Name of the Book: Redefining Urdu Politics in India
Edited by: Ather Farooqui
Publisher: Oxford University Press, New Delhi
Year: 2006
Pages: 309
Price: Rs. 595
ISBN: 019567739-0
Reviewed by: Yoginder Sikand

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That Urdu is in a sorry state of decline in the land of its birth is a well-known and often-lamented fact. What should be done to rescue it from eventual extinction is what this immensely useful book is all about. Bringing together essays by Urdu scholars, Indian and foreign, as well as activists working for the cause of Urdu, it book provides an in-depth insight into the myriad causes of Urdu’s rapid decline in post-Partition India while also arguing for various measures to revive the language.

Competitive communalism

In his preface, Salman Khurshid speaks about how the decline of Urdu owes, in large measure, to the politics of competitive communalism. Once the rich repository of a widely shared culture that brought together Hindu, Muslim and Sikh elites, Urdu became a victim of the Partition, being branded by Hindu communal forces as a ‘Muslim’ language. They saw it as somehow ‘anti-national’ and ‘foreign’ because it drew heavily on Arabic and Persian and also because it was declared the official language of Pakistan. North Indian Muslim elites who remained behind in India Urdu continued to insist on Urdu as an integral component of Indian Muslim identity. This owed largely to the fact of Urdu being the repository of much of the north Indian Islamic literary heritage.

This forced association between Urdu and Muslims was further strengthened by efforts of north Indian Urdu-speaking elites to project Urdu as the language of all Indian Muslims, which was, and still is, not the case at all. And since in post-Partition India efforts by Muslims to assert even their legitimate rights are often quickly branded by Hindu communal forces as a manifestation of alleged ‘anti-national’ and ‘pro-Pakistan’ proclivities, it has proved difficult for Muslim Urdu-speakers to mobilise and lobby for the protection and preservation of Urdu and to protest the state’s discriminatory policies towards the language. In the process, Urdu has become increasingly marginalised, the issue being ‘communalised’ by the state and the language’s opponents and defenders.

Successive governments, following the Hindu communal line, have also worked to erase Urdu from schools in large parts of the country where it was once taught as the principal language, replacing it by a heavily Sanskritised and generally incomprehensible Hindi. This has not been a spontaneous effort. Rather, it is part of the agenda of the state and dominant and communalised Hindu elites and reflects a fierce opposition to the syncretistic or composite north Indian culture, of which Urdu has been an integral part. Careful efforts have been made to excise all words of Persian and Arabic origin from official Hindi, this reflecting a form of Indian nationalism that draws heavily from Brahminical Hinduism, denies the Muslim contribution and presence and seeks to impose a single homogenous culture on all Indians. The separate identities of local languages spoken in the so-called ‘Hindi belt’, such as Awadhi, Maithili, Magadhi and Rajasthani, each of which has its own rich literary heritage, have all been denied by the state and proponents of Hindi, being absorbed into ‘Hindi’ in order to artificially inflate the number and political clout of ‘Hindi speakers’.

At the same time, Khurshid says, in order to present themselves as ‘secular’ and to garner Muslim votes politicians have offered sops to Urdu-speakers in the form of Urdu academies, awards for Urdu literary works and sponsorship of literary functions. These populist measures are, of course, wholly inadequate as a means to sustain any language, whose survival and advancement depends on its links with public education and employment. But this indifference, indeed hostility, of the state towards Urdu is something that Urdu shares with various other minority languages, being deliberately effaced as the state and ruling elites project English-medium education as a ‘symbol of excellence’.

Urdu education

Owing to the hostility of the state as well as Hindu communal forces to Urdu, Muslim elites have sought to preserve the language by setting up madrasas, where the language is taught. This, Khurshid says, has only further strengthened the forced association of Urdu with Muslims and an over-identification with Islam, which it did not earlier possess. Because the state has effectively denied large numbers of Urdu-speakers the right to have their children learn Urdu, many Muslim families prefer to send their children to madrasas to study in order that they can learn their mother tongue. Not all of these want their children to be maulvis, their choice of madrasa education being forced on them for want of secular schools where their children could learn Urdu. Khurshid sees this as one factor for the rapid expansion of madrasas in the years after Partition. He argues that this is leading to the further marginalisation of Muslims because madrasas are largely exclusivist and hardly provide their students with any access to secular education, insulating them from the wider, plural society. Had state schools made provision for teaching Urdu, he says, many Muslim families would have preferred to send their children therein to study instead of madrasas. In order that Muslims might progress, and not be forced, for want of Urdu education in state schools, to send their children to madrasas to study Urdu as well as to prevent the further ghettoisation of Urdu as a result of it now being taught mainly in madrasas, Khurshid argues that the state must set up Urdu-medium schools or schools where Urdu is taught as a subject in areas with a sufficient Urdu-speaking population.

