War on Urdu is war on our composite culture

Varshatai is hardly to be blamed, litigating all the way to the Supreme Court, only to receive a very public lesson in elementary linguistics. After all, she was doing no more than channelling the kind of stupidity with regard to Urdu that has become mainstream in the New India. This is the alleged "foreignness" of Urdu, which disqualifies it from being used for signage in the New India that attained its freedom in 2014.

This is, prima facie, odd, because English remains perfectly acceptable. And indeed, the antipathy towards "foreignness" does not extend to the armloads of foreign things that are avidly appropriated.

However, before I go any further, let me register my deep gratitude to the judges of the Supreme Court who have firmly put their imprimatur on what is, after all, received wisdom among scholars.

Of course, Urdu is a product of centuries of cultural and linguistic mixing among diverse peoples on and around the fertile plains of north India.

Its archive is, by the same token, an invaluable and irreplaceable repository of our rich, hybrid and cosmopolitan culture. As people — pilgrims, merchants, wanderers, displaced peasants — moved around the subcontinent, so their languages also migrated, and mingled, and intermarried and, indeed, proliferated in joyful promiscuity.

But — and this is the crucial point — all this happened here, on the Indian subcontinent, relatively isolated from the rest of the world by turbulent seas and fearsome deserts and high mountain ranges: a crucible for a unique cultural experiment that was the wonder and envy of the world, Hindustan jannat nishaan.

And Urdu is but one gem produced in this process, and Varshatai would be hard put to find any Urdu outside the subcontinent — except among expatriate communities who long for its fluent eloquence, its sinuous charm. This fact, incidentally, also trumps the linguistic bigots who seek to derive Urdu from Persia and Arabia.

The other range of bigots — who seek a "pure" Sanskrit lineage for our beloved linguistic hybrid, albeit under the name Hindi — are also wrong, despite the geographical congruence.

Both the fake lineages rely on the entirely unsurprising lexical borrowings — words, mainly nouns, are borrowed from all kinds of languages, all the time, everywhere.

But the grammatical anchoring in some linguistic base that is neither Sanskrit, nor Persian, nor Arabic, is undeniable — and unaffected by any amount of lexical borrowing. A particular favourite of mine is a road sign glimpsed in New Delhi, imploring impatient motorists: "Red light jump na karein". Despite the fact that three of the five words in that entreaty are in English, even Varshatai would not say that that sign is in English.

The frequently asserted "foreignness" of Urdu is, on the evidence, unsustainable. But the fact that it is so widely believed is a phenomenon that deserves independent attention. Some years back, we witnessed the spectacle of officially endorsed louts, painting over Urdu signage in New Delhi. Official agencies routinely issue lists of "foreign" — ie, Urdu —- words, whose use is deprecated.

So, indeed, it is not just one ignorant individual whose tantrum had to be pacified by the Supreme Court. We confront a widespread pathology.

In the early 2020s, when Covid-19 first raised its ominous head, there was much effort to identify some source to blame. This was partly for epidemiological reasons — identifying an original source and, so, breaking the chain of transmission.

But considering that this desire to identify a "culprit" went all the way from the Tablighi Jamaat to the "Wuhan lab" and the wet market there, we are dealing with other, less honourable reasons, like deflecting responsibility.

However, what is of particular interest in the context of the widespread belief in Urdu's "foreignness" is the other face of the official response, which was the attempt to defer and deny the palpable fact that the Covid virus had achieved community spread — indeed, "gone viral" — and, so, called for a different epidemiological response.

I would suggest that in respect of the alleged "foreignness" of Urdu, this error, too, has gone viral — the virus of this particular mode of stupidity has achieved community spread and is likely to show up in different forms and locations.

The task, then, is to attend to particular outbreaks, as, indeed, the Supreme Court has in the matter of Varsha Tai.

But beyond that, we must seek to identify the "Wuhan lab" of this particular virus. As I see it, the identification of Urdu with Islam — the key identification that motivates the loathing — is a complex, multistage process and involves several linked fraudulent claims.

The first of these is the identification of Urdu with Muslims. This claim condenses several micro-histories, which lie beyond my present scope. But the claim makes no sense — neither in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, which have substantial Muslim populations, nor, indeed, in the Muslim-majority areas of Kashmir and East Bengal, which latter (also later) became Bangladesh precisely on the matter of rejecting Urdu.

But the crucial and linked fraud is the claim that the Muslims of the subcontinent are themselves, en masse, "foreign", invaders forever. So, Urdu equals Muslim equals foreign. This is, of course, the key hinge of the "Hindu" consolidation of the Savarkarite ideology of Hindutva.

If all Muslims are indeed foreign invaders, then a twisted "anti-colonialism" demands that all Hindus should unite against them in this freedom struggle — unlike the other one that the "Veer" conscientiously distanced himself from.

Further, this "Hindu consolidation" tactically not only transcends the inconvenient, but also the intrinsic differences of caste and sect, and, indeed, divinities.

Urdu is the incidental, but also visible and available, target of this manoeuvre.