By Shafqat Tanvir Mirza

Dawn Lahore Edition

DR Zaheer Ahmad Siddiqi, registrar of the Government College, has very kindly taken note of a piece written by me about the introduction of Punjabi at master's level. Classes have not yet been started. Thank God, the registrar has, on behalf of the college, committed that, "the college plans to start MA (Punjabi) classes in the future". Good enough.

It was never said in this column that MA Punjabi was offered as a subject in the past. The piece was meant to draw the attention of the authorities to introduce the language at MA level which the authorities are going to do in "the future".

In his recently published autobiography, Dar Dar Thokar Khaey, Dr Mubarik Ali has narrated an incident. He says when he was teaching history at the Jamshoro University, his department received the thesis paper of the MA candidates of the Government College, Lahore. He was supposed to evaluate them. But before he could do so, the head of the history department of the university ordered that no student of the Government College should be given first class marks. Why? it was the Government College, Lahore, which had produced top civil servants and which still produces them on merit and not on the quota system. This was one reason and the other was that most of the men produced by the Government College had no sympathy with the local languages while the Sindhis are very sensitive about their language and they had got their province separated from Bombay in 1937 on lingual basis. Their language was introduced as a medium of instruction during the earlier stages of the Raj. On the other hand, the local language is still deprived of this status in the Punjab and Punjabi children are instructed in a language other than their mother tongue. The registrar and the governing council of the Government College must be aware of the fact that the language problem is the most sensitive issue for all societies and Pakistan is no exception. The Pakistan Establishment did not recognize this national issue. Therefore, it did not implement that linguistic formula given by the father of the nation who had said in Dhaka that Urdu was the national or the link language of the country while the provinces were free to choose their own official languages. The establishment in Pakistan and some of the fundamentalists still oppose provincial languages.

It was the language issue which had separated the National Conference of Sheikh Abdullah and the Muslim Conference of Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas in Jammu and Kashmir. The Dogra rulers and the Muslim Conference belonged to Punjabi/Dogri/Pahari-speaking areas while the Kashmiri-speaking areas of the valley were against the Dogras and their language and culture. The people of the valley were never happy with those who had deprived them of their independence in the 16th century. The situation was still the same in 1947 when the Muslim Conference supported the Maharaja who at that stage had declared that he would remain independent. On the other hand, nationalists like Sheikh Abdullah had launched the Quit Kashmir Movement against the Maharaja. These two conflicting realities changed the situation in favour of India and the Maharaj for which we are still suffering.

People in Pakistan might have noticed that all the leaders of the All-parties Hurriyat Conference speak Kashmiri wile addressing big public gatherings in the valley and, in fact, the majority of the APHC leadership is Kashmiri-speaking. In the light of the above, there is no need to say that even in Afghanistan they have clashed on Many issues and one of them is that they belong to two different lingual groups - Pushto and Persian. This is a serious warning to those who still believe in single-language rule. It is as dangerous as single-party rule.

In the Punjab, educational institutions at higher stages should have arranged the teaching of other provincial languages like Sindhi, Pushto, Balochi and Kashmiri and it a special need of the Government College, the nursery established for preparing the best civil servants and the concept of the best civil servant in the eyes of our colonial rulers was that the chosen ones should contact the people they ruled through linguistic affinity. Their ICS officers were taught Punjabi before they were posted in the Punjab and it is another matter that some of the British administrators had done unprecedented work on the Punjab and the Punjabi language. Can we even forget Richard Temple, Ibbetson and others? None of the Punjabi ICS or CSP officers from the Government College can claim to have done any matching work in the field of culture, politics, economics, history or language and literature. One can name Masud Khaddarposh who stood for Punjabi but his own contribution to literature is negligible.

We know that Ashfaq Ahmad, Bano Qudsia, Athar Tahir, Shehzad Qaiser and Safdar Mir are from the Government College and also Qayyum Nazar, the first head of the Punjabi department at the Oriental College was from the same college, but that is all. What we need are young men well-rooted in their soil and its culture which is more humane and sympathetic towards other religions and cultures.