By Prof M Qasim Bughio

The News Karachi Edition

The freedom movement of India, for the most part, received the staunch support and participation of its people. It was particularly strong and active in those areas where Hindus constituted the majority. Although its initial aim was to obtain freedom from the British, it dealt with many other issues. The language question, in particular, was a strong issue-it was hoped that with their freedom the people would also be free to replace English with Hindi as the official language.

In those areas where Hindi-speaking people were in the majority (Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar), the Urdu-speaking population of these areas weakened their case, as they were not prepared to accept the claim that Hindi should be made the national and official language of India, but instead projected their demands for Urdu. Their demands were supported by the All-India Muslim League (the political party working for the rights of Muslims in united India) passing resolutions in favour of Urdu.

'As the Urdu language was originally an Indian language, and was the result of interaction of Hindu and Muslim culture and it was spoken by a great part of the people of this country, it was best suited to develop a united nationality and the attempt to replace it by Hindi might upset the structural, basis of Urdu, otherwise known as Hindustani, and adversely affect the growth of comradeship between the Hindu and Muslim sections..." (Pakistan Movement: Historical documents, 1976:164-65).

Gandhi, after entering into the freedom movement, surveyed the situation and came up with what he saw as the solution by suggesting that Hindustani be made the official language. In the course of carrying out his plan, he succeeded in passing a resolution of the Indian National Congress in 1925 which states:
"The proceedings of Congress should be conducted as far as possible in Hindustani, the English language or any provincial language may be used if the speaker is unable to speak Hindustard or whenever necessary..."
In response to this situation widespread disapproval came from the native speakers of the other Indian languages who were not willing to drop their own languages and adopt Hindustani. Because of this, it was not possible to offer one language as the national language of India. After independence, in order to solve the complexity which such linguistic diversity fostered it was eventually declared in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution in 1954 that fourteen Indian ethnic languages should be made national/regional and Hindi would occupy the position of national, official language. Later, in 1967, Sindhi was added as a fifteenth national language. English was not mentioned in the constitution, but was, in fact, used as a government language at the federal level and in some states.

With the creation of Pakistan, there was an overall desire in the country for the implementation of a national language in order to secure the new country's integrity. Amongst Pakistan's ruling elite and within the intellectual circles there were long debates concerning the question of which language(s) should be made national and official for Pakistan.

At this time, the Urdu-speaking population migrated from India voiced their demands for Urdu to be implemented as the national language, arguing that Urdu had been the lingua franca during the freedom movement of India and the language of the Muslims of India. Some Punjabi-speaking people educated in Urdu, who were in communication with the British through the medium of Hindustani, supported this demand. Some scholars of Urdu, however, hold the view that where the word Hindustani was used for language it meant Urdu. (Fatehpuri, 1987).

Various other views concerning the language question were put forward: There were those such as the Aga Khan and others who desired Arabic as the national language, arguing that this was not only the language of the Qur'aan and Hadith, but that all Muslims were familiar with it through their religious practices. Adoption of Arabic would assist in promoting good relations between the Muslims of the Arabic world by this means as opposed to Urdu which was associated with the period of the downfall of the Muslim state. Arabic, as a universal Language of the Muslim world, would unite; Urdu would divide and isolate. (Aga Khan, 1957) Others were of the view that the majority language, ie, Bengali whose speakers comprised 56 per cent of the total population should be introduced as the national language. Some conscientious native political leaders believed that all five indigenous languages should be made national languages and for government purposes English should be maintained until an indigenous Language was enabled to take the position of English as the official language through conscious language planning.

