Doordarshan to launch Urdu channel in 2006

New Delhi: UNI

A New Year's gift awaits the over 120-million-strong Urdu-speaking people in the country with Prasar Bharati announcing to launch an exclusive Urdu channel from January 1, 2006.

Announcing this at a press conference here on Friday, Information and Broadcasting Minister S Jaipal Reddy said the launch of the channel would take at least six months for recruiting personnel and developing software for it.

An amount of Rs 65.7 crore had been set aside to prepare the software for the channel, which would beam at lest seven hours of programme every day, to begin with, he said.

He said Prasar Bharati had accepted a request to this effect made by the Central Government.

The Minister said there was no dearth of Urdu journalists in the country to help develop the channel.

''To start with, a sum of Rs 200 crore is proposed to be provided in the 2005-06 Budget for the channel, which will dish out both news and entertainment programmes,'' he pointed out.

Allaying doubts about the commercial viablity of the proposed channel in view of the competition from the existing private Urdu channels, Mr Reddy said Prasar Bharati is a public broadcaster and it has to cater to the needs of all sections of society.

''Urdu boasts of a rich literature, and over a hundred million people speak and understand it. It is imperative to start such a channel,'' he added.

While the channel was not being started keeping commercial viability in view, attempts would be made to earn revenue.

http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/jun242005/update158292005624.asp

We can just hope that competition will make ETV Urdu's program even better.

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.

http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=73153

Manto: Messiah or madman?

Nirupama Dutt on Saadat Hasan Manto, the wild child of literature, in his 50th death anniversary year

A month before I was born here in Chandigarh, there died a man called Saadat Hasan Manto out there in Lahore in 1955. He was just 43 and he had challenged God in his own epitaph that is written on his grave_ "There Saadat Hasan Manto lies buried…and buried in his breast are all the secrets of the art of story writing. Even now lying buried under tons of earth he wonders whether he or God is the greater writer of the short story."

For the likes of me who grew up without knowledge of Urdu, the language Manto wrote in, he remained a much-talked-about yet obscure litterateur and my first introduction to his stories was through a special issue of Sarika, a literary monthly that used to be brought out the by Times of India group long ago, sometime in the 1970s.

This issue carried some of the Partition stories for which Manto is so famous. However, for a teenager brought up on a not so merry mix pulp fiction in English, Hindi and Punjabi via Devanagari these stories were difficult and somewhat remote.

This seems a rather strange confession from a member of a family that had migrated from Lahore in the bloody 1947. The only alibi that I can find for it is in the ‘conspiracy of silence’ that was to be found not only in politics, history but even within homes. It took me many years to know which aunt had been abducted and then rehabilitated or which relatives had slaughtered their daughters as they migrated from one part of the Punjab to the other.

Anyway, Manto was not a name to be mentioned too often in middle class homes, specialise as he did in tales of pimps and prostitutes. He was a drunk and had been an inmate of lunatic asylums. What had we, the new breeds of Independent India, have to do with the likes of him?

Glimpses of him came in snatches from my mentor, Mantoesque poet of Hindi called Kumar Vikal. I recall him saying, "If one is to write of red-light areas in present times, one should be able to transcend a Manto who seems to have said it all." Vikal with Hindi as the medium of his expression and Left-wing politics as his inspiration seemed to dismiss Manto such.

Those were still days of ‘Laal Salam’ and Manto was also a deserter of sorts who had chosen to migrate to a country that was formed on the basis of a particular religion.

It was only in the late 1980s when Baba Laali, the Savant of Patiala, allowed me into the ranks of his disciples, who could be talked to, that I heard him referring to Manto, his writings, and also using him as a symbol for humanism amidst the dark days of militancy in Punjab. I recall some quotable quotes by Laali uttered on the bench outside the cafeteria of Punjabi University at Patiala and I gobbled these remarks with the enthusiasm of a slow learner. So said Laali: "That was 1947 and now it is AK 47." "The urinal is the only secular space. Manto has said it all in the symbol of the urinal."

In the early 1990s I actually entered that pre-Independence urinal in Bombay of old where the graffiti debated, in unprintable epithets the treatment meted out to the mothers of the two communities. For mothers and sisters are the first to be targeted in any battle that men fight and so it was with the names of the two countries that were replacing female genitals. This was when Rajkamal Prakashan published five volumes of Manto’s complete works in Devanagari. Of course these were not so complete as what would be unpalatable to the popular opinion in Hindustan was edited out. Nevertheless ‘Mutari’ (urinal) and other stories that make Manto compete with God were there and also my slowly acquired understanding to receive them.