Khurshid recognises the need for the Urdu-speaking community to salvage its language by setting up Urdu-medium schools but argues that such voluntary effort cannot replace state initiative. No language can survive, he says, only on the basis of the voluntary sector. Private Muslim-run Urdu-medium schools do not attract non-Muslims and their students often grow up without interacting with children from other communities. Further, because they charge more than nominal fees, they are not affordable for the majority of the Urdu-speaking population, who are poor. Hence, he stresses, the state has the responsibility of establishing Urdu-medium schools as well as enabling the teaching of Urdu as a subject in state schools in localities where the population of Urdu-speakers warrants this. To deny this is to deny Urdu-speakers their Constitutional right to educate their children, at least till the primary level, in the medium of their mother tongue in state schools, and, beyond that, to learn their language at least as a subject in such schools. The state’s continued discrimination towards Urdu is a violation of the Constitution, which demands that the state treat all languages equally and provide facilities for children of different linguistic backgrounds to receive education in state schools in the medium of their mother tongue, at least till the primary level.

In most states, including Uttar Pradesh, considered to be the cradle of Urdu, the state’s official three-language formula effectively prohibits Urdu-speakers from enabling their children to learn Urdu, Khurshid writes. Thus, in most north Indian states, children have to learn English and Hindi, and Sanskrit, a language spoken by hardly anyone in India, is forced on them as the third language. Ironically, this archaic language is taught as a ‘modern Indian language’! Consequently, there are only a few state schools in north India where Urdu is the medium or is even taught as a third language, although the vast majority of Urdu-speakers live in this part of the country. Almost all these schools are of a very poor standard. The problem is exacerbated with lack of sufficient and good quality textbooks, almost all the available textbooks being translations from other languages. As a result, many Urdu-speaking parents prefer to send their children to Hindi-medium schools instead. As a remedy, Khurshid suggests that in localities with sufficient numbers of Urdu-speakers the state should establish schools Urdu-medium schools till the fifth grade, Hindi being taught therein from class three and English from class six. This would enable students to easily switch to Hindi-medium schools after passing out from primary school. In addition, Khurshid argues, Urdu should be offered as an optional subject in schools that use English, Hindi or a regional language as a medium of instruction.

In his chapter, Ather Farooqui raises several issues that Khurshid dwells on. He speaks of how Urdu, once the cradle of a rich composite elite culture, was consciously abandoned by north Indian Sikhs and Hindus after 1947, thus making it effectively a language associated with Muslims. Because of the state’s anti-Urdu policies, Urdu is not taught in the most state schools, even those located in areas with a high concentration of Urdu speakers, and now is restricted mainly to madrasas, where most students are from poor Muslim families. In effect, therefore, Urdu survives among the Muslim poor. Making the problem of preserving and promoting Urdu even more difficult is the fact that Urdu-speakers are a minority in every state in the country. In the only state where Urdu is the state language�Jammu and Kashmir�only a few people have as their mother-tongue. Despite the noises that they occasionally make on behalf of Urdu, Muslim elites and the middle classes prefer to provide their children an English-medium education because that is seen as the path to worldly ‘success’. Since Urdu has effectively lost its links with the economy and employment in the ‘mainstream’ economy, Urdu-medium education is now not a preferred option for children of most Urdu-speaking families, Farooqui observes.

