The Situation of the Urdu Writer: A Letter from Bara Banki, December 1993 / February 1994

Abstract

As I sit down to write for your special issue I have spent almost three months in Bara Banki, a small town in northern India, thousands of miles away from the seminars on literature at Chicago. On the other hand, Bara Banki is only seventeen miles from Lucknow, the fast-decaying capital of the state of Uttar Pradesh, which was once famous for its elegant, Urdu-dominated culture; it is also only seventy miles away from Ayodhya, where exactly one year ago a frenzied mob, led by some very deliberate people, tore down a sixteenth-century mosque. A few weeks ago, at a musha'irah or poetry reading attended by several hundred people, I heard a young Urdu/Muslim poet recite a banal verse which nevertheless drew loud applause: They all love me, but none is 'mine' // I exist in this country like Given these circumstances, I feel little inclined to discuss magic realism in Urdu fiction or the decline of the abstract story in this postmodernist period. I can only talk about Urdu and what it is like to be an Urdu writer in India today, in this forty-sixth postcolonial year. So bear with me. Urdu is one of the sixteen or eighteen constitutionally recognized major languages in India, and I am told that the 1981 census showed it to have some 35 million speakers. There is, however, no region specific to it. Years ago, for some obscure political reason, it was declared to be a state language in Kashmir, but the mother tongues of the people of that beleagured state are Kashmiri, Dogri, and Ladakhi, not Urdu. On the other hand, in the states where millions of Urdu speakers have lived and died for centuries, Urdu has no status, not even that of a full-fledged second language. (My mother recently wrote her will in Urdu but, in order to get it legally registered, had to have it translated into Hindi.) Urdu-speaking children in Lucknow and Bara Banki do not receive primary or secondary education in Urdu. (I write to my sister in Urdu; she must correspond with her sons in Hindi.) Perhaps I should say that the Urdu-speaking children in northern India cannot receive primary or secondary education in their mother tongue guaranteed to them in the Indian Constitution because the state refuses to provide it. In fact, the state has put an end to what was available even during the colonial period. When it happened, soon after India became independent, many Muslim parents started sending their children to what were then and still primarily are religious schools: the madrasahs. Previously there, children learned to vocalize/memorize the Qur'an without understanding a word of it and the basics of the Islamic faith. Now, in that same context, they are taught to read and write Urdu, but little else. Eventually they return to the regular schools and find themselves trailing behind their peers in almost every subject. Better Muslims, perhaps, but handicapped for the mundane competitions of life, and not really true heirs to all that was always claimed for Urdu. One invariable claim made about Urdu was that it