Hindi and Urdu

[Shailendra Raj Mehta]

Samar,

I am afraid your analysis of Hindi does not any hold water. (You spell
Hindi in several different non-standard ways. I wonder why?)

1. Many others have pointed out that many languages have been written
in multiple scripts. Serbo-Croatian and German have been mentioned. In
addition virtually every language in India has been written in multiple
scripts. Sanskrit, for example can be found in Devanagari, Roman, Grantha,
Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and indeed dozens of other scripts (including many
from South-East Asia). If you include the International Phonetic Alphabet,
then every language is written in at least two scripts. Moreover,
increasingly, Urdu in India is being written in the Devanagari script. I
have personally read every single major Urdu poet in the original, and most
Urdu short story writers too  (I particularly enjoyed Sa’adat Hasan Manto),
even though my knowledge of the Arabic script is imperfect. It is because
they are all available in Devanagari. Your are probably aware of this, but
in Uttar Pradesh and in much of North India, there is a large class of
educated Muslims (the majority?) who cannot read the Arabic script at all.
They read even the Q’uran in the Devanagari script.
2. But are you aware that a major intellectual feat (possibly unique
in human history, as far as I know) is the project which is making
available every major world text in Devanagari transliteration, with Hindi
translation along side it, so that the sounds, phonetic structure and the
music of the original might be enjoyed by anyone who knows Devanagari
script/Hindi? I have read the Tirukkural and Kamban Ramayan this way, as
well as the Q’uran, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and much else
besides. Moreover, and I have pointed this out before, with Unicode, script
becomes irrelevant amongst Indian languages and before long one will be
able to read Tamil, say, in Bengali script.
3. Contray to what you believe, Hindi is doing quite well. The quality
and quantity of writers and writing in Hindi is as good as ever, though you
would not get that impression if you read the colonial (or English) press.
What has disappeared, though, is the mass of general interest magazines,
but that is not unique to India, but a common consequence of the spread of
TV. Actually, for the first time in history, a full time Hindi writer can
be independent and depend solely on writing for a (very comfortable)
living.
4. The only way in which one can get a pan-Indian view of writing in
the Indian languages, contemporary or otherwise, is through Hindi, largely
because of the wonderful translations done by Jnanpith, Sahitya Academy and
others. The flavor of the original and much of the words can be preserved
when moving from one Indian language to another in a way that is simply not
possible, in, say, an English translation.
5. And Hindi films are doing very well, thank you. The conventional
measure of a hit, is ticket sales in India, because that measure can be
used to compare films over time. However, in the last several years, three
other major sources of film revenue have become very important: overseas
ticket sales, music rights and satellite rights. Each, of these is as
important as the first. As a recent piece in India Today showed, a very
large number of films in the year 2000  (the so called annus horribilis of
Hindi cinema) were profitable even before release, when all of these
revenue sources are combined. Their spread, too,  is now global – with
major fan bases (most of it not among the Indian diaspora) in China,
Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Central Asia, Middle East, North and East
Africa, the Caribbean, England, Russia, United States, Canada and parts of
Latin America. (For example my Chinese, Malaysian and Indonesian students
have seen most of the major Hindi films, both old and new.) With European,
Japanese and Chinese film making endeavours in major decline, Hollywood has
only one global competitor – in Hindi (and to a lesser extend in Tamil)
films.
6. Actually, the language that is in real trouble in India, and for
that matter in Pakistan as well, is Urdu. Urdu and Hindi have a common
grammatical base, and use identical verbs, adverbs and numbers. Hindi uses
Sanskrit nouns and adjectives, while Urdu mainly relies on Persian and
Arabic for them. Hinglish uses English nouns and adjectives. Thus, and this
is important to understand, since no one, as far as I am aware, seems to
have pointed this out before (I am writing a paper on it) the Hindi
grammatical core remains in Hinglish, but the Urdu entirely disappears!
Example – Hindi: Ap ek prayog kIjIye. Urdu: Ap ek tajurbA kIjIye. Hinglish:
Ap ek experiment kIjIye. Just as Urdu emerged from Hindi, so is Hinglish
emerging from Hindi and in so doing is replacing almost all of the Urdu
heritage.  In fact, I am afraid, Urdu as we know it, is in danger of
disappearing completely. And even sympathetic observers such as the
politician Mulayam Singh Yadav (whose love for Urdu and for the Muslim
heritage are second to none) have warned that the only future of Urdu in
India is in the Devanagari script. I hope the irony is not lost on Samar
Abbas.


Shailendra Raj Mehta
Purdue University.