Written in the cursive-like Nastaliq script, and in an adaptation of Perso-Arabic alphabet, Urdu has become caught in religious silos. It “looks” Islamic, and therefore, in popular imagination, belongs to just one community in the multilingual universe. Anthologies of Urdu literature—in Urdu and in translation, especially in English—seem to have perpetuated this simplistic narrative of Urdu equals Islam by only Muslim authors in their collections. With the anthology Whose Urdu Is It Anyway?, Rakhshanda Jalil attempts to bring diversity to the scene by including only non-Muslim writers. She writes:
For as long as Urdu is yoked to religion – Islam – and a certain community – Muslims – it will never be understood in its entirety. This collection of writings is an attempt to bust stereotypes and address a persistent misconception: that Urdu is the language of India’s Muslims and that it addresses subjects that are, or should be, of concern to Muslims, and Muslims alone.
The sixteen stories in the volume are written by authors who have been active in the last hundred years: the precise years of publication of the stories is not shared. Some stories are set in the time of the Partition of India while others touch on other themes.
The book opens with an epigraph in the form of a verse by Gulzar, perhaps the most well-known living writer in the contemporary moment, known more widely for film-making and for songwriting for Hindi films. It could be translated as:
What is this love for Urdu, the tongue
Whose words melt in ecstasy
As if these were flavours in a paan
Sweet and moist,
Bursting open on the tongue
Paan is an Indian mouth freshener cum dessert. It is also a way of consuming tobacco. Its invocation in the verse brings the two together, to get a sense of what it means to speak, maybe even listen to oneself speak, in Urdu.
Mention must be made of three stories in the collection. The first story is “The Generous One” by Krishan Chandar. Daani—the character’s name means “the generous one” but it also refers to the Diving—lives on the footpath of Bombay. One day, he saves Sariya from hoodlums and the two of them gradually develop a relationship. They dream of having a house of their own, especially ever since they get to know they are going to be parents. In one scene, they stand outside a church to pray, or rather to listen to the pastor delivering a sermon:
Through the ornate grill, they could see Jesus Christ on the Cross in the spacious courtyard. On one side sat Mary holding the blessed baby in her lap in a grotto made of blue stones. Candles were lit in the grotto and the delicate leaves of the gulmohar tree below about in the breeze. The baby in Mary’s lap was exactly like the baby in every mother’s imagination. The night was as gentle as the cloak on Mary and as innocent as the dreams in the sleepy eyes of Jesus.
Daani finished his prayer and said to Sariya: ‘Why was the padre constantly referring to freedom, bread and culture in his sermon? I can understand freedom and bread, but what is culture?’
I think it must be some kind of sweet cake,’ answered Sariya after thinking for a while.
‘And he was also talking about peace in the world,’ said Daani. ‘But there is such a war going on in my stomach that I fail to understand how it will ever end. O dear Lord, what a frightful war goes on in my belly!’
Urdu has a solid body of work grounded in the progressive movement, South Asia’s version of social realism, not in the sense of celebrating revolution but in the sense of cultivating empathy and generating interest in poverty and the life of the poor. The innocence of the two homeless people are icons of this larger political focus on socioeconomic inequality.
The story “Run from these Slave-Traders” by Ramanand Sagar is interesting for the shock value it is likely to bring to many readers. It’s a story about communal violence:
The Muslims came in boats from the other side of the river to attack our village… I turned around to see three or four sturdy Muslims holding pickaxes come towards me. More were getting off the boats and, behind them, several more boars were coming in our direction. A scream escaped me. I threw my bundle of twigs and, calling out to my husband, ran towards him. That’s when I realized that my husband had begun to run long before me and was far away. Perhaps, he had seen them getting off the boats before I spotted them. And instead of attempting to save me.
The abducted woman manages to return home one day only to be disowned by her husband and her father in law. She learns that they have avenged her abduction by abducting Muslim women.
The story is shocking not just for the horrors it evokes of the Partition but for the author’s identity. Ramanand Sagar is famous for his grand adaptation of the Ramayana for public television in the 1980s. This series has been said to flatten the varied, even conflicting, versions of the epic by idolizing Rama and devotion to him that was easily hijacked for communal violence in the early 1990s. Getting to know that he wrote in Urdu shifts one’s perspectives: the epics, the shastras, and literature in regional languages of India together constitute sources of the Indian tradition. Knowing Hindi, Urdu, and Sanskrit are not mutually exclusive but instead individual aspects of what it meant to be creative and a well read person, especially in North India. Hindi and Urdu are, linguistically, not that different: they remain mutually intelligible. Jalil never quite defines what makes writing in Urdu different from writing in Hindi other than the script. But there seems no question that both writers and readers draw a distinction. It is the writing or script that makes it look like these were two independent languages. So Ramanand Sagar and his Ramayana can share the same roots in Hindu devotion and Mirza Ghalib, perhaps the most celebrated Urdu poet.
The volume ends with Gulzar’s “The Crocodile”, perhaps because Gulzar alone can have the first word and the last word in this anthology and any other anthology of Urdu literature. The story is about communal tensions in the backdrop of the Dassera’s celebrations. Dassera is an occasion when Ravana’s effigy is burnt; it is a way of commemorating the victory of good versus evil. The effigy maker in the story is a Muslim.
‘Raza miyan, how could you call the burning of Ravan on Dussehra something that is “not good” the other day!”’
Brother, the character of Ravan is not good, just as Yazid’s character is not good in the incident of Karbala.’
‘But Ravan was a maha-pandit, a highly learned man and a devotee of Lord Shiva. He was a great…’
Raza got annoyed. He cut short the pandit mid-sentence and said, ‘But then, brother, why do you burn him if he was such a great and learned man. After all, he was a Hindu too!’
The sentence that had remained incomplete onRaza’s lips was completed by Ram Pandit.
‘Had he been a Muslim why would we have to get an effigy made?’
That was enough! The battle lines were drawn. That year bombs were burst instead of firecrackers during Ramlila. And the tallest flame leapt out from Raza’s shop.
Raza was absconding… and the riots continued.
Gulzar’s genius lies in the way he identifies intersections between the Hindu ritual of Dussehra and the Muslim ritual of Muharram. In Urdu, these are everyday references that become metaphors of the community’s shared heritage. The two communities understand each other’s vocabularies and worldviews very intimately, and yet, they turn into enemies.
To someone who knows about the context of mainstream translation politics and publishing in India, Jalil’s mission and anthology make sense. To any other curious reader of world literature, Whose Urdu Is It Anyway? is a good introduction to Urdu literature.
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