Urdu cannot be saved, let alone promoted, if it continues to be denied a space in the school curriculum, from the primary to the high school level, Farooqui argues. For this, and to also encourage Muslims to send their children to regular schools instead of madrasas, which, he says, only further exacerbate Muslim marginalisation, Farooqui suggests that the state arrange for Urdu to be integrated with the public education system. This will, he contends, help attract Muslim students who might otherwise have studied in madrasas, enabling them to broaden their outlook. However, as things stand today, Farooqui laments, in most states in India government policies effectively deny children from Urdu-speaking families the right to study Urdu even as a third language. This conscious policy of destroying Urdu is, he says, not just a question of the possible extinction of a rich language in the near future but also one of gross violation of the rights of Urdu-speaking people. Farooqui proceeds to examine the fate of Urdu in India today by offering his findings from field observations in five states across the country. He reveals that in these states there is not a single non-Muslim student studying Urdu even as an optional subject at the primary or secondary level, so deeply ingrained has the notion of Urdu as a ‘Muslim’ subject become. Financial assistance provided by state governments ostensibly for promoting Urdu has done little or nothing for the language as such. Instead, it has only produced a small class of pro-establishment sycophants who do not dare to critique the state for its anti-Urdu policies. In some states Urdu is taught as an optional subject in a small number of schools, much less than the number warranted by the numerical strength of Urdu-speakers residing therein. In most Urdu-medium schools subjects like science and mathematics are taught not in Urdu but in English, Hindi or a regional language, because the anti-Urdu policies of the state and neglect by Urdu elites who appear to champion Urdu’s cause have put an effective halt to the development of adequate scientific vocabulary in Urdu. In some south Indian states, however, mercantile Muslim communities have set up good quality Urdu-medium institutions, in marked contrast to the north.

Anti-Urdu policies

Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s long and incisive essay looks at other dimensions of the issue of the decline of Urdu in post-Partition India. He, too, locates this primarily as a consequence of the anti-Urdu policies of successive governments, which stems from the Hindi-Urdu and the related Hindu-Muslim controversy. Because facilities for teaching Urdu are now almost non-existent in most state schools across the country, Urdu-speakers are fast being cut off from their linguistic and cultural heritage. Since, barring Jammu and Kashmir, no state has Urdu has its official language, Urdu lacks sufficient political patronage and clout. Consequently, even the reports of government-appointed commissions that have berated the state for its anti-Urdu policies and have made numerous suggestions to remedy the situation have gone ignored. Echoing a point made by Khurshid, Mehta argues that the state and the dominant elites’ hostility towards Urdu reflects a certain form of nationalism which seeks to deny all alternate identities that challenge their homogenising agenda. The identity of the highly Sanskritised Hindi that they seek to impose is dependent on a conscious distancing of itself from Urdu, with Urdu being somehow seen as associated with ‘national disloyalty’. Hence, Mehta argues, the denial of the rights of Urdu-speakers is a violation of their self-respect, an attack on their sense of citizenship, leading to their loss of faith in the system.

Mehta goes on to discuss the role of madrasas, which, in the absence of state provision of Urdu education, are an attractive option for large numbers of Muslims, particularly the poor. Many Muslim families, he says prefer to educate their children in madrasas not simply because they want them to become religious specialists but also because they represent the cheapest form of education available. Further, often other schools, including, sometimes, state schools, are socially unreceptive to Muslims. Were the state to provide Urdu-medium schools and/or the option of studying Urdu as a subject in schools in areas with a significant number of Urdu-speakers, Mehta opines, many Muslims would prefer to send their children there to study instead of to madrasas.

Because Urdu has been pushed out of the state education system, madrasas are now the major institutions where Urdu is studied. Yet, Mehta argues, madrasas are not the best means to promote Urdu. Madrasas may use Urdu as a medium of instruction for certain subjects, but they do not teach it as a language and generally do not make available to their students anything but religious literature in Urdu. Hence, madrasa students are often left unaware of the nuances and richness of the Urdu literary heritage, much of what is routinely condemned as ‘un-Islamic’ by the ulama.

What the state’s attitude towards madrasas should be is a vexed question. Mehta writes that the state should provide the freedom for communities to set up religious schools in the absence of ‘compelling evidence’ that they preach hatred of others. However, the matter is not so simple if such institutions seek financial assistance from the state or state recognition of its degrees. In such cases the state must ensure that the education imparted in these institutions equips their students with the ability to ‘navigate the modern world and understand the basic requirements of democratic citizenship’. However, Mehta says, given that religious schools are a reality in India, denying them state aid will not ensure that their students have other affordable and effective choices but, in fact, would mean that their fate might be worse than if these institutions received no government assistance. This does not mean that the state should not try to provide these institutions with incentives to move towards what Mehta leaves vaguely defined as a ‘modern education’, but if the parents of the students want only a ‘traditional’ education for the students they should bear the costs. But, since Muslim parents often send their children to madrasas simply because of poverty, for the state not to subsidise madrasas is tantamount to discrimination against the poor. This fact, Mehta suggests, points to the need for state provision of cheap and good quality schools for poor Muslims so that they have a genuine choice to send their children to these schools or to madrasas. Mehta argues that ‘It is possible to justify minimal interference in the affairs of religious schools; it is impossible to justify giving them state support, or accrediting them, if they do not fulfil some minimal requirements’.