That was a time when 50 years of Partition were approaching and so was a revival of interest in this madman and messiah called Manto who had intervened in spaces into which historians social scientists failed to reach. That was a time when progressive historians accepted their failure. Mushirul Hasan aptly says: "The fact is that to me and many other historians like me, Manto and many other creative writers expose the inadequacy of numerous narratives on Independence and Partition, and compel us to adopt new approaches that have eluded the grasp of social scientists and provide a foundation for developing an alternative discourse to current expositions of a general theory on inter-community relations."

Manto’s nephew Khalid Hasan, to whom goes the credit of translating much of Manto into English for Penguin, wrote some time ago wondering if Pakistan would pay adequate tributes to Manto on the 50th anniversary of his death. Tributes to Manto? What tribute can one pay to a writer who at the cost of his sanity, health and well-being paved the way for the preservation of essential human values. And it is to Manto and his kin that we today think of a sub-continent that will shape up differently for the positive. Manto Mian, I would like to tell you of some graffiti here in this Chandigarh of ours.

As I take a lift in some office in Sector 34 during the India-Pakistan cricket days, I find a heart with an arrow piercing it drawn by some youth of the MTV generation with the words ‘I love Pakistan’.

It has been a long and painful journey since the two governments of India and Pakistan divided their madmen and the protagonist of your Toba Tek Singh breathed his last on the no-man land. But we seem to be moving on and there are more choices before us than banishment, madness or death. Perhaps, there was a method in your madness.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2005/20050612/spectrum/book5.htm

Read Manto's most famous story (translated into English): http://www.urdustan.net/2004/09/toba-tek-singh-by-manto.html

some more of his stories in Urdu:
http://www.urdustan.com/mazameen/mazduri.html

Dastans: The ancient art of story telling

The Hamzanama is nothing but an illustration of a ‘dastan’ that tells stories. SHRUBA MUKHERJEE speaks with theatre artist Mahmood Farooqui who is attempting to revive this ancient cultural form.


It has enchanted both the prince and the pauper. From the court of Akbar in Fatehpur Sikri, to the Qissa-Khvani Bazaar in Peshawar, to the by-lanes of old Delhi, ‘dastans’— symbolising the perfect bonding of literature and performing art have not only entertained people since time immemorial, they have been an outstanding example of prose narration in Urdu.

But in what might be considered as another instance of cultural neglect, this art of story telling, where the narrator used to perform the characters through voice modulation, mimicry, ventriloquism and spontaneous composition, has sunk into oblivion as today there is no expert, book or account that can shed light on this remarkable tradition.

It is the vitality of the text and the elements of creativity and improvisation in performance which attracted young theatre artist Mahmood Farooqui into the magic world of dastans and the dastangois or the narrators.

Presently working on a research project, this Rhodes scholar is trying to revive the “culture of story-telling” by ensuring that this unique form of verbal art gets its rightful place in Urdu cultural tradition. Through his project, that includes translating a few volumes of dastans, performing them at stage shows and making a film on the art form, Mahmood sets a “modest” goal for himself— revivification of interest in the craft.

Elaborating on the nature of this unique art form Mahmood says, the word dastan means a tale, but longer than a qissa. Thus, a dastangoi might carry on for days and weeks telling stories. Originally composed in Persian, versions of dastans gradually spread to all languages of the Islamic— from Indonesia to Azerbaijan, East Bengal to Constantinople.

The most famous of these purported to deal with the life and adventures of Amir Hamzah, the Prophet’s uncle. “The stories had a moral— victory of the righteous over the sinner. But even the righteous had his pitfalls showing that to err is human and there is nothing like a perfect human being,” says Mahmood.

Akbar’s patronage

Popular in India since the eleventh century, the art form acquired immense prestige because of emperor Akbar’s personal interest in it. He not only memorised great portions of the story and used to recite and perform them with élan, he also commissioned an illustrated version of it, the great Hamzanama, regarded as the crowning glory of Mughal Art.

However, the dastan came into its own in India only in the 19th century when it began to be composed in Urdu. The “Indianised” dastans had a lot of common elements and storylines with the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Jataka and the Panchatantra. For example, the story of Ram killing the demon Marich, who was in the disguise of a golden deer, had been modified in a number of dastans. In 1881, Munshi Nawal Kishore, the legendary publisher from Lucknow, decided to come out with a multi-volume edition and in 1905, the 46 volumes of the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza were published.

