Urdu,Hindi,and Sanskrit

[Aditya, the Cheerful Hindu Skeptic]

rohan.oberoi at CORNELL.EDU has written as follows:

>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.

I cannot at all agree with your conclusions. I find it much easier to read
Ghalib's poetry in Devnagri than in Urdu script even though I can read both.
One can reproduce those works on a CD without any need for a  script as most
cinema goers today do not care or know the script in which the dialogs and
lyrics are written. I do not seen any great need to burden every child with
another script just to read a few items. Moreover just because they do not
read Urdu script does not by itself leads to the conclusion that Muslim rule
was just oppression. I think the rule of Akbar was far less oppressive than
many Hindu rulers of his time.

It is OK for scholars, archaeologists and indologists to study ancient
languages but to mandate it to all is no better than mandating Sanskrit or
Pali or Swahili.

Have a peaceful and joyous day.
Aditya Mishra
Primary email: a018967t at bc.seflin.org
Primary homepage: http://www.pompano.net/~aditya
ICQ # 1131674 Phone #: (954)746-0442  Fax # (209)315-8571
Random thought of the day:
        I thought about being born again, but my mother refused.