The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India

Chapter 4 Locating Urdu: Deccani, Hindustani, and Urdu

106 Chapter 4 Locating Urdu Deccani, Hindustani, and Urdu However, it is important to remember that there is also something that is missed in narrating these developments only as a fatal pas de deux: Hindi and Urdu, captured together in one historical moment and one grammatical framework, locked in a bitter complementarity, each matching the extravagant excesses of the other, so that no matter how far they move apart, each is forever bound with the other. There is also, at some level, an­autonomous dynamic that is at work in respect of both Urdu and Hindi—so that the story of one is not, howsoever sensitively decoded, also the story of the other. AlokRai,Hindi Nationalism Scholarship on Hindi and Urdu is torn between the desire to describe the activities of Hindi and Urdu polemicists as homologous on the one hand— each side “matching the extravagant excesses of the other,” sharing equally in whatever blame may be apportioned—and the desire to acknowledge the particularity or autonomous dynamic of their projects on the other. This chapter seeks to reframe this discussion on Hindi and Urdu by widening the focus from this pair “locked in bitter complementarity” to consider the challenges posed to Urdu-­ language advocates not by their Hindi rivals but by the introduction of English in India, the expansion of nationalist sensibilities, and the minoritization of Muslim cultural forms. That Hindi and Urdu language advocates employed similar strategies to differentiate their respective language from and claim its superiority over the other is both undeniable and well documented.1 And yet to focus exclusively on this dueling pair risks, this chapter hopes to Locating Urdu 107 demonstrate, ignoring the most profound political transformations addressed by twentieth-­century vernacular language advocates, most notably the model of English education provided by the colonial state and the demands of nationalist politics. This chapter explores these issues by focusing on a singular moment in the history of Urdu polemics, namely the efforts of Urdu-­ language advocates in early twentieth century Hyderabad to improve the Urdu language and rewrite its history in order to make a claim for its all-­ India status. To understand this moment purely as an attempt to best their Hindi rivals would neglect to explain why the strategies and projects of Urdu advocates changed over time. To see these projects as cynical efforts to manipulate language policies for the sake of narrow-­ minded self-­ gain would be to ignore the political implications surrounding discussions of Muslim culture in early twentieth century India. The Place of Urdu The politics of the Urdu language have always revolved around place. The name itself, Urdu, as Shamsur Rahman Faruqi has explained, derives from the phrase zabān-­e urdu-­e mu‘alla-­e shāhjahānabād, “language of the exalted city/court at Shahjahanabad,” that is, the Mughal capital, Delhi.2 According to Muzaffar Alam, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Mughals extended patronage to this vernacular language (referred to as Hindavi) while simultaneously Persianizing it, thereby rendering it fit for the requirements of the exalted court: “In the face of the asserting regional forces in the eighteenth century the Mughals accorded a respectable position to Hindavi by admitting it in their sarkars, but many of them also saw to it that it was heavily Persianized. . . . In other words, it was the language that evolved at the Mughal camp, and not the language of the region, which the Mughals recognized and appropriated.”3 The Hindavi of Mughal patronage had to reflect the high culture of the imperial court, in Delhi and other urban centers, which had formerly popularized the Persian language and literary forms, not the vocabularies of common people, hence the title zabān-­e urdu-­e mu‘alla. This Urdu differentiated the culture of the city and court from the common culture of the countryside. This connection to place continued into the nineteenth century with Urdu literary figures insisting—despite evidence to the contrary—that the location of poets was determinative of style and hence literary value.4 Beginning in the late eighteenth century, as the Mughal nobility’s support for literary production 108 Chapter 4 waned, Urdu’s patronage shifted from the Mughal court in Delhi to cities like Lucknow, seats of their own Indo-­Muslim kingdoms. The major political event of the nineteenth century, the permanent displacement of the Mughal imperial court, was projected onto the...