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Imposing an arbitrary national language would only divide Pakistan further
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<time datetime="2016-09-13T15:44:34Z">September 13, 2016 11.44am EDT</time>
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Arthur Dudney
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Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge
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<p><span>Arthur Dudney receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust. Views expressed are his own.</span></p>
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Urdu-language maxims adorn a school in the Swat Valley, Pakistan.
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<p>For a country seven decades old, Pakistan is dealing with a
surprisingly fundamental political and cultural problem: a struggle over
what language to use for government.</p>
<p>The Supreme Court has ordered the government to use the constitutionally-mandated national language, <a href="http://www.dawn.com/news/1243652">Urdu</a>,
in place of English in the many contexts where English is currently
used. (Ironically, the court’s order was itself written in English.)
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has declared his enthusiasm for the
transition to Urdu, and a <a href="http://nation.com.pk/editors-picks/24-May-2016/pm-forms-body-to-implement-urdu-as-official-language">committee</a> was constituted to monitor its progress.</p>
<p>But is imposed monolingualism a good fit for South Asia – or does it
in fact follow a very Eurocentric idea of how a nation-state should
work?</p>
<p>This discussion has been rumbling on and off ever since India and
Pakistan achieved independence. Both of their post-colonial
constitutions required that after 15 years, English should be officially
replaced by Urdu and Hindi respectively, but both countries eventually
side-stepped the requirement. Pakistan continued to use English without
comment alongside Urdu; India declared it a “subsidiary official
language”, symbolically inferior to Hindi but nonetheless still
recognised.</p>
<p>Today, the problem comes in how narrowly Urdu and Hindi are defined
by the bodies tasked with monitoring and developing the official
languages.</p>
<p>Pakistan’s <a href="http://tribune.com.pk/story/458570/national-language-authority-renamed/">National Language Promotion Department</a> (formerly the National Language Authority) and India’s <a href="http://www.rajbhasha.nic.in/">Department of Official Language</a>
both have a reputation for filling their respective languages with
clunky neologisms. These are used to avoid common English loanwords;
Hindi ones are drawn largely from Sanskrit, and Urdu’s largely from
Arabic and Persian.</p>
<p>The people who <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-34215293">complain</a>
about the language policy aren’t necessarily trying to maintain their
English-speaking privilege; there really are genuine questions about the
character of the official language. If its speakers commonly use words
that aren’t recognised by governmental language bodies, is it right to
have a two-track system in which there is a governmental variety of a
language and very different one that normal people use?</p>
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<span class="gmail-caption">Up in arms.</span>
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<p>Taking a hard line against English as a colonial language makes
little sense decades after independence, especially when it has become
the language of international business and when English loanwords have
become embedded in people’s everyday usage in other South Asian
languages. And looking back over history, this is a very recent argument
anyway.</p>
<p>The scorched-earth cultural politics of imposing a national language
never took hold in the subcontinent before modern India and Pakistan
came into being. Persian was the apex language during Mughal times and
well into the era of British colonial rule, but it never overwhelmed the
subcontinent’s longstanding linguistic diversity.</p>
<p>Many modern historians never think to question <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zGNJAAAAIAAJ&dq=On%20the%20Education%20of%20the%20People%20of%20India&pg=PA144#v=onepage&q&f=false">the colonial line</a> that Persian was “thoroughly debasing and worthless” in India, but this is a fiction; I myself <a href="http://newbooksnetwork.com/arthur-dudney-delhi-pages-from-a-forgotten-history-hay-house-india-2015/">wrote an entire book</a>
arguing against the idea that Persian was a foreign imposition that
patriotic Indians never really embraced. In reality, people used the
languages available to them, making allowances for difference and freely
taking words from other languages.</p>
<p>It was recognised, as the old Hindi saying has it, that in South Asia “<em>kos kos par bhasha badle, do kos par pani</em>” or “the language changes every mile, and the taste of the water every two miles”.</p>
<h2>Overridden and overwhelmed</h2>
<p>In Europe, where national languages are largely a foregone
conclusion, we tend to forget how brutal and undemocratic their
imposition was.</p>
<p>Languages other than English, notably Irish and Welsh, were repressed
across the British Isles in early modern times. The 1536 Welsh Act of
Union, for example, excluded <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/08/wales-language-commissioner-welsh-speakers">Welsh speakers</a> from all government posts.</p>
<p>Across the English Channel, the adoption of standard French involved
centuries of violent confrontation with Occitan and Breton speakers. The
1539 <a href="http://www.academia.edu/11317362/Interpreting_early_French_linguistic_policy_The_meaning_and_impact_of_Fran%C3%A7ois_Is_Edict_of_Villers-Cotter%C3%AAts">Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts</a>,
which replaced Latin with French in legal documents, has often been
read as an act of popular liberation from the dead hand of Latin, but
from the minority-language perspective it was a disaster; whereas all
linguistic communities had previously used the same Latin documents, now
only one community was represented.</p>
<p>But while Europe’s worst battles over minority and non-standard
languages have been largely swept under the rug in recent centuries,
radically multilingual India and Pakistan simply don’t have enough rug
to do the same. An unintended consequence of decolonisation has been an
almost colonial imposition of artificial, non-colloquial registers of
Hindi and Urdu by Indian and Pakistani elites, who are concerned that
without a unifying national language their nations will face devastating
social and political disintegration.</p>
<p>This is misguided. Instead of repeating some of the unsavoury
linguistic nationalism of early modern Europe, these elites should
celebrate the wide variation in usage. They should acknowledge the ways
Hindi and Urdu mix with languages like English and Punjabi, and make
allowances for the complexity of language in society.</p>
<p>Far too little attention is routinely paid to how the citizens
themselves might wish to speak. Nothing illustrates this more poignantly
than a <a href="http://www.amaana.org/ismaili/arabic-universal-language-of-the-muslim-world-aga-khan-iii/">1951 speech</a>
by the Aga Khan, in which he argued that the only possible national
language for the new Islamic Republic of Pakistan could be Arabic. While
he addressed the point that Urdu was the mother tongue of a tiny
minority of Pakistanis and thus apparently unsuitable as a national
language, he did not acknowledge the undeniable fact that Arabic was the
mother tongue of precisely 0% of Pakistanis.</p>
<p>And of course, he gave the speech in English.</p>
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