But more interesting than the text was its narration as the dastangoi used to recite the stories along with the sub-plots from memory and the quality of his performance used to depend on his capacity to improvise.

Their performance required exceptional command over rhetoric, delivery, mimicry, ventriloquism and spontaneous composition. Moreover, dastangoi was one aspect of an oral/performative culture where the public arena— market place, roads, chowks, was the first and perhaps the most natural site of performance.

“For example, when a dastangoi used to perform in front of a kebab shop in old Delhi, he used to select his stories according to his audience. Since there was no stage, no dazzling costume and no music, the narrator used to chose the language, words and poems in such a way that he could hold the attention of his audience for a long time,” says Mahmood. Citing the example of the last famous dastangoi of India Mir Baqr Ali, Mahmood says, “While he was reciting the dastan, if a king appeared in the story, the listeners felt themselves standing before an imperious monarch.

Sometimes, if he spoke the words of some old woman, he adopted the very style of speech of respectable elderly ladies, as if he does not have a single tooth”.

Whenever, the story had a description of a marketplace, the narrator used commoners’ language. But soon after the narration might have a court scene and the dastangoi would switch over to sophisticated Persian with equal élan.

Although dastans continued to be published till well into the 1940s their popularity, both as a printed story and as a live performance, had clearly waned. While changing times might explain the decline of the form, what is inexplicable is the way their memory has been virtually effaced from our literary and performance history, says Mahmood.

Though the main stories were based on the tours of Hamzah and his family to far off lands, ostensibly in the cause of Islam, the sub-plots also included secular activities such as wining, seducing, abducting and the amorous affairs of men and women.

http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/jun122005/finearts1033262005611.asp

Mahmood Farooqui writes in Daily Mid-day, Mumbai.

http://ww1.mid-day.com/asp/columnsarchive.asp?cat_id=745&st=0

Bringing IT home for Urdu

Pakistan’s presence on the internet is expanding at an incredible rate. Yet the number of websites that feature Urdu content is dismally low. A Google search for the phrase “Urdu” reveals over three million hits, but of these probably less than one tenth of a per cent actually feature any content in Urdu. Couple this with the fact that there are merely a handful of programmes written in the Urdu language, of which almost none are designed for software development, and a major problem reveals itself. The vast majority of Pakistanis are excluded from any kind of online or computer-related experience unless they first train themselves in the English language.

In a world that is continually making leaps and bounds in technological progress and innovation, Pakistan finds itself constantly lagging behind. The significant role played by the internet in our lives during this day and age is now undeniable. And yet, a recent e-readiness ranking of 65 nations published by the Economist Intelligence Unit lists Pakistan second last, placing us ahead of only Nigeria. There is a dire need to improve our pathetic situation. And the path we need to adopt is obvious. The government has to provide access to quality education for the masses. And since this year’s budget allocation for education spending follows the same pattern as that of previous years, it is unlikely Pakistan will be a major force in the global IT economy any time soon.

However, while our shortsighted, military-minded leaders continue to bloat our defence budgets to inexcusable excesses, one other measure to improve our current situation does suggest itself. The government of Pakistan has to launch an aggressive campaign to encourage the localisation of computer programmes and Web content so as to allow the widespread proliferation of computer literacy. Adapting the Urdu language for easy use on PCs and the internet will speed us toward this goal.

Despite the many obstacles and disadvantages of possessing a largely uneducated and illiterate population, the potential for developing IT professionals in Pakistan is, oddly enough, tremendous. If the number of people that thronged to the job fair organised by the Pakistan Software Houses Association, or the hordes of software developers that descended upon the Microsoft Pakistan Developer Conference 2005, are any indication of the interest people have in this field, then there is still hope for the country’s IT sector.

http://www.spider.tm/jul2005/main.html?pgsrc=ednotes&submenu=ednotes1&dirtarget=none

Hali's haveli to become girls' school

Haryana to open school for girls in Hali’s Panipat haveli
Commits itself to revival of poet’s legacy
Aditi Tandon
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, July 20
Celebrating the genius of 19th century Urdu poet Altaf Hali, the Haryana government today decided to open a primary school for girls in the poet’s ancestral “haveli” located in Panipat.