Both Muslim elites as well as the state have a responsibility to seek to promote reforms in the madrasas, Mehta contends. The latter, he notes, have done little at all to promote ‘modernisation’ of the madrasas, at the same time as they insist that madrasas are integral to Muslim identity. Few Muslim elites send their own children to madrasas to study, preferring to educate them, if they can afford it, in English-medium schools. Hence, the burden of representing Islam through the training of ulama in madrasas has now been firmly placed of the shoulders of the Muslim poor. ‘Modern’-educated Muslims have, therefore a major role in consigning Urdu to the role of the language of the madrasas that cannot be detached from its religious moorings. It is no longer a ‘market language’ linked to employment outside a narrow Islamic religious or Muslim communitarian sector.

Talk of state intervention in or assistance to madrasas has gained particular currency in the wake of the emergence of militant groups, as in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are linked to certain radical madrasas. However, Mehta is quick to remark that ‘Despite the existence of madrasas, India has not produced any dominant strains of jihadi Islam’. He notes, too, that ‘secular schools can often produce militant Hinduism as well’. For its part, he says, the state has provided only a pittance for its much-touted ‘Madrasa Modernisation Programme’. Hence, the relevant issue here is, Mehta argues, not ‘militancy’ but ‘justice’. The state should offer students who, out of poverty, are forced to study in madrasas the affordable choice to study in good quality schools instead. It is also the duty of the state to ensure that madrasa students are ‘minimally equipped to navigate the demands of the modern world’. However, state assistance to any institution, Mehta says, must be conditional on it conforming to ‘the basic requirement of a modern education’, although what precisely he means by ‘modern’ is left unclear. This, he says, is not an argument for a hostile or confrontationist posture vis-à-vis madrasas but, rather, a plea to leave them alone and to strengthen the system of secular Urdu public education so that over time, and without coercion, madrasas appear as a less attractive option. In turn, this will help the cause of Urdu, bringing it out of the ghettoised existence that it now leads, being largely confined to the madrasas.

Optional subject

Mehta notes that the Urdu intelligentsia continue to demand that Urdu be allowed as an optional subject in government schools, a demand that he, too, appears to support. Yet, he also observes that a similar demand is rarely made in the case of schools where many Urdu-speaking elites send their own children to study. If Muslim elites (along with poorer Muslims) can help generously fund literally thousands of madrasas across the country, Mehta asks, why cannot they fund the setting up of regular, secular schools that teach Urdu as well? Although they have the right to demand this from the state, they, too, should take an active interest in doing so, Mehta rightly argues. It is not sufficient to have Urdu taught as a subject, whether optional or compulsory, in schools. Rather, good quality Urdu-medium state schools are needed and there is no reason why, Mehta says, to suppose that such schools would be incapable of equipping their students with other important skills, such as fluency in English. Mehta also suggests the possibility of dual-medium schools, with certain subjects taught in Urdu and others in Hindi, English or the regional language of the state.

Mehta argues, against those who see Urdu as somehow ‘anti-national’, that India’s unity critically depends on the different religious, cultural and linguistic groups inhabiting the country feeling genuinely at home. For the state to act on its Constitutional obligations vis-à-vis Urdu would, contrary to what some assert, not lead to the balkanisation of the country. On the contrary, it would promote true inclusivism so that Urdu-speakers, marginalised and denied their rights and cultural identity, would feel truly accepted. The struggle for Urdu should, therefore, not be based on ‘cultural nostalgia’ or a ‘misplaced sense of the sanctity of language’, but, rather, be seen as part of a broader struggle for genuine democracy.

Yogendra Singh’s article looks at the issue of Urdu from the perspective of identity politics. He looks at the ‘communalisation’ of Urdu, the reduction of the language in the eyes of many of its defenders and detractors to the status of a ‘Muslim’ language, which it never was. He locates this in the backdrop of the competitive politics of north Indian Hindu and Muslim elites and the machinations of the British colonial authorities, and, after 1947, of various Indian political parties and the state. In pre-Partition India, Urdu survived and thrived because it was the language of communication of most north Indian elites, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, and because it received official patronage and was a language of administration and commerce. This, however, is not the case today because of which the class base of the support for the language has shifted, with Urdu being associated with Muslim ghettos and taught mainly in madrasas, where mostly poor Muslims study. With their narrow ideological perspectives, madrasas may have helped preserve Urdu but can do little, if anything at all, to link it to the process of ‘modernisation’, which alone, Singh argues, can ensure the revival of the language beyond its presently limited role.

