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Can Urdu and Hindi be one language?

The politics of Hindi–Urdu division — and unity — stretch back to at least the 19th
century.

David Lunn ― Updated about 5 hours ago

—Illustration by Khuda Bux Abro/Dawn

[Follow Prism on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram]

“Where did this Urdu-speaking white guy come from?” (or, in most Indian
contexts, Hindi-speaking) is a question I hear pretty frequently.

It’s a legitimate one, and arguably better for everyone involved than those
occasions when people assume, naturally enough, that this videshi (or pardesi)
won’t understand what’s being said around or about him. I won’t go into details
of the awkward, and sometimes hilarious, situations that such assumptions
have created.

The short answer to the question is Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland,
where I was born and raised. And yes, there aren’t many white guys there, or
anywhere else in the UK or Ireland, who speak Hindi or Urdu.

But that background has been crucial to explaining how I came to get interested
in the idea of Hindustani, and to go on to do a PhD on how that idea was used
particularly in the 1920s and 30s as a path between the binaries of Hindi-Hindu
and Urdu-Muslim.

Tracing the origins

It was a contested term then, and it still is today. Many people thought (and
think) they know exactly what it refers to, but once you scratch the surface it
quickly becomes clear that the beauty — or ugliness — of Hindustani is very
much in the eye of the beholder.

In 1927, at the initiative of several Indian writers, politicians and academics and
with the cooperation of the government of the then United Provinces, an
institution called the Hindustani Academy was established in Allahabad.

The goal of the institution was never absolutely clear, but as the British governor
of the provinces Sir William Marris remarked in typically paternalistic tones:

"The Government resolution which created the Academy recognises Urdu and Hindi as
twin vernaculars of the province, and embraces them both in the possibly unscienti c but
 admirably innocuous title of “Hindustani”. Now if I believed that one untoward
consequence of the Academy’s creation would be to blow up the embers of linguistic
controversy I might have left my hon’ble colleague’s scheme severely alone. I do not
believe that any such consequence ought to ensue."

The problem with Marris’ formulation was that the linguistic controversy was
far beyond the stage of “embers”.

Since the 19th century, and at least in part as a consequence of British policy,
Hindi had increasingly come to be exclusively identified with Hindus, and Urdu
exclusively with Muslims.

Related: Born into Punjabi, here’s how I fell in love with Urdu

Indeed, as the Hindi scholar Alok Rai has observed , “the prime candidates for
initiating the modern process of linguistic division are, by popular consent, the
pedants of Fort William College”, the colonial training ground for officers of the
East India Company.

This process of absolute differentiation is a trajectory that links the Hindi and
Hindu nationalising politics of Bharatendu Harishchandra in the 1860s with
Abdul Haq’s famous comment in 1961: “Pakistan was not created by Jinnah, nor
was it created by Iqbal; it was Urdu that created Pakistan”.

But in the 1920s a groups came together around the idea that if an institution
existed to promote both Urdu and Hindi together, then perhaps a way could be
found to stop the ongoing division between the languages and their associated
religious communities.

Plenty of those involved demonstrated and argued that Hindi and Urdu were not
separate languages at all, and perhaps most importantly that the registers and
creations of each were part of a shared culture — a Ganga-Yamuna tahzeeb —
that belonged to Hindus and Muslims alike.

In the words of the Progressive writer Sajjad Zaheer, the Academy existed “to
bring Urdu and Hindi closer to one another”.
Too high an idea
But this idea — “Hindustani” — still needed some clarification. What was it?
What is it? And what was it to do?

The colonial use and misuse of the term dates back to the 18th century, as a host
of excellent studies by the likes of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi have
demonstrated.

By the 1920s the question remained: was Hindustani a point on a spectrum

between a “pure” Hindi stuffed full of Sanskrit and a “pure” Urdu overflowing
with Persian and Arabic?

If so, who was to define this middle point? Was it to be — as it seemed in

Gandhi’s understanding — something “simple”, and therefore authentic? If it
was some kind of everyday speech, would it not be devoid of all art, beauty and
life?

Or was Hindustani an expansive, inclusive umbrella that drew the whole range
of Urdu and Hindi language, literary styles and tastes into its happy, welcoming
embrace? If so, who could hope to be well-read and educated enough to
understand even half of it?

Read next: The Urdu sounds that are disappearing from Bollywood songs

These questions were never conclusively answered by the Academy, though

many of its members tried to come up with a solution — including the historian
Tara Chand (its general secretary), the politician Tej Bahadur Sapru (its
president), and writers, editors and other members such as Premchand, Daya
Narayan Nigam, Maulvi Said Ansari, Hafiz Hidayat Husain, Ramnaresh Tripathi
and Upendranath Ashk.

And we know that, in a formal sense, the project of the Hindustani Academy
failed.

It’s not possible to point to a single codified language of Hindustani today — it

has not been adequately institutionalised — and the overwhelming tendency of
the language politics of the colonial period have resulted in a situation where
Hindi is considered the national language of India (though it has status as an
official language only, and of course many non-Hindi speakers, especially in the
south, rightly resist its imposition), while Urdu is seen as the national language
of Pakistan (though again, speakers of other languages on occasion view it as a
muhajir importation).

Con ning boundaries

There is an unfortunate — and historically illiterate — tendency, especially in
the West, to think of the link between the nation-state and a single language as
somehow natural, right and inevitable.