Endorsing requests of Indian and Pakistani Urdu scholars, here for the two-day Indo-Pak seminar on Hali being organised by the Haryana Urdu Akademi at Panjab University, Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda consented to set up the girls’ school in Panipat. In this context he referred to Hali’s reformist streaks and said “he was the frontrunner of national unity and of the uplift of girls.”

The government also decided to start work on the poet’s mausoleum which lies in a state of neglect, causing disappointment to those who recognise Hali’s relevance. Hali was the first Urdu critic; he was also the one who wrote rules of construction for Urdu poetry. It was Hali’s exceptional ability to visualise trends that endeared him to Ghalib.

Dr Salim Akhtar, the visiting Pakistani scholar and former Head of Urdu Department in Mehra Government College, Lahore, said: “The significance of Hali in Urdu literature cannot be overemphasized. He was the poet of national integration. His style came closet to Iqbal’s who has acquired the status of a prophet in Pakistan. But Hali was more committed to social consciousness than other poets of his times. He wrote of reform, of radicalism and of reversal.”

Along similar lines, Dr Tahir Taunsvi, Chairman, Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education, Pakistan, drew one’s attention to the contributions of Hali to Urdu literature. “He set the path which others followed. All norms pertaining to approach to the language, its construction, its patterns, were laid down by Hali. It would not be an exaggeration to call him the “torchbearer” of Urdu poetry.” Dr Taunsavi has conducted research on Hali, while Dr Akhtar has written three articles linking the styles of Hali and Iqbal. The same have been published in India and Pakistan.

Trailing the evolution of Hali, Haryana Education Minister Phool Chand Mullana also painted an awe inspiring picture of the poet who would walk from Panipat to Delhi to take lessons from Ghalib. Reiterating Haryana’s commitment to safeguarding Hali’s legacy Mr Mullana said a park had been constructed in Panipat in Hali’s memory.

Interesting to note was the light hearted ambience in which debates on the poet progressed today. Unlike customary conventions that yield little, this one wrapped up on an encouraging note with scholars like Dr Khaliq Anjum, general secretary, Anjuman Taraqqe-e-Urdu, the national level Urdu body, proposing and the Haryana government consenting.

A significant recommendation Dr Anjum made pertained to more funds for Haryana Urdu Akademi, which is publishing Hali’s ghazals in Urdu and Hindi under the guidance of Dr K.L. Zakir. This year the Akademi got Rs 10 lakh more than the last budget. That the proposal to enhance its budget would be taken seriously was clear from the words of appreciation which the Haryana Governor, Dr A.R. Kidwai, had for it. The Governor talked about Urdu as a binding force for SAARC countries, and recalled Hali’s relevance by saying, “He was born in 1835 and was naturally influenced by the Mutiny of 1857”.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2005/20050721/haryana.htm#2

Darkest hour produces finest litterature

Bored by tragedy
By: Mahmood Farooqui
July 15, 2005

In the wake of the Gujarat riots, the surfeit of media coverage and the universal sympathy for the displaced victims had tended, at times, to create a sense of ennui.

In spite of the scale of the tragedy the sheer number of documentary films, journalistic accounts and seminars sometimes dismayed one because of the monochromatic nature of their understanding and transmission.

Some people were provoked enough to transfer this tiredness on to the Gujarat victims themselves when they wondered whether anybody had ever bothered as much about the conditions of Pandit sharnarthi camps in Jammu.

Depending upon the degree of beleaguerment experienced by you, even causes otherwise right and meritorious can get your goat. Take, for instance the case of Partition riots.

This darkest hour for Muslim Indians, as well as for other Indians, was also the most shining hour for Urdu fiction. When we think of Partition, we think, of necessity, also of Toba Tek Singh or Khol Do or Lajwanti.

For many different strands of Urdu fiction, Partition provided a ready material for weaving satire, pathos, irony and humanitarianism into a lament for the fallen humanity.

The number of writers who wrote unforgettable stories on Partition is a legion. They included Hindu writers such as Krishan Chandra and Bedi, Pakistani writers such as Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi and Qudratullah Shahab, writers associated with cinema like Ramanand Sagar and Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, Progressives such as Ismat Chughtai and Hayatullah Ansari and of course writers who transcend boundaries and categories such as Manto.

Altogether, Urdu writers seemed to have cried out for a balanced, impartisan and humanitarian approach to what was undoubtedly a great tragedy. Who could have any problems with this invaluable legacy? It came as a great surprise to me to learn, therefore, that there is a stream of criticism in Urdu literature that is severely critical of this output.

