[lg policy] The colonial roots of the current crisis of Punjabi

Wed Feb 21 15:47:21 UTC 2018

The colonial roots of the current crisis of Punjabi

   - Mushtaq Soofi <http://www.dhakatribune.com/author/mushtaq-soofi/>
   - Published at 05:04 PM February 21, 2018

[image: The colonial roots of the current crisis of Punjabi]
<http://www.dhakatribune.com/assets/uploads/2018/02/mushtaqsufi_features_feb21sup2018.jpg>
Pakistani writer Mushtaq Soofi writes of his native language of Punjab, and
how that too faced a constant threat from the colonising power of Urdu
<http://www.dhakatribune.com/linkout/244432>

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Everyday experience bears testimony to the truth of the ancient Arabic
adage – the speech of the ruler is the ruler of speech. When British
colonialists occupied the Subcontinent, the English language inevitably
became the socio-cultural emblem of power; a tool that enabled the ‘native’
to get closer to power, or at least achieve the semblance of power.
Persian, the lingua franca of the old elite, was gradually replaced by
English, spoken by the new foreign elite.

*Colonial language policy was underpinned by economic, political and
cultural considerations *

There were the class relationships to be maintained to extract maximum
economic surplus, political domination of the white elite and a display of
socio-cultural superiority of the European way of life, a model to be
emulated by the ‘natives’.

The British did not occupy the subcontinent in one go, the process spread
over hundreds of years. The first task they set themselves was to change
the indigenous knowledge based education system. The crucial element of
this was and is language, the tool through which knowledge is imparted. The
first step was to undermine the status and significance of the old
languages that were officially patronised and religiously venerated like
Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian.

Persian being the court language suffered a great setback; it was simply
thrown out of the echelons of power. In its place, English was declared the
language of the power. However, official business could not be carried out
without the help of the compliant old and new emerging elite, so the new
language policy envisaged two types of schooling in a broader colonial
framework.

European schooling was introduced with English as medium of instruction for
the local elite. And schooling for commoners, though based on the European
model, had elements of tradition; it employed regional/local language as
the medium of instruction with English as a subject. In short, the colonial
rulers introduced English at higher level of administration and at middle
and lower levels encouraged the use of local languages, such as Bengali in
Bengal, Hindi and Urdu in Uttar Pradesh and Sindhi in Sindh.

*Unfortunately, the colonial bureaucracy adopted altogether a different
policy in the Punjab.*

It imposed two foreign languages – English and Urdu – on the people, with
far reaching socio-cultural consequences. Punjab was the last sovereign
kingdom to fall in 1849, ten years after the death of the politically
conscious ruler and military strategist Maharaja Ranjit Singh.  There were
two groups with opposing opinions on the question of language in Punjab –
the minority group advocated for the use of Punjabi, whereas the other
group was in favour of employing Urdu. Though their arguments were flimsy,
born of their poor knowledge of Punjab’s literary and cultural history,
they won the day due to a host of factors – political, administrative, and
strategic.

J Wilson, deputy commissioner of Shahpur, which was the district
headquarter of Sargodha at the time, writes in his notes – “I wish to draw
attention to what I consider to be serious faults in our system of primary
education in the Punjab— it fails to attract more than a small proportion
of the boys we wish to educate, and especially of those belonging to the
agricultural classes, in which I include not only land-owners and tenants,
but also artisans and village menials. To the ordinary Punjabi village boy,
Urdu is almost as foreign as French would be to an English rustic.”

He also addressed another objection against the use of the Punjabi – “It
may be objected that there is no one Punjabi language, but several
dialects. This is true, but it was also true of all written languages
before the particular dialect ultimately adopted became specially favoured
by the literate.”

He wrote this in 1894, but the decision to use Urdu and English was taken
and imposed long before that, without proper debate.

However, the Director of Public Instruction Punjab, wrote to the Secretary
of Government, Punjab in 1862 – “There can be no advantage in the
substitution of Punjabee for Urdoo —Punjabi is merely a dialect of Urdoo
and varies considerably in different parts of the Province. As a written
language it makes its appearance in the Goormookhee character, a bastard
form of Nagree, almost as bad as the Kuyasthe of the N.W. Provinces which
is fast dying out. It has no literature of its own.”

Well! You can imagine how knowledgeable and well-instructed was this
director, who declared Punjabi a mere dialect of Urdu, not knowing that
Punjabi is much older than Urdu and had written literature of its own
spread over at least 800 years, at the time he was expressing his lofty
opinion.

The script Punjabi used was actually Arabic based. Guru Arjun and his
companions evolved Gurmukhi letters for sacred literature as late as the
sixteenth century, so it surely was an outlandish example of colonial
ignorance and ‘Hindustani prejudice’.

*This prejudice was internalised by the Punjabi upper classes, who turned
against their own language, which has a literary history longer than that
of English.*

Geoffery Chaucer, the father of English literature, was born in 1343 and
died in 1400 while Baba Farid, the great pioneer of Punjabi literary
tradition, was born in 1173 and breathed his last in 1265. Ginan, the
Ismaili religious hymns, were composed in the local language in the 10th
and 11th centuries.

Those who claim that there was no political motive behind the rejection of
Punjabi and imposition of Urdu would be well-advised to glance through the
letter the Commissioner of Delhi wrote to the Punjab Government in 1862. It
said – “Any measure which would revive Goormukhee, which is the written
Punjabi tongue, would be a political error.”

He was not wrong. It would certainly have been a political error to
encourage the ‘revival’ of Punjabi because it would have subliminally
evoked the Punjabi identity and history, which could presage serious
problems for the colonialists who made every effort to denigrate what was
indigenous.

*The issue of the Punjabi language needs to be understood and analysed in
the context of colonialism in the subcontinent.*

While it was not a court language in the pre-colonial era, it was employed
for academic, artistic and literary expressions. It carried no
socio-cultural stigma born of class distinctions, but had literary
prestige. The last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar composed poetry in
Punjabi, though it was not his mother tongue. Punjabi was used proudly by
clergy, Sufi-saints and secular literati.

The colonial administration in the Punjab created the a language policy in
favour of Urdu for administrative convenience, fear of nationalist feelings
associated with Punjabi, and to create a new type of educated person loyal
to the white master. What above all had the greatest impact was the gradual
change in the mode of production introduced by the colonial machine.

Punjabi was kept out of new schools where two foreign languages, English
and Urdu, were imposed. The colonial administration offered a clear choice
to the Punjabis. If they wanted jobs, they had to get educated in the new
schools, instructed in the new languages. Punjabi did not enable them to
make a living, and how can a language be owned and used if learning it
disempowers them?

While the roots for the oppression of Punjabi were laid down long ago, we
are to this day continuing the movement for the preservation of Punjabi in
a nation that still holds Urdu above all languages. The Bengali language
movement of the 1950s is a constant source of inspiration for our struggle
for the restoration of rights of Punjabi, and every International Mother
Language Day, we salute our Bengali brothers and sisters and remember their
sacrifices.

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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