[lg policy] Five Questions

Mon Mar 5 15:13:22 UTC 2018

 Five Questions
March 05, 2018
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Islamabad  -  Tariq Rahman is an academic scholar, writer and a well-cited
linguist in Pakistan. Holding degrees in literature and linguistics, he has
authored many books including A History of Pakistani Literature in English,
Language and Politics in Pakistan, An Introduction to Linguistics,
Language, Ideology and Power. He is the recipient of several national and
international awards recognising his research and vast scholarship. His
most recent book is From Hindi to Urdu: A Social and Political History
published in 2011. Tariq Rahman is currently the dean of the School of
Education at the Beaconhouse National University in Lahore.

 Q1) Your life has an interesting trajectory; you joined the army, left it,
studied literature and then eventually switched to linguistics? What
prompted you to change your fields?

 When I joined the army I was very young and didn’t know anything about
politics. I wasn’t interested in it either. When military action took place
in Bangladesh, I was about to be passed out as an officer and heard senior
colleagues from East Pakistan describing the atrocities on ground. The
stories of mass murders, systematic rapes, and burning of villages,
traumatized me. For them, it was suppression of those who betrayed the
state whereas for me it was the suppression of East Pakistanis by military
action rather than votes. I decided that I couldn’t obey orders to fight a
war, which my conscience declares wrong. That is when I resigned from the
army even though I had prospects of rising to higher ranks. I wanted to
study further. Eventually, I did an MA in English, and then another two in
political science, all three as private candidates.

Q2) Do you think linguistics is more important to understand than
literature?

I think both are equally important. After leaving the army, I wanted to do
a degree that could combine literature with social sciences. With social
sciences, I felt you could write about the changing attitudes of war.
Social science is important in terms of bringing attitudinal changes. Now,
the British council scholarship at that time (1979) was only offered for
literature. In 1980, I applied to a number of universities but my
preference was University of Sheffield, which offered British history and
literature. By undertaking this degree, I could write about the military.
When I finished my MA in literature, in 1982, my class fellows had applied
for PhD programs. With encouragement from my wife, I too decided to apply
for a PhD. I then got a doctorate degree in 1985, which focused on E M
Forster’s aspects of an English language novel. I came back to Pakistan and
in a year’s time, my interest changed to the history of English language
and then to linguistics. Then I applied for another Masters because I
wanted to write a book called ‘language and politics’. For this, I went to
Glasgow because Scottish universities were teaching linguistics.

My studies brought me to the nature of conflict in Pakistan, class of
worldview and ideologies and, in general, things which are precious to me
in a country, we all live in.

Q3) What is the current state of linguistics education in Pakistan?

It has improved since the time I came. There are a number of Masters and
MPhil classes in various universities but no institute teaches linguistics
at Bachelor’s level. That is unfortunate because students come for an MPhil
degree without any real grounding of how the language works. I founded the
linguistics department at Quaid-e-Azam University, which offers MA in the
subject but then again, without any previous knowledge of language,
students can’t take much from this degree. So while neighboring countries
like India, Sri Lanka and Nepal, offer linguistic courses at Bachelor’s
level, the field remains unfamiliar and unexplored in Pakistan.

Q4) How do you think languages such as Urdu and English are being used as
tools of power at the cost of local languages?

There are domains of power such as democracy, judiciary, media and business
houses. Whichever is the language of these will give people jobs. English
is primary language since British times followed by Urdu. To flourish in
the job market, it is important to know these languages.  This is true for
India too. India has a 3-language policy on paper but jobs are still only
in English and Hindi.  This is a sub-continental reality, which is more
pronounced in Pakistan.

There are a total of 72 regional languages in Pakistan, but their
importance is being increasingly marginalized. Punjabi, despite having 60
million speakers, is not taught in schools whereas Pashto is taught only
till class 5 in Balochistan. Sindhi is taught till higher grades but only
in rural Sindh. Our languages are the beauty of Pakistan and it is tragic
that there have been no measures to safeguard them.

Q5) Although many people don’t approve of ‘Urdish’, the use of Urdu and
English together in utterances and written sentences, giving the logic that
one should use only one language at a time, you argue in favour of such
usage. Why?

 Purists have always been against change. Whenever two languages come
together, there has always been, what we call, code-switching. That is the
technical term for such usage. It has also been called high literature at
some point. The common saying these days is that ‘Kids don’t know any
language. Neither Urdu nor English’.  This is complete nonsense because
there are, in my opinion, many reasons to switch during the conversation.
If one wants to express intimacy or convey particular thoughts or ideas
which one feels can only be conveyed effectively in a certain language,
they switch. It is simply false to say that bilingual or multilingual
speakers don’t have command over any one language. In ordinary
conversations, speakers of more than one language will always alternate
between them to facilitate the conversation.

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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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