Census of India: 1991 - Series I - INDIA: Paper-I of 1997 on Language which has just been published indicates that Urdu is steadily declining in all Urdu-speaking States, in other words, it is dying a slow death, though it still retains its pan-Indian character as no other scheduled, far less a non-scheduled language does. According to the Census it ranks 6th, after Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi and Tamil in the number of persons who declared it as their Mother Tongue. Table I shows the relative pattern of the languages which were declared at their Mother Tongue by at least 1% of the total national population:

Table - 1

Scheduled Languages in Descending Order of Strength, 1991

Urdu has the same position that it had in 1971 and 1981, except that while the proportion of Hindi has grown from 38.04 to 38.71 to 39.85, that for Urdu has gone down from 5.22 to 5.11 and 5.13, as may be seen from Table 2:

Table - 2

Comparative Strengths of Scheduled Languages, 1971, 1981 and 1991 Percentage to total population

** Fuli figures for Tamil for 1981 are not available as the census records for Tamil Nadu were lost due to floods. Therefore, percentage to total population is not given.

THE CASE OF HINDI:

As the following table would show the Census includes under Hindi nearly 104 million persons (to be exact 103,839,829) who have not declared Hindi per se as the Mother Tongue but other languages which are akin to or associated with Hindi or considered to be its dialects.

Table - 3

Languages Specified in the Eighth Schedule (Scheduled Languages), 1991

It is interesting to note that if, these non-Hindi languages were taken out of the count, the proportion of Hindi would fall from its inflated level of 39.85% to 27.58%. This would still be much higher than the corresponding figure for the next most widely spoken language, Bengali, with only 8.22%. What is important is the likelihood that many Urdu-speaking persons in the areas where these non-Hindi languages (included under Hindi) are spoken, would have declared the latter and thus been included under Hindi. But there is no way to check this hypothesis Before further analysis, we have to make a basic assumption. Urdu has become synonymous with Muslim Indians. Though it is not the Mother Tongue of all Muslim Indians, almost all those who declare it as the Mother Tongue are Muslim Indians State-wise Distribution of Urdu As may be seen from the Table-4 only 8 States namely, A.P., Bihar, Karnataka, MP, Maharashtra, Tamilnadu, UP and West Bengal have more than 1 million Urdu speakers, totalling to 93.4% of total Urdu-speaking population. Next in importance fall 5 States:

Gujarat, Haryana, Orissa, Rajasthan and Delhi which have more than 100,000 but less than 1,000,000 speakers These 13 together account for 99.1% of Urdu-spakers in the country. But Urdu is spoken in all States and U.T's. It is the second or the third language in all Hindi States, Chandigarh and Delhi and outranks Hindi in 3 major States namely A.P, Karnataka and Tamilnadu and even in Goa.

Table – 4

Distribution of Urdu Language - India, States and U.T.'s, 1991

Table – 5

Relative Position of Urdu and Hindi, Hindi-speaking & Non Hindi 'Urdu' States

* more than 1 million Urdu Speakers.

Decadal Growth Rate: Urdu's decadal growth rate is considerably lower than Hindi as may be seen from the following table:

Table – 6                                                                                                                           Decadal Growth Rate

Let us examine the growth rate of population in Hindi and "non-Hindi Urdu" States.

It is interesting to note that while the decadal rate of growth of Muslim population in Hindi-speaking states and non-Hindi Urdu States and the country as a whole during 1981-91 is 26.21, 22.22 and 27.22, the rate of growth of Urdu-speaking population in Hindi States and in the country as a whole is much less at 18.93 and 22.89 respectively. On the other hand it is much higher in non-Hindi Urdu States. This supports the hypothesis that for one reason or the other, by choice or by compulsion of

Table – 7

Growth Rate of Urdu in “Hindi” States 1991

circumstances, the Muslim community in Hindi-speaking States is distancing itself from Urdu to the advantage of Hindi, specially in Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. On the other hand, in the non- Hindi States, the Urdu rate of growth parallels the Muslim rate, except in Gujarat. Urdu is thus under assimilation in Hindi States. The trend is the same even in relation to the rate of growth of total population between 1981-91. This may be seen in the following table

This hypothesis is further confirmed by the following Table related to major 'Urdu' States only.

Table – 8

Indeed, except for Bihar, A.P., Orissa, Karnataka and Maharashtra, with the highest Coefficients of Urduisation are non-Hindi states. The case of UP needs to be taken not of because in UP lives 23% of the total Muslim population of the country and yet the Coefficient is as low as 52, though MP, Rajasthan and Haryana are ever lower. But both Muslim and Urdu population are much smaller in them.

Assuming, within Hindi-speaking States, there was a one-to-one relationship between Muslims and Urdu, the Urdu-speaking population in the country goes up to 7.64%, as may be seen from the following table:

Table - 9

This forms 7.64% of total national population and elevates Urdu, above Marathi and Tamil, to the 4^th position, after Hindi, Bengali and Telugu.

Conclusion:

In Hindi States, as a matter of state policy, the educational system, the administrative machinery and the mass media have been deliberately and effectively used  to "Hindi-ise" the Urdu-speaking population. The younger generation has been largely deprived of the opportunity to learn Urdu and, as such, it knows no other language except Hindi, though, in its speech and writing it may continue to use many Urdu words of Persian and Arabic origin. Thus Urdu has been sought to be reduced to a spoken dialect of Hindi and sentenced to a slow lingering death - a process of painful or painless linguistic depending upon one's point of view.