The hostile policies of the state vis-à-vis Urdu, the official patronage of Hindi in its place and the dominance of English have all made Urdu lose its public value. To add to this is what Singh sees as the absence of strong, well-networked alternate systems among Muslims for the promotion of Urdu on a voluntary basis. In turn, this is related to the indifference of many Muslim elites to the educational and other problems of the Muslim masses, widespread poverty and illiteracy among Muslims and the lack of political empowerment of the community as a whole.

Singh critiques what he sees as the Urdu-elites over-dependence on the state for hopes to promote Urdu at the same time as they do not display the same sort of enthusiasm to educate their own children in that language, preferring to send them to English-medium schools instead, in the hope of ‘better’ worldly prospects. Hopes for promoting Urdu today are further diminished because of its enforced ‘over-identification’ with Islam as a result of the language being taught mainly in the madrasas, as a consequence of which most Urdu literature being produced today, penned by madrasa graduates and maulvis, is on Islamic religious subjects. The Urdu-elite’s myopic approach to Urdu, that of preserving it as part of the Muslims’ religious and cultural heritage rather than as an instrument of ‘modernisation’, has, Singh believes, only further exacerbated the communally exclusivist character that Urdu’s supporters and opponents have sought to bestow it with. Hence, moves to promote Urdu must also take note of the possibility of re-linking the language to the market and the economy, a task doubly difficult today in the age of ‘globalisation’.

Urdu media

The Urdu media, Singh opines, has a critical role in promoting the language. He notes that the Urdu media is in a state of decline in large pats of India, owing partly to competition from English, Hindi and regional language media. Because of declining rates of literacy in Urdu, many Muslims themselves do not read Urdu newspapers. Furthermore, right-wing Hindu groups do not miss any opportunity to protest even against the most symbolic assistance provided by the state, often a vote-garnering gimmick, to the Urdu media, as exemplified, for instance, in the ‘riots’ in Karnataka some years ago following the government’s announcement of news programmes in Urdu on state television.

Another means for promoting Urdu is to expand the range of Urdu publishing, Singh says. Today, most Urdu publishing houses remain limited to bringing out literary, historical (often hagiographical) and religious works. If they were also to publish social science texts, he says, they would increase the market for Urdu graduates and provide the community with much-needed information and insights on social, political, cultural and political issues, which are crucial for the empowerment of the community as a whole.

In her paper, Barbara Metcalf raises some of the same issues as Singh does, seeing the fate of Urdu in the context of the history of Hindu-Muslim communal strife from the late nineteenth century and colonial machinations, leading to the development of what their protagonists saw as two separate languages out of a single language, Hindustani. Metcalf laments the pitiable state of Urdu in India. She talks of numerous libraries in the country with rich Urdu collections but without a librarian who can read or even catalogue them. She notes the desperate shortage of Urdu teachers, owing to lack of state-funded Urdu-teachers’ training facilities. She mentions, too, the fact that that few Urdu publishing houses produce anything but Islamic literature. She suggests that the cause of Urdu could be popularised by publishing Urdu works in the Devanagari or ‘Hindi’ script so that those who cannot read the Urdu script may have access to some of the gems of Urdu literature. She also raises the possibility of ‘biscript’ publications, texts using both the Urdu and Devanagari scripts, in order to reach a wider readership.

Voluntary action, Theodore Wright insists in his paper, is crucial for the preservation and promotion of Urdu in the absence of serious state initiatives. In order to stave off possible attacks from Hindutva forces who might see efforts for promoting Urdu as ‘anti-national’, Wright suggests that advocates of Urdu highlight the ‘Indian nationalist roots’ of the language and the benefits that reviving Urdu could have for India, including promoting knowledge of the Arabic script that could help Indians doing business with the Middle East.

The greatest threat to Urdu and the cultural heritage that it represents, Wright opines, comes not from Hindi, as its protagonists sometimes argue, but from English. In challenging the growing hegemony of English, he says, Urdu-speaking Muslims and Hindi-speaking Hindus have a common interest. There is, he argues, no need to exclude English, for that would isolate India from the rest of the world. Instead, what he pleads for is the ‘protection of Indian culture […] from the invasion of pornographic and violent American popular culture via satellite television, cinema and radio’, and in this, he says, advocates of the various Indian languages, including Urdu, can have a common cause to join hands for.