Some held the view that in the eastern part of Pakistan Bengali should be adopted as the national language, while in the west Urdu should be introduced. Here Punjabi, a language lacking a proper developed script and literature, was spoken by the majority of the people who, bypassing their native language, had adopted Urdu into their education system during the British period. Contrary to this, many believed that Pakistan, as a new nation, would weaken its integrity if it was to adopt various different languages as national languages. The adoption of only Urdu, it was argued, in a multinational/multilingual country, would contribute to the emergence of a sense of nationhood. However, because Urdu was not inimediately capable of fulfilling the criteria for being a national language-it did not have a fully developed body of literature and people generally were unfamiliar with it-English would be adopted as the official language until Urdu had time to take root and efficiently meet the demands for government correspondence.
After a long debate concerning the sole national language, in addition to Urdu being implemented as the sole national language of Pakistan, English was made the language of official correspondence.
It must be pointed out that, among all the five provinces of Pakistan, Urdu was not the language of any of the ethnic nationalities. According to the 1951 census conducted soon after independence, Urdu was the mother tongue of only 2.37 per cent and was spoken as a second language by 4.2 per cent of the total population of Pakistan whilst Bengali was the mother tongue of 56.40%, Punjabi 28.55%, Sindhi 8.47%, Pashtu 3.48% and Balochi 1.29%. English was the mother tongue of only 0.02% and was spoken as an additional language by only 1. 1 % of the total population. This can be observed from the table given below which illustrates languages spoken as mother tongue and second language in 1951 and 1961.
Language 1951 1961
Ll 12 Li 12
Baluchi 1.29 - 1.09 -
Bengali 56.40 0.17 55,48 0.32
English 0.02 1.87 0.02 1.38
Punjabi 28.55 0.84 29.02 0.52
Pashtu 3.48 0.41 3.70 0.21
Sindhi 8.47 0.80 8.51 0.89
Urdu 2.37 4.03 2.65 3.559
Mother tongue Languages (L 1) and Second Languages (L 2) in Pakistan by the percentage of total population.

By the adoption of Urdu and English, Pakistan was made an exoglossic country. "We may call a country exoglossic when the national official language has been brought in from abroad, and its few native speakers do not form the majority of the inhabitants in any district or major locality." (Kloss, 1968,71)
At this stage there was a drain of English and Urdu educated people from Sindh, owing to the large-scale migration of Sindhi Hindus to Indiavery few Sindhi Muslims at this time were educated in English. This gap was filled by immigrants from India and other provinces of Pakistan. Meanwhile the prestige status of English grew from strength to strength. Many schools opened within the private sector (in urban areas) to which access was only given to those privileged enough to be able to afford the high costs involved in English tuition. A successful education in English soon came to encompass all those things through which power and social standing were to be attained and by this means English became the language of the ruling class.

The decision about language choice documented above illustrates the general disregard of public sentiment. Obviously the choice of Urdu as a national language was not based on problem solving or the representation of the whole population, because emphasis was placed on attaining proficiency in non-indigenous languages-not an easy task-education suffered a setback as it was not being provided in the mother tongue at all levels.

The introduction of Urdu as the national language caused a series of problem which could not be easily solved. Firstly, it created grievances amongst the native speakers of Bengali, Sindhi, and Pashtu who vociferously demanded proper rights for their own languages. In East Bengal, the struggle for the status of Bengali gained momentum and the growing protest from Bengalis to make their native language national and official resulted in widespread agitation, with hundreds of lives being lost in the process. (Saeed, 1967:1986)

Under pressure from such resilient demands, the constitution proceeded to grant official status to the Bengali language in 1956. It stated: "The official languages of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan shall be Urdu and Bengali: provided that for a period of twenty years from the Constitution Day, English shall continue to be used for all official purposes for which it was used in Pakistan immediately before the Constitution Day, but Parliament by law provide for the use of English, after the expiry of the said period of twenty years, for such purposes as may be specified in that law."
In the western part of Pakistan the official language of Bengali was not so palatable and likewise with Urdu in the eastern part. The controversy which emanated from this language situation continued to grow. Politically, the Bengalis had been misrepresented, and that economically they suffered a decline and this resulted in their demands for equal social and political rights which finally came to a head in 1970 when, after a civil war and the intervention of India, East Pakistan became an independent country, Bangladesh.

