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The Language of Power
Masters of Linguistics remember very well how when the first ever
linguistic Survey of India was taking place, an entire lobby of
anti-Punjabi people had tried to argue that Punjabi was neither a
language, nor did it have a fully developed script of its own and in
fact it was a mere dialect of Hindustani. It finally took masters
like Grierson to establish that it was a full fledged language.
Soon the debate turned towards the available body of literature and
we were told that there just was not enough contemporary literature
to justify inclusion of Punjabi as a language. The Singh Sabha
movement changed that and many a Sikh writer turned to their quills
to fill that gap. Men like Bhai Vir Singh made signal contribution.
Half a century down the line, the communal lobby was back. The 1941
census simply dropped the language column, and the 1951 census was a
totally communal one which showed how it was possible to Muslimize
the Urdu language and Hinduize the Hindi. In the bargain, some
Sikhization of Punjabi also happened. The 1961 census was perhaps
the most fraudulent in history. (We are not even mentioning
Kandukhera).
And while all these wars were taking place on the issue of the
language, some private warfare was also going on over the issue of
script. Men like Shaheed Bhagat Singh at one stage advocated using
the Devnagari script for Punjabi language. Many Muslims who migrated
to
Pakistan were using the Arabic Shahmukhi script while Sikhs stuck to
the script used in the holy Guru Granth Sahib, the Gurmukhi.
Pre-Independence, the war was between Hindi and Urdu, and since Urdu
was the language of power, most mercantile classes of Hindus also
used Urdu, but as soon as India yanked itself off the yoke of
colonialism, the language of power became Hindi at the Central level
and a majority of Arya Samaj inspired Punjab’s Hindus quickly
shunned Punjabi and stated their mother tongue as Hindi.
The communal press in
Punjab
played its own role, so Punjabi was being decimated in
Punjab
on the Indian side while those sons of Punjabi who migrated to
Pakistan quickly adopted the language of power in their country,
Urdu. Punjabi was not even taught in Pakistani Punjab schools and
even though people used that language in their everyday lives (and
how so beautifully), there was no clamor for Punjabi teaching.
Efforts of men like Afzal Ahsan Randhawa and Amin Malik did keep the
issue alive on the other side of Radcliffe Line but achievements are
far too small.
It
is in Indian Punjab that we saw the real decimation of Punjabi.
Except for some push in the late 60’s, sons of Punjabi Ma-Boli were
gradually pushed away to English or Hindi, thanks to the higher
market value of private school education and low awareness levels
among politicians about using the law to keep a language thriving.
The power of any language has to do with the language of power, and
Punjab’s
politicians forgot that their political existence was closely tied
to this basic cultural construct. In an increasingly multi-lingual
world, the importance of mother- tongue cannot be over-stressed. It
is in this connection that we welcome the latest initiative in
Punjab to make Punjabi compulsory in schools and offices. But that
is only the law. In the social sphere, there are many lessons that
Punjab
can
learn from the Diaspora which has managed to stay closer to the
mother-tongue despite many pressures and fears of losing in the
jungle of a strange culture and myriad languages.
30
April 2008
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