Unsurprisingly, it is writers based in Pakistan who led this counterattack. I came across a series of essays around the theme of ‘fasadat aur Urdu Adab’ that castigate Urdu writers for their ‘biased’ handling of the riots.

That Mohammed Hasan Askari or Mumtaz Shirin, ideologues who later on also demanded a Pakistani and/or Islamic literature from their writers, criticized this oeuvre was still understandable. What flipped me totally was to discover that my literary idol, Intezar Husain, too had expressed very trenchant views about this phenomenon.

Way back, in 1949, Husain wrote a piece called ‘The Propagandaic Aspects of Riot Stories.’ The piece is worth reading, even if Husain’s views may have changed now, for he takes great issues especially with Krishan Chadra and while his treatment is sophisticated his wit has more bite than I expected.

The riot stories, according to these writers, follow a pre-fabricated formula. The English created the seeds of discord between Hindus and Muslims, the formation of Pakistan that is the partition of the country caused the riots, all communities — Hindu, Sikh and Muslim — must be apportioned equal blame (should be shown as being equally barbaric) and the writers should remain impartial, affirmation of a common humanity linking us all.

They should lament for a lost humanity in man and condemn our barbarism, as in the story titled ‘Wahshi hain hum’ or statements such as ‘main kaun hoon, main insaan hoon.’

What they seem to be alleging is one, that this even-handedness ignores the inequality of actual suffering — Muslims suffered far more in Delhi and East Punjab and so on.

And two, by blaming Partition for the riots these writers are ignoring other prior divisions as well as denigrating a movement that was an ideal for many Muslims.

Of course, they are in empathy with the objectives of these stories, condemning sectarianism and promoting a common brotherhood, but the preachy sententious manner in which this has been portrayed is disdained by them.

Sometimes this balancing act can have counterproductive results. Reports of Noakhali massacre, in the 1940s, provoked counter-retaliation in Bihar but it turned out that the scale of bloodshed in both places was quite disproportionate. Had numbers and communities been properly named, may be the revenge killings would have been smaller.

Gyanendra Pandey, the subaltern historian, who has been working on Partition for some time now, has also questioned the necessity of this rigid, even totalitarian, objectivity and impartiality. The issue is of more direct consequence for the media in reporting on communal conflicts.

Whether it should name communities involved, say in the attack on Kar Sevaks on the Sabarmati Express and risk retaliation or try and keep it under (see-through) wraps, in which case wild conjectures and rumours might lead to greater disasters.

However, in condemning the tendency of riot-writers to speech-making from the platform of the Communist party we should understand that Partition, whatever its justification, was still a ghastly event for millions of people.

Just as the Gujarat Muslims, however much lamented, were still victims. We may become weary of an excess of good causes and well-intentioned speeches but our weariness must not blind us to the plight out there.

http://web.mid-day.com/columns/mahmood_farooqui/2005/july/113985.htm

Panel to probe Urdu council functioning

Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI: The Human Resource Development Ministry has constituted a committee to look into the functioning of the National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language over the last five years and whether it has departed from its basic mandate.

Journalist and social activist D. R. Goyal will head the panel. The members are retired professor of Aligarh Muslim University Iqtidar Alam Khan, journalist Javed Naqvi and professor of linguistics in Delhi University Ramakant Agnihotri.

The committee will also see whether resources have been used for the intended purpose. It could look into any other aspect it considers relevant and suggest follow-up action.

http://www.hindu.com/2005/07/08/stories/2005070804171500.htm

for background information read these posts:

http://www.urdustan.net/2005/05/promoting-urdu.html

http://www.urdustan.net/2005/04/great-urdu-fraud.html

and Urdu Council's site is here:
http://www.urducouncil.nic.in/

New volume of Urdu dictionary

Published: Thursday, 7 July, 2005, 01:12 PM Doha Time

KARACHI: Pakistan has completed the 20th volume of the world’s most comprehensive dictionary of the Urdu language, officials of the Urdu Diction Board of Pakistan said here Wednesday.

The volume has been produced in spite of the fact that it faces a shortage of funds and human resources. The last volume came out in April 2004.

President Urdu Diction Board Dr Farman Fatehpuri said the 20th volume consists of 828 pages and contains about 10,000 words, idioms, phrases and proverbs. The first and last words of the volume are ‘Nashaat’ and ‘Nh’, respectively.