We tend to imagine European countries as defined at least in part by a

monolingual identity, with the borders of the map corresponding to the borders
of a language area, and that within as being unified, and given form and reason,
through a single language as part of a package of symbols of nationhood.

Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth — think of Catalan or Basque
in Spain as only the most obvious example — but we do know that the modern
state has a vested interest in promoting linguistic homogeneity, and has often
acted to impose this on its people.

In some ways, the partisans of both Hindi and Urdu in the 19th and 20th
centuries bought in to this Eurocentric misunderstanding, and pushed mightily
to define communities, and eventually nations, on the basis of language.

Also read: Exploring how Dilli became the city of poets and of Urdu

As I have said, my own upbringing in Northern Ireland almost certainly pushed

me towards an almost natural interest in this question of Hindustani. Before I’d
ever been to India or Pakistan — before I even really knew or thought much
about these places that have come to mean so much to me — I was aware as a
child of how even the simplest, most banal aspects of language could be used to
divide people.

Brought up in a largely Protestant community, and attending a primary school

with no Catholic children, I was taught by my peers (though not by my parents!)
that you could spot a Catholic just by the way they pronounced the letter 'h'
(Protestants said “aitch”, Catholics said “haitch”).

Growing older in the 1990s, and as we painfully moved towards a peace

settlement in Northern Ireland, I was aware of how opportunities to study Irish,
or Gaelic, were only available in Catholic schools — those run by the church, or
largely/exclusively attended by Catholic children (and the question of an Irish
Language Act remains a politically divisive one in the region today).

And of course the Catholic/Protestant divide even now largely maps on to a

Nationalist/Unionist one — between those who would see a united Ireland, and
those who prefer the union with Great Britain that we call the UK.

Language, community, nation: South Asia is not alone in facing these issues.

Beyond binaries
My initial university-level training in Hindi–Urdu was pretty eclectic, and my
teachers and professors had no interest in policing the boundaries of language
or insisting on “purity”.

But when I came to India for more language study, aged around 20, I
encountered resistance: from some fellow students who wanted to study
“proper Hindi only”, not any of this Urdu vocabulary, and from those who told
me not to use certain words — “that’s a foreign word” — and provided
appropriately Sanskrit-derived alternatives. Maaf kijie.

But there are many who reject the politics of division, hatred and purity even
today. Recently, the hashtag #MyNameInUrdu began trending on Twitter in
India. It saw a host of people writing their profile names in Urdu script as a show
of solidarity and a direct refutation of the kind of language politics that insisted
that Urdu was “foreign” or exclusively Muslim.

Explore: As a love letter to my past, I recreated iconic vinyl album covers in Urdu

And perhaps the most intriguing response was the rise of #MyNameInHindi on
Twitter in Pakistan, as people reciprocated and began to write their names in
Devanagari or Hindi script. In the words of Prabha Raj, “a symbolic gesture
against hate and bigotry”.

These moments on Twitter or social media more broadly are just that —
moments, and often ephemeral and quickly over. But they are indicative of
something more. Anyway, it gave me the opportunity to quote one of my
favourite, satirical rubais:

Ham Urdu ko Arabi kyon na karen Hindi ko voh Bhasha kyon na karen
Jhagre ke lie akhbaron men mazmun tarasha kyon na karen
Aapas men adavat kuch bhi nahin lekin ik akhara qaim hai
Jab is se falak ka dil behle ham log tamasha kyon na karen

Why shouldn’t we turn Urdu into Arabic and Hindi into Bhasha [Sanskrit]?
Why shouldn’t we write divisive articles in newspapers to fuel the ght?
There is no mutual animosity but an arena is prepared:
Why shouldn’t we make a scene, when this cheers the heart of the heavens?

That was written by the then well-known poet and satirist Akbar Allahabadi ,
around 100 years ago. As they say, plus ça change.

If the politics of Hindi–Urdu division stretch back to at least the 19th century,
the politics of Hindi–Urdu unity have roots going back as far.

For me, the thread that connects Akbar Allahabadi’s satirical verse to the
laudable efforts of the Hindustani Academy to the social media moments of
#MyNameInUrdu/#MyNameInHindi is a spirit of refusal and rejection.

Discover: In the narrow lanes of Old Delhi, a unique and avoursome dialect of Urdu is
going extinct

Allahabadi, as Tara Chand and his fellows, and as those on Twitter, refused to
permit a narrow understanding of language and culture, or an exclusive link
between language and religious community, to define or limit their tastes and
practices. Theirs was and can be again a world of inclusivity, of generosity and of
sharing.
That’s not to say the optimists always get their way. Another of my favourite
treatments of the Hindi–Urdu controversy was Saadat Hasan Manto’s short
story from the 1940s Hindi aur Urdu, beautifully translated by the late
Muhammad Umar Memon.

In it, the characters Munshi Narayan Prasad and Mirza Muhammad Iqbal argue
about whether lemon or soda is the better drink. They can’t agree — which is
better for your health? Which did their parents recommend? Well, maybe they
could mix them together? No — one wants lemon-soda, and the other wants
soda-lemon.

But Alok Rai gives an appropriately optimistic take on the situation. As he

laments the demise of Hindustani as emblematic of the shared culture of Urdu
and Hindi, and the rise of “unbending, inhumane politics” in its place, he
reflects that “Hindustani presents itself — on the ramparts, at the hour of the
wolf — as a utopian symbol, a point of desire, something light, bright and
distant from our sphere of sorrow.”

One can only hope.

Are you studying South Asia's socio-linguistic history? Share your insights with us at
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