Urdu for Muslims?

The perils of linguistic stereotypes

VIKRAM KUMAR

Posted online: Friday, June 24, 2005 at 0000 hours IST

TIME OUT I met Khan Sahib at a private gathering. Urdu poetry is a passion with him. He has a knack of responding to the variety of life’s situations by composing, impromptu, couplets. Similes and metaphors in his poetry are unusual and unique. He has an inexhaustible treasure of anecdotes relating to his friends misconstruing key words of Urdu in communications meant for them and consequently finding Khan Sahib and themselves in hilarious situations.

Since all his friends addressed him as Khan Sahib, I too stuck to the same. My chance meeting with Khan Sahib and his wife at a friend’s party left me wondering about how they made such an odd couple in terms of their language skills. I have not seen Khan Sahib ever uttering a word of English and his wife seemed qualified enough to give lessons in English elocution.

Some time ago I discovered some old documents written in Urdu in my ancestral house in the village. Immediately I thought of Khan Sahib and sought an appointment from him. He gave me a few landmarks so that I would not face any difficulty in locating his house. On the appointed day and time I found myself looking for his house desperately in the location mentioned in the address. Everything seems to falling in line but the nameplate outside was bereft of any Muslim name.

To my relief I saw Khan Sahib coming out from the same building. He welcomed me with open arms and directed me to the drawing room. The room minus its sofa and few curios would look like a perfect reading room. In the meantime he got a call and was busy over the telephone; I began browsing through his collection of books. To my surprise I found that most of the books carried “Kamal” as the name of the collector of books. I could not resist asking Khan Sahib in chaste Urdu, “Janab ka ism-e-sheerf?” (Sir, what is your name?) Khan Sahib answered: “Uy toh khaksar ka naam Kamal hai par jo mazhab ko juban se jodhate hai woh Kamaal pukarate hai.” I confessed to Khan Sahib that all these years I had mistaken him as a Muslim.

How ignorant I was in drawing a straight connection between language and religion. All Christians are not English speakers and all English speakers are not Christians. Had I learned the Urdu language and literature in the course of my formal education perhaps I would have been purged of my prejudices against “others” long back. Understanding the secular character of the Urdu language and denouncing all efforts to abuse it through its political misuse will go a long way in saving Urdu and restoring and rejuvenating its role in the civic sphere.

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