Muslim identity

Madrasas are today the main institutions for the teaching of Urdu. In her paper, Arjumand Ara looks at the role of madrasas in the shaping of contemporary Muslim identity and what this means for the fate of Urdu. Several of the points she raises are indeed valid, although on the whole her essay is distinctly polemical, makes too broad generalizations, lacks sufficient depth and sensitivity that comes from sustained fieldwork and is uncritically laudatory of the project of ‘modernity’ and of the Indian state’s claims to secularism and democracy. It also reflects a certain intellectual and elitist arrogance in its diatribes against the madrasas, seeing things, as indeed the ulama it argues against themselves often do, in black and white, without taking cognizance of the fine shades of grey in between.

Ara rightly argues against the claim that Indian madrasas are ‘dens of terror’. She opines that Hindutva propaganda against madrasas is linked to the right-wing Hindu forces’ quest for the ‘creation of a ghettoised majority’ (Hindus), which, in turn, ‘requires the creation of a ghettoised minority’ (Muslims). The Hindutva agenda of ‘Hinduising the Hindus’ is, she points out, crucially dependent on the ‘minoritising the minorities’, and the Hindutva discourse on madrasas reflects this. To equate the Indian madrasas with a few radical madrasas in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as many Indian and Western observers do, is quite misleading, she correctly says.

Yet, at the same time, Ara is critical of several aspects of the madrasa system. She opines that madrasas are the ‘greatest obstruction in the path of progress of the Muslim community’. She claims that ‘the general view that madrasas have a narrow outlook and oppose everything modern is not far [sic.] wrong’. ‘Educated Muslims’ (a term she leaves undefined, but which probably reflects the elitist notion that an ‘educated’ person is one who has received a ‘secular’ or ‘modern’ education, preferably in English), she says, ‘feel uneasy when they see swarms of young madrasa pupils in kurta-pyjama and sporting small beards and skull-caps emerging from a mosque or heading toward the home of a Muslim brother for a charity meal’.

Ara opines that Muslim elites have done little or nothing for the education of the Muslim masses, the vast majority of whom continue to wallow in poverty and illiteracy. In fact, she says, they have been ‘indifferent, almost hostile’ to the education of poor Muslims, most of who come from the ‘low’ castes. She refers in this regard to Sayyed Ahmad Khan, founder of the Aligarh movement, who saw his educational initiatives as aimed only at the so-called ashraf, Muslim elites who claimed foreign descent. He argued, she points out, that if ‘modern’ education were provided to Muslims of ‘low’ caste it would cause ‘resentment’ among the ashraf. Since ‘low’ caste Muslims were generally denied ‘modern’ education (both by the state as well as Muslim elites), they took recourse to madrasas. For their part, the madrasas, so Ara says, have only ‘further strengthened’ the caste system among the Muslims, with many ulama, following the lead of the Hindu Brahmins, seeking to legitimise caste through various means.

While in medieval and even early modern times, madrasas catered essentially to the ashraf, in recent years they have become the bastion of the ‘low’ caste Muslims, Ara says. This is because of the free education that they provide as well as the channel of upward social mobility through ashrafisation, emulation of the mores of associated with the ashraf, that they open up to upwardly aspiring ‘low’ caste Muslims. As Muslim elites went in for ‘modern’ education, they continued to support madrasas, although few of them chose to educate their children therein. Muslim elites, in colonial times and today, used madrasas, or so Ara claims, in an instrumental fashion, as a means to assert and strengthen a separate Muslim community identity based on religion, a task that they left to poor Muslims to bear. This further reinforced the association between madrasas and ‘low’ caste and poor Muslims. This changing class composition of madrasa students, added to the fact that madrasas later emerged as what Ara terms a ‘symbol of resistance to imperial rule’, meant that they became ‘more specific in [their] objectives and rigid in [their] worldview’, because of which they ‘gradually lost their relevance to contemporary society’. Children from poor families were made to study abstruse books in Arabic, which few of them could properly understand, leading to a rapid decline in madrasa scholarship.

And so, Ara goes on, a system was born that was ‘a by-product of a feudal society’ and one that, in her opinion, ‘should have died out with the introduction of a democratic and liberal social order’. The fact that such an order hardly exists in India and is still a far from finished project appears of no consequence to Ara, whose hostility to the madrasas is amply evident, and is reflected in her uncritical and simplistic approach to ‘modernity’ and ‘democracy’. But she is on firmer ground when she argues, without, however, explaining why, that in post-Partition India, Muslim religious organisations, many associated with the ulama of madrasas, sought to arrogate to themselves the status of leaders of all Indian Muslims. In effect, however they represented and protected what Ara terms ‘the interests of the feudal lords’ and ‘blatantly protected the autocratic system in the garb of religion’. The point about the ‘feudal lords’ is certainly arguable. Are there indeed many Muslim ‘feudal lords’ left after zamindari abolition, one wonders, but Ara’s argument about the narrow interpretations of religion emanating from most madrasas is certainly less contestable. But then, the same could be said of most Hindu religious schools, particularly those run by Hindutva organisations, for that matter. Surely, the problem of reactionary interpretations of religion is a more general one, which needs to be looked at in a broader context.

