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23 June 2004
The Urdu renaissance
Until my tenth standard I had no idea that social sciences as part of the CBSE curriculum could also be taught in English. For nine years I studied in a school nudged in Bangalore, the most unlikeliest of places to enforce Hindi doctrination, where Hindi was accorded so much significance that we had whole weeks whence school assemblies were to be completely presented in Hindi. That included the Science Topic on Mondays, Current Affairs on Tuesdays, Sports Feature on Saturdays, the News and Thought for the Day on all days. Even the lanky principal who spoke Telugu natively and fluent English would have to speak in his broken Hindi inspite of his classy attire that came with a striped tie, a mildly swelling paunch tucked in by a tight-fitting leather belt and gleaming leather shoes. It was a different matter that conscious of this he would often skip addressing the school assembly and left matters of general announcements to the vice-principal whose familiarity with Hindi could well be attributed to his knowledge of Sanskrit which also brought in its wake a strict sense of disciplinarianism enforced by his frequent rounds of classrooms and rugged, sharp slaps. The vice-principal also infused terror in us by the hair that grew out of his ears and a wan smile beneath a pencil sketch moustache that never left him even in the most vigorous moments of punishment that he would mete out to us. But I digress. Hindi was very much a part of our school life and so much a platform for us to indulge in petty "academic" rivalries that I was forced to choose between its two different flavours -- the one with Urdu and the one with Sanskrit -- just to keep my niche and advantage.It was in the sixth standard that a Muslim boy, shall we call him N, encroached upon our strong bastion of confused accents and renditions of Hindi influenced by our own vernaculars. He was a sensation with all the Hindi teachers given his sweet voice and equally sweet infusions of Urdu that he used to good effect in blandishments and written prose alike. Those were the years when numbers and single-digit ranks, roster mentions and proficiency prizes, percentages and the number of "V."s preceding a stylish "Good" mattered so much to all our egos (I am of course hedging and hiding behind the use of the plural pronoun). Needless to say, N's ascendant star what with his use of the Ramzan month to good advantage had to be checked. It was then that I disavowed all affiliation to Urdu and forswore all its usage. It is possible that my alleged superiority over N in Sanskrit contributed to some extent to this widening rift. Urdu was consistently hailed as the sweetest language born out of wedlock from many parents -- chiefly the Hindi of the North, Persian of the foreign and the Deccanese of the invaded -- in military camps in central India, but for some unknown reason then I failed to recognise the fact. Our prejudices and biases were so politicised that I could not even be caught unaware with an Urdu word uttered. Our Hindi grammar teacher in the ninth and tenth standard would constantly belabour to disabuse me of my slants but found my obstinacy rather amusing. Perhaps because of it or otherwise, I suffered materially in my board examinations when I scored a paltry 58/100 in Hindi, Core A. On the upside, I did learn to assimilate a lot more Sanskrit words than usual and found myself more comfortable speaking "shudh" Hindi. Over the years though, I have come to recognise my folly. Indeed, what a sweet-natured, mellow tongue Urdu is! The language of the Sufis, of Mirza Ghalib and Premchand, of the Nawabs of Hyderabad in whose lands it has deteriorated into a pedestrian-sounding and incomprehensible Hyderabadi.
My reminiscences were sparked from the many ghazals and lilting melodies that we came to listen to repeatedly during the Seattle-Pasadena road trip. I surrendered to Jagjit Singh's "Jhuki jhuki si nazar" from Arth, Suresh Wadkar's and Bhupinder's "Huzur is kadar bhi" from Masoom and Sonu Nigam's "Mujhse naaraaz ho to ho jao" from Papa Kahte Hain.