The introduction of Urdu in the rest of the provinces met with varying degrees of tolerance. Since the Balochis did not have a script and any developed literature as such they accepted Urdu. Similarly with the Punjabis, even though they had a rich supply of literature, they did not possess a standard script and they had already adopted Urdu-a language with many similarities to their own-into their education system during the British period. Unlike their aforementioned neighbours, the Pashtoons, on the other hand, were reluctant to accept Urdu becoming the official language. (Das Gupta, 1969)

As regards Sindh, a linguistic case of a different nature emerges. During the British period (1843-1947) Sindhi existed as the official language of Sindh province with all levels of education conducted in it. However, post-independence saw the implementation of Urdu as the official language. Sindhi and Urdu both belong to the Indo-Aryan family of world languages. Geographically, Urdu can be distinguished as a central and Sindhi as a northwestern member of this group. Linguistically, they differ from each other in many respects:
The Sindhi alphabet has 52 letters while Urdu has 44. Within its alphabet, Sindhi incorporates all phonemes of Urdu. However, this is not the case with Urdu as a number of sounds have developed in Sindhi which are not found in this language. Most noticeable among these are the implosive b, j, g, d and the nasals, n, n and j.

The Sindhi language acquired its own peculiar features from Prakrit languages whereas Urdu developed as a lingua fronanca in the polyglot environment of central India during Muslim rule. Seen from this perspective, in Urdu not a single sentence can be quoted which does not include forms derived from two or more languages, especially from Arabic, Persian, or Sanskrit, Hindi or one of the several languages of the Asian subcontinent such as Balochi, Punjabi, and Pushto. Finally, it is a Sindhi peculiarity that all words must end in a vowel-short, long or nasalised; no word can be found which ends in a consonant. Urdu does not share this peculiarity and, indeed, many words have consonantal endings.

When the Sindhis, who had treated the immigrants with hospitality, saw that they had to adopt a foreign langauge brought by the immigrants, they feared the equilibrium of their society would be upset. The adoption of Urdu as the official language in place of the indigenous language would result; it was feared, in the Urdu-speaking immigrants gaining the same advantages in industry, politics and the Civil Service as English brought to Englishmen or the English educated.

Looking towards the consequences which such a decision would lead to, and seeing how this would limit their overall opportunities, the Sindhis now became conscious of the validity of their own language. Intellectuals, writers, teachers, students and politicians through their books, pamphlets, and the medium of the Sindhi press began to air their views for the rightful status of the Sindhi language. The Urduspeaking immigrants, however, through the Urdu press and some sections of the bureaucracy countered such demands and in this way the gap between the indigenous people and immigrants, instead of being bridged by the process of assimilation, which had happened in the case of previous foreigners (the Aryans, Arabs, Pathans, Mirzas, Moghuls, Punjabis and the Balochis), was widened.

In the case of Sindhi speakers who migrated to india, we can observe that, in the absence of a Sindhi-speaking region in the country, all Sindhi immigrants had to settle in areas where other Indian languages were spoken as regional languages. Following this the Sindh immigrants were faced with the new linguistic context of having to acquire a language other than their own. They soon discovered that their own language could not serve their needs in the new socio-economic context. Over the past forty-five years the language has become highly acculturated to other languages and narrow in its function having lost its acceptability as a norm for group identify. (Daswani, 1989) The consequences of this means that today although Sindhi is the mother tongue of about 2.5 million people it is not spoken in any single geographical region of India. Indian Sindhi gives us an instance of a fully developed language decaying as a result of the competitive pressures of the economically more dominant languages, Non-viability has determined its decay and disuse. With the creation of Pakistan, the capital of Sindh, Karachi, was named as the capital city and because of its key position and the mass of employment opportunities which it offered, a high number of people from other areas of Pakistan, all with different languages, moved there. These migrants used Urdu for their business and spoke their native languages at home while the Sindhis still retained their mother tongue. A similar situation developed in other urban areas although on a lower level. The rest of the area remained monolingual.

Prior to the 'One-Unit' period, it was decided that from standard three (up to the age of eight years) children would study Urdu as a compulsory subject whilst Urdu-speaking pupils would study Sindhi as well as their other tongue. Thus a decision was never implemented, however, and after the imposition of the 'One Unit (1955) Sindhi departed from the curriculum and Sindhi students were forced to study Urdu. One year after martial law was imposed in 1958, a national education commission was established for the general advancement of the education system and to consider the medium of education. It suggested: "The experience of other countries shows that where there are many languages, the best results could not be obtained. When the education in the mother tongue will be given up to fifth standard... but after standard five (up to the age of ten years) the national language would be adopted as the medium of teaching and the other tongue will stop forthwith. We strongly recommend the above formula." (National Education Commission Report, 1959).