politics and argue and laugh together for hours and enjoy each other's company, but when they go back home they have to resort to English in order to correspond. Only a few Hindus and Sikhs are left there who are old enough to be able to use Urdu.

This has given rise to something new. There is a trend among Pakistanis interested in the development of their mother tongue and securing for it its due place in both society and government, to learn the Gurmukhi script. Of course this is confined to very few of them, only those whose interests are purely literary, and I suppose you can count such persons on your fingers. You will certainly ask: why should these Pakistanis be learning Gurmukhi? Why don't the people on the other side bother to acquire acquaintance with the Persian script?

The answer is simple. There is much more to learn from the high quality research work done in East Punjab. At the moment we can only say that perhaps the Sikhs (and Hindus) do not have such fine Punjabi poets as we have (even Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote some Punjabi poetry in the end) but that is all. We cannot match the probing intellectual and academic labour of years undertaken by them, particularly in the Guru Nanak University in Patiala. In fact they have done more work on the Muslim Sufi poets than we are able to show. Also we are far behind in prose writing, especially fiction, while in the domain of travelogues, criticism, biography and autobiography and learned subjects like history, we have nothing much to show.

The sad fact is that the votaries of Punjabi are still fighting (even among themselves) to obtain some sort of recognition for it. But all is not lost and rays of hope can be seen. Many dedicated people have made the development and propagation of Punjabi their life's mission. The movement is two-pronged. One is devoted exclusively to building up an atmosphere for the use of Punjabi in all walks of life and prevailing upon an unwilling government to accept the universal principle that education for children should begin in their mother tongue.

The other, which is more important if we want to match the Punjabis across the border, is to encourage research and publication of learned literature to bring the language at par with those about which it is claimed that they are comprehensive and capable of expressing all modern ideas. Happily, serious efforts are now afoot in this regard. and recently, apart from research into classical literature, a voluminous dictionary of the Punjabi language has been published, as also an interesting large volume of Punjabi proverbs. As I see it, the movement is gradually shifting from being just a fad to earnest long and hard labour in the purely intellectual and literary domains like any other modern language.

All well and good, but it is the first prong that presents the most difficulties. Try an experiment to understand the problem. Go to any English-medium school in Lahore or Rawalpindi or any other big city of Punjab, and ask individual children, boys and girls, from Class I to A-Level, what is their mother tongue. Invariably, and without exception, all of them will say it is Urdu, even if both their parents are 100 per cent Punjabi and converse with each other in the language of their own parents. So where does this leave poor Punjabi as a mother tongue? Only in the villages?

There are many other aspects, features and facets of the problem that confronts the lover of Punjabi, and one article does not even skim the surface. The issue of the rural-urban divide, the gap between the educated rich and the not-so-educated poor, and the establishment's preference for Urdu at the cost of Punjabi also call for attention. Then, I should like to devote a piece to the books published recently, particularly during the last year. I also want to talk of writers and scholars who live abroad permanently and go on doing their bit for their mother tongue. So, let us see what I am able to do.