Very few Hindus realise that the largest surviving group of victims of the Partition are those Muslims who chose to stay in India. They came to be mistrusted and despised in the land of their birth. Nothing symbolises their more poignantly than the treatment meted out to Urdu in post-Independent India. This can well be described as linguistic genocide.
Most people are just as unaware that in the region that gave birth to Urdu and was the traditional centre for Urdu learning for centuries, namely Uttar Pradesh, there is not a single Urdu medium primary or junior high school. The only two Urdu medium high schools are those run by and affiliated to AMU. Consequently, very few among the post-Independence generation can read or write Urdu.
All those families who are keen to have their children pick up some Urdu have to send their kids to religious madrasas. Thus Urdu learning gets divorced from secular education and religious leaders alone get associated with the defence and spread of Urdu. This strengthens the hold of those Muslim leaders who want their community to limit their concerns to religious issues and ignore the secular interests of Urdu speakers. This further widens the gulf between Muslims and other communities.
Why this attempt at decimation of Urdu? Many Hindus have been misled into believing that Urdu is an alien language, that it was once the language of foreign invaders and that for this reason their supposed descendants made it the language that helped bring about the partition of India. The actual facts tell a very different story. The foreign invaders who brought Islam to India were Turks who knew no Urdu simply because Urdu did not exist at that time. Though their own language was Turkish, their successors, the Mughals, used Persian as the court language ... established ...
... The great Mughals considered Urdu too plebian for use as a royal language. Only later lesser Mughals whose empires had shrunk in both size and glory began using Urdu at court ...
Urdu was not the language of Muslim rulers but grew on Indian soil as a language of the bazaars and Chhavnis (Military garrisons) of north India out of the interaction between Persian and Khariboli. Just as Hindi is Sanskritised Khariboli, Urdu is Persianised Khariboli and, therefore, Hindi and Urdu are close kin. Urdu was the language of the educated elite among both Hindus and Muslims for a few hundred years until English replaced it.
Thus, contrary to popular belief, Urdu is not the language of Muslims alone. Both Hindus and Muslims joined together in creating this beautiful language. It is no less incorrect to stigmatise Urdu as the language that created the partition of India. The very idea of Pakistan was conceptualised in England by a handful of Western educated Muslim intellectuals like Jinnah and Iqbal. They cooked up this fantasy influenced by European nationalism - an ideology that has been responsible for some of the bloodiest massacres and wars known to human history, including two world wars.
It was an anglicised intellectuai, Jinnah, who hardly knew any Urdu and was not even a practising Muslim, who was able to convince large numbers of educated Muslims that they were not just a community, but a separate, distinct nationality and, therefore, needed a separate homeland and nation state. Almost till the very end, the indigenous educated ulemas and maulanas sided with the Congress and opposed the partition. Thus, the ideology that led to the disastrous partition of India was the product of Western education rather than that of Urdu or Islamic tradition ...
Nevertheless, the Hindu elite has been taught to mistrust Urdu because it was adopted as the national language of Pakistan. Ironically enough, despite fifty years of brainwashing of Pakistani Muslims into accepting Urdu as their national language, it has very weak roots in Pakistan. Urdu is an alien language for most Pakistanis, barring the minority who migrated from Uttar Pradesh at the time of partition. Most Pakistanis speak very clumsy Urdu with a distinct accent ... The real Urdu speaking people are still called Mohajirs, that is, foreigners. The party of the Mohajirs, the MQM, is locked in a deadly battle with the Pakistani political establishment., Many people in Pakistan's provinces feel Urdu is an unwelcome imposition on them and they are extremely hostile to Urdu speaking Mohajirs.
Just as the political establishment in India has tried to wipe out Hindustani from official use, which is indistinguishable from Urdu, and substituted Sanskritised Hindi, so also the Pakistani establishment is at pains to ruin Urdu by stuffing their official language with as many Arabic words as possible while also distancing it from Hindustani. The result might be considered comic were it not for its tragic consequences ... The Sanskritisation of Hindi, courtesy the Bharat Sarkar, is part of a political exercise meant to drive a wedge between Hindus and Muslims in north India. Similarly, while most who know Hindustani in India can enjoy Pakistani popular entertainment and ghazals, we find it hard to follow the language used in the news bulletins of sarkari PTV. ... A section of the Muslim leadership has been working hard to force all Muslims - no matter if they live in Kerala, Karnataka, Assam or Gujarat - to adopt Urdu as their mother tongue. This amounts. to driving a wedge between them and the local culture and community in which they are now rooted.
The language of every community in India is region-specific, not religion specific. Just as Hindi is not the language of all Hindus in India, Urdu cannot and is not the language of all Muslims in the sub-continent. Muslims will have the incentive to stay rooted in their regional and linguistic identities only if they feel secure and confident that their religious, cultural, economic, political and citizenship rights are secure. If they are victims of hatred and violence, if they don't feel physically secure, politically confident and culturally fulfilled, they are likely to seek security in huddling together defensively as an inward looking religious community that uses formal adherence to Urdu for symbolic purposes alone. (Source: The Hindustan Times, 4 June, 1999)
