Abstract
Purpose: The paper examines how Urdu evolved from the language of the rulers to the lingua franca of Muslims in the modern times. The paper attempts to highlight how Urdu is still being used as an identity marker for Muslims with respect to the other communities and is a source of ascendancy, an achieved elitist status within the Muslims of the North and Deccan. Approach/Methodology/Design: Socio-cultural analysis. Findings: The usage of Urdu as a political instrument by the Muslim League and the cultural influence the language has exerted on the Muslim community led to its usage as a source of elitism within the community in the modern times. The analysis indicates that there is harking back to the highly Persianised, nastaliq form of Urdu, which was manifested in its literature in the twentieth century as the pure, hegemonic and the aspired language, true to the identity of the community. The language was characterized by its emergence as a monolithic, distinctive medium, overcoming the different varieties and registers during the British rule through the Hindi-Urdu controversy. Practical Implications: This review study situates Urdu in a socio-cultural context, reflecting the historical status of the language in India. Originality/value: Urdu has been recognized as a language of a particular community i.e. Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, especially those in the Northern and the Deccan parts of the independent India. This review article, through the use of literature review and content analysis, shows that Urdu is used as a language by Muslims in a way that denotes their high status within the community, due to a variety of factors embedded in the socio-cultural history of the community in the Indian subcontinent.
Highlights
Language is not merely a means of interpersonal communication and influence
A language which is rather a dialect of Hindustani [1] came out to be the identity of the Muslims in India, and South Asia by extension owing to its origins and the political processes
This paper traces how Urdu holds a peculiar position with regards to its status as a language in the subcontinent and its evolution, as well as the identity politics surrounding it, leading to its use by the Muslim community in India in the Northern and the Deccan parts as an identity marker with respect to the other communities and a source of an elitist status within the Muslim society vis-a-vis who don’t possess the knowledge of the language
Summary
Language is not merely a means of interpersonal communication and influence. It is not merely a carrier of content, whether latent or manifest. Owing to the literature that started to be produced in the twentieth century, its adoption as the language of Islam in South Asia and the identity politics it was subjected to, Urdu exerts an enormous cultural influence among the Muslims in India which results in the usage of the standard and pure Urdu (of the ashrafs ,[2] “elites”) as a source of elitism within the community. The success of the Hindi movement led Sir Syed to further advocate Urdu as the symbol of Muslim heritage and as the language of the Muslim intellectual and political class. Urdu started to become a language distant from a rural, uneducated and poor individual It came to be the language of high culture, with complicated and ornate vocabulary; denoting the identity and prestige of the ashraaf, the elite sections of the Muslims (Rahman, 2011 (b), pp. After the Partition of India, there still remains awe for the writings which are identical to the style of Iqbal: embellished with Perso-Arabic vocabulary, obfuscated and lyrical
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