Urdu,Hindi,and Sanskrit

[rohan.oberoi at CORNELL.EDU]

That's an interesting perspective.  Now that you put it that way, it
seems the way knowledge of the Urdu script has been utterly
marginalised in India since independence has helped to cut people off
from the literature associated with the period of Mughal rule.  If
people cannot read Dagh or Ghalib, even though they could very easily
if it were transliterated into Devanagari, it's easy for them to
dismiss the period of Muslim rule in India as a time of barren
oppression rather than the hugely influential part of India's cultural
heritage that it was.

Mandating six months instruction in the Urdu script to any child who
reads or studies Hindi (as most do) could have remedied that.  It
seems the Hinduising establishment made a conscious decision to cut
people off from this heritage, and I suspect the growing virulence of
anti-Muslim prejudice in India today (much of it justified by angry
rhetoric about the period of Muslim rule, rather than by anything in
the present time) can be laid at the door of this.

Regards,
Rohan.





>Aditya, the Cheerful Hindu Skeptic wrote:
>
>> It is to the credit of Kamal Pasha who realized the failings of
>Arabic
>> script and changed the script for Turkish
>
>While it is true that Arabic script is particularly unsuited for
>writing Turkish and a move to the use of a Roman script undoubtedly
>helped improve literacy rates dramatically, one must realize that
>Ataturk had other agendas at the same time arising from his
>totalitarian programme of secularization.
>
>By virtually outlawing the use of Arabic script he was also able to
>ensure access to older religious -- especially Sufi -- literature
>became much more difficult and thus was able restrict the transmission
>of most religious teaching.  This is corroborated by the fact that he
>also made all Sufi meeting places, the use of religious titles like
>Sheikh, the "sema" ritual of the Mevlevis ete etc illegal.  His covert
>aim can be seen as little less that the outright elimination of Islam
>from most areas of life.  It is only in reecent years that Sufi
>literature has begun to be easily available in romanized Turkish.
>
>A similar idea seems to lie in part behind the Communist Chinese
>simplification of the Chinese script, the reduction of current
>characters and the several attempts to replace the traditional script
>with Pin-yin romanization.  If people cannot read their classics, then
>their minds will not be "polluted" by the ideas contained therein.
>
>Imagine what the level of religious understanding and knoweldge would
>be in India now of all the religious and philosophical classics if the
>British, for example, had outlawed devanagari and other traditional
>scripts in  favour of total romanization !
>
>Best wishes,
>Stephen Hodge