The Board plans to publish 22 volumes containing 300,000 words, give or take a few hundred words. “Our good performance should dissuade the government from making any changes in its present status,” Fatehpuri said.

He said work on the 20th volume of the Lughat was completed under the editorship of Dr Rauf Parekh who had joined the Board in July 2003. He praised Parekh for bringing out two volumes of the Urdu Lughat in as many years.

Though the initial work of the Board - enunciation of guiding principles for Urdu lexicography, establishment of a well-stocked library, provision of books, appointment of scholars and staff, etc - began in 1958, the first volume came out in 1967.

The Board has modelled its flagship dictionary on the Greater Oxford Dictionary. When completed, the dictionary would enable the Urdu language to join the exalted ranks of English and German, which are the only two languages in the world to have such comprehensive dictionaries. - Internews

http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=43567&version=1&template_id=41&parent_id=23

Of Soiree and shairee meetings

sorry for my long excuse, I just came back from a trip to India, more about that later, let's continune with news about Urdu.


NALIN VERMA

The clamour by various Muslim bodies to accord Urdu the second language status in Jharkhand hardly surprises anyone. But what causes surprise is the mention of a Brahmin IPS officer and a Sanskrit scholar, who has devoted his life to Urdu.

Gupteshwar Pandey (IPS) who was the senior Superintendent of Police in Ranchi and is now the Deputy Inspector General, Tirhut range, North Bihar has taken up the cause of Urdu with missionary zeal. Pandey, a batch mate from Patna University, is true example of a connoisseur and lover of poetry.

Pandey embarked on his mission in Ranchi itself when he organised a grand Mushaira (gathering of poets) which was graced by the top shairs (Urdu poets) of the country including Bekal Utsahi, Rana Jeba and Rehana Navab. Hundreds of people enjoyed the sher-o-shairee evening organised by Pandey near the Sainik Bazaar here, about five years ago. And many, still today fondly recall the zeal with which Pandey organsied the meetings.

Pandey is an old friend who studied with me in Patna University in 1980s. A brilliant student of Sanskrit, he secured first class in his B.A examination from Patna College and took admission in MA. He would often recite Sanskrit verses and extracts from Vedas with much ease and pleasure.

But he abandoned his love for the language and appeared for civil services examination. He still did not let go of Sanskrit and took it up as an optional. Finally, Pandey became an IPS officer in 1987.It was a chance meeting with him on Sunday during my visit to North Bihar when I found Pandey reciting the Urdu couplets composed by himself.

Urdu tou na Hindu na Musalman hai, Urdu to Hindustanki beti hai-aan hai, Kyon bantate awaam ko Urdu kenaam pe, Hindi ki shaan hai, Musalman ki jaan hai. (Urdu is neither Muslim nor Hindu. Urdu is the daughter and pride of India. Why do you divide the people in the name Urdu. It's the pride of the Hindi and life of the Muslims), Pandey sang. It was the same man and the same love with which he recited his Sanskrit slokas way back in 1980.

Pandey was busy discussing his plan to organise a grand mushaira with some known Urdu poets at Muzaffarpur when I called on him. Endowed with a mellifluous voice, Pandey does daily riaz (exercise) of singing ghazals accompanied by the harmonium and tabla.

Pandey has also organised mushairas to restore Urdu's glory wherever he has been posted in the last five years. He opted for Bihar cadre after the bifurcation of the state and was posted at Aurangabad and Nalanda as superintedent of police. He organised poetry evenings at Aurangabad and Nalanda, which was graced by likes of Bashir Badra, Manauwar Rana, Shabia Adis and the who's who of Urdu poetry.

Many of our readers in Ranchi recalled Gupteshwar Pandey for his charming personality. When I joined the capital of Jharkhand in February last year many spoke of him to me. They recalled how he would mesmerise the audience with his songs and poems in the majlis (rendezvous of poets and shairs).

The Ranchi people still remember him as one of the best Superintendent. “He was unlike an orthodox police officer, confined in his office. He mingled with people, listened to them, sang with them and shared with them", remembers Sukhdeo Singh, a senior IAS officer of Jharkhand Government who was the deputy commissioner of Ranchi when Pandey was its senior SP. Pandey's decision to opt for Bihar is Jharkhand's loss.

With his departure to Bihar, the city has lost the atmosphere of sher-o-shairee besides a true lover of Urdu and its rich tradition. This is to tell you Pandey, that Ranchi still misses you.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050609/asp/jamshedpur/story_4845676.asp