Urdu tales, found in translation

Rohit Mahajan

Just the other day in Lahore, Navjot Singh Sidhu by his side, Pakistani Punjab’s governor Muhammad Sarwar said: “Since he’s from Punjab and I’m also from Punjab, so if we talk in Punjabi, there is no harm!”

Well, the ‘harm’ is that in Pakistani Punjab, Punjabi is considered the language of the illiterate, the uncouth. Urdu — which is not native to any Pakistani province — is deified as the language of the cultured, sophisticated people. That’s the result of language politics — leaders and politicians made choices and imposed them on people: Urdu for Muslims, Punjabi for Sikhs and Hindus. Urdu has prospered in Pakistan, to the detriment of the ‘native’ languages.

Urdu’s situation in India, though, is very curious — it can be argued that more people understand Urdu words than ever before, largely due to the ‘Hindi’ movie industry. Do you remember the song Dard-e-Disco from Om Shanti Om? It has words such as gulposhiyon, sargoshiyon, anjuman, armanon, farmaish, jurrat, azmaish! Pick up any random Hindi song or even a movie script, and you’d find that the language is more Hindustani than Hindi. 

Urdu is prospering. However, the Persio-Arabic script used in Urdu is indeed in decline, even dying, and literature published exclusively in Urdu is becoming increasingly inaccessible.

This book tries to bridge the gap caused by the decline of Urdu’s script.

This translation of the memoirs of movie legends — originally published in publications such as Shama, Fann Aur Shakhsiyat, Naqsh, Ruby, Gulfam, etc. — will delight the movie buff. Some of the writers themselves are giants — Nargis wrote a touching piece on the death of Meena Kumari, Kaifi Azmi provided an intimate portrait of Sahir Ludhianvi, Naushad wrote an intense piece on K Asif, the maker of Mughal-e-Azam. Ismat Chugtai’s piece on Suraiya sparkles with humour and a sense of fun, with Suraiya relating tales of being besieged by suitors when she was at the height of her popularity. Raja Mehdi Ali Khan’s stories about Saadat Hasan Manto and his good friend Shyam, the actor, are rollicking fun. The collection has personal reminiscences of Dilip Kumar, Kamal Amrohi, Talat Mahmood, Shakeel Badayuni, Veena, Jaidev, Meena Shorey — the Lara Lappa girl! — and Balraj Sahni, to name a few.

If you have any affinity for Urdu, you’d be left wondering how much more wonderful would these stories be if read in the original Urdu. Sahni’s piece, originally published in 1961, has intelligent inputs on the language question. ‘Urdu is the official language of Pakistan, while ours is Hindi, and it has become some sort of a fashion to declare the two languages are disparate,’ Sahni wrote, and added: ‘Mercifully, with the blessings of Eeshwar and the grace of Khuda, our film industry is still untouched by this fashion.’ 

For Sahni, the difference between the two languages was more about the script than anything else — ‘it may be written from right to left or the other way round’. Indeed. Most homes in Punjab have or had a grandfather who could read Urdu. Sadly, they’re going away, taking away with them the ability to read the books they possessed.