Ara does not conceal her antipathy for the madrasas, and here, as elsewhere in her essay, she refuses to recognise the positive contributions that many madrasas are indeed making. Although several of her observations seem valid enough, some of these are somewhat exaggerated. In post-Partition India, she says, madrasas and various Islamic religio-political organisations helped shaped Muslim identity as ‘traditional, fundamentalist, exclusivist and escapist'. ‘Madrasas, in fact’, she claims, ‘became the most effective tool in the hands of people with vested interests’, preaching those tenets of Islam ‘that suited them most’. They insisted that Muslims must never question the authority of the ulama and must not apply reason in religious matters. They focussed on rituals and duties, for which they promised rewards (sawab) in the life after death. They argued that if only the Muslims were to blindly follow the ulama they would receive a place in heaven. They were taught to cheerfully bear their poverty as a test from God and as a matter of fate. Poor Muslims studying in madrasas gained some sort of respectability and self-satisfaction in the belief that God loved them more because of the ‘righteousness in poverty’. In this way, she says, religion was deployed as a ‘powerful tool to keep people ignorant and exploited by the privileged’. Rather than empowering Muslims to improve their lot by adapting to the ‘modern’ world, madrasas, in effect, helped ‘push them to the margins’.

Madrasas and the way in which they interpret Islam admirably suit the interests of the Muslim ‘feudal’ elites, Ara contends, because it helps keep the Muslim masses under their sway, even as they send their own children to ‘modern’ schools and not to madrasas. The ‘mass base’ that madrasas create among the Muslim poor serves, she says, as a means for elite Muslims to exploit for their own quest for power and domination in the name of protecting Islam. Madrasas are projected as ‘forts of Islam’ and the slogan of ‘Islam in danger’ is routinely raised by Muslim elites and the ulama in order to keep the Muslim masses under their subjugation, she adds. At the same time, many ulama who insist that Muslims must send their children to study in madrasas send their own children to ‘modern’ schools and even abroad for education, so Ara contends. Such ulama are said to lead ‘modern’ lives while preaching obscurantism to their flock. Consequently, Ara alleges, madrasa students are ‘prone to becoming tools for vested interests’, further marginalizing and ghettoizing Muslims. ‘Youth with madrasa background are especially prone to brainwashing in the name of religious revivalism, Muslim nationhood and pan-Islamism and organized [sic.)] in jihadi camps’, she goes on, appearing to misleadingly equate the vast majority of the Indian madrasas with radical madrasas in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet, she says, Muslim elites and political parties are reluctant to intervene, as they are not genuinely interested in improving the living conditions of the Muslim masses. Ara opines that the state and Muslim organizations must help set up Urdu-medium schools catering to the Muslim poor to replace the madrasas, empower Muslims and counter the appeal of Hindu and Islamist communal and fascist forces.

Communalisation of Urdu

Amina Yaqin’s paper, like several others included in this volume, examines what the author terms as the progressive ‘communalisation’ of Urdu. Trapped in its ‘aristocratic lineage’, Urdu is now considered as a ‘Muslim’ language by many Hindus and Muslims as well as the state. While Congress politicians, including Gandhi and Nehru, had declared that neither Hindi nor Urdu but Hindustani would be India’s national language, they did not live up to their promise. Instead, heavily Sanskritised Hindi was foisted upon the country, leading to Hindi and Urdu becoming more distant from each other. Speakers of various dialects and languages in the ‘Hindi belt’ have been officially declared as ‘Hindi-speakers’ in order to back the ruling elites’ agenda of forcing Sanskritised Hindi on the rest of the country.

This point is further elaborated upon by Daniela Bredi, who argues that the notion of spoken Hindi and Urdu as two separate languages is misleading. Rather, she says, they ought to be seen as shades of what she calls a ‘unitary language’, drawing upon Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic vocabularies to different extents. She then proceeds to examine the role of an emerging Hindi middle-class in late nineteenth century colonial north India that sought to counter Muslim and Kayasth domination in government services in the United Provinces by championing the cause of ‘Hindi’, which they consciously developed as a language that was shorn of its Persian and Arabic heritage. In reaction, Muslim elites began stressing what they saw as the ‘Islamic’ identity of Urdu. Today, she says, Urdu is seen as integral to north Indian Muslim identity, with Muslim elites defending it, fearing the complete erasure of Muslim identity or what Bredi terms ‘cultural genocide’ in the face of a homogenizing Indian nationalism that is heavily influenced by Brahminical Hinduism. Since Urdu as a taught language is now largely limited to madrasas and since the standard of the few Urdu-medium schools leaves much to be desired, madrasa Urdu, heavily Arabised, has now become to official standard of ‘correct’ Urdu, threatening to wipe out Urdu’s rich secular and composite cultural heritage.

The Urdu press can play an important role in preserving and promoting the language, Bredi argues, but she adds that Urdu schools lack the standards needed to produce a readership that demands high standards of the press. Consequently, the low overall standard of the Urdu press has meant that it has largely failed to play a constructive role in shaping Muslim sensibilities to adjust to contemporary challenges facing the Indian Muslims. Instead, Urdu journalism has, so Bredi argues, a tendency to reinforce a ‘sectarian’ and ‘emotional’ outlook. Since in north India few middle-class Muslims can read Urdu, the Urdu press there caters mainly to the lower-middle classes and the poor. Often, she writes, Urdu papers are linked to Muslim politicians who have a vested interest in reinforcing a ‘ghetto mentality’ among Muslims. This problem is further compounded by the fact that many Urdu journalists are madrasa graduates and are not exposed to other forms of education and ways of thinking.

Urdu intellectuals and Muslim politicians who seek to protect and promote Urdu must prove, Bredi says, that Urdu does indeed have a vital role to play in India today. They should desist from ‘self-pity’ and blaming others for Urdu’s plight. She suggests that the thousands of maktabs in the country could incorporate the teaching of Urdu, in addition to the Qur’an, and that in their efforts to secure the rights of Urdu, its champions should not project it as a ‘Muslim’ issue, but, rather, as one to do with a language that is an integral part of India’s rich and diverse cultural heritage.

Syed Shahabuddin’s well-argued article offers constructive suggestions for the promotion of Urdu through voluntary efforts and state initiatives. Shahabuddin insists that voluntary efforts to protect Urdu are not enough in themselves. Rather, the state must play a key role in this regard since it is obliged to do so. He notes that while Urdu-speakers in large parts of the country are effectively denied the right to study their mother-tongue in schools, scores of colleges and universities teach the language, making Urdu-education ‘top-heavy’. He argues that it is the Constitutional obligation of the state to enable Urdu-speakers have their children educated in Urdu till at least the primary level and to learn the language as an optional subject at higher levels, and he notes the various means through which the state has consciously sought to relieve itself of this duty. For their part, he adds, many Muslim educational institutions do not give particular support to Urdu, since their primary objective is either commercial or else the promotion of education in general, and not of Urdu as such.

Shahabuddin believes that it is not now possible to make Urdu the medium of instruction at the secondary level, except in what he says are ‘exceptional conditions’. However, he argues for the state or the Urdu-speaking community to establish one or more Urdu-medium high school in each district to feed the few Urdu-medium higher secondary and degree-level institutions that remain, which, in turn, can produce better teachers for Urdu-medium schools. It is only when the state is forced to act on its Constitutional obligation of enabling Urdu-speakers to learn their language in schools that Urdu can survive, and Muslim elites should raise this demand rather than remaining restricted to demands for more Urdu universities, Shahabuddin stresses. The latter demand, he says, is actually welcomed by the state as it enables it to proceed with undermining and marginalizing Urdu while at the same time providing sops to Urdu-speakers and paying verbal tributes to the language by setting up Urdu academies and sponsoring Urdu mushairas and seminars, thus diverting attention from the fundamental question of teaching Urdu as a subject or employing it as a medium of instruction in schools.

Several other essays included in this volume make roughly the same points as those mentioned above. This remarkable book is a must for anyone concerned with the unenviable fate that Urdu faces in India today. Someone ought to undertake the laborious task of summarizing its contents and translating and publishing it in Urdu for the benefit of Urdu-speakers. The fact that this book is in English and that there is, as far as this reviewer is aware, nothing comparable on this subject available in Urdu, itself shows the depths to which Urdu has sunk, or, rather, forced to sink, in post-Partition India.