ralph russell on urdu

Late Ralph Russell wrote an long article --- Urdu in India since Independence. Some excerpts I find interesting and will reproduce here.

"There is a proposal that the teaching of Urdu should be taken on as one of the main tasks of the religious foundations, the madrassas and so on, which are primarily established for the imparting of Islamic learning. I do not think that there is any point in this at all. In the first place, why should the job be handed over to other people. The champions of Urdu are looking for someone else to do work which they ought to be doing themselves and which they are not doing. In the second place, there never has been the least evidence that these organisations are interested in the teaching of Urdu, or at any rate in teaching it to any very worthwhile level. These madrassas have functioned continuously both before independence and throughout the whole period since independence and not one of them has ever shown the least interest in teaching Urdu to the level which would introduce their students to Urdu literature. They are concerned with religious questions and only with religious questions. It is not in the least likely that they will undertake this task on anything like a large scale. As far as my experience goes there is no reason to assume that the attitude of the teachers in religious institutions has changed much since the time of Ashraf Ali Thanavi when, almost a hundred years ago now, he wrote Bahishti Zevar. He has a chapter in Part Ten in which he lists all the kinds of books which women should not read. But two things have to be said about that. Firstly that we want women to be able to read everything that men can read. Secondly, the disapproval of the kind of literature which Ashraf Ali Thanavi, censures obviously extends to the literature which men read. In Bahishti Zevar, he lists among other books that should not be read: "divan aur ghazalon ki kitaben" "divans and books of ghazals" – in other words, virtually the whole of Urdu poetry and certainly that part of Urdu poetry which is the most valuable; the Indar Sabha; the story of Badr i Munir, that is the story of the masnavi of Mir Hasan; Dastan i Amir Hamza, Gul i Bakavali and other books. To expect people who are dedicated to religious teaching to teach people to read some of these best works of Urdu literature seems to me quite unrealistic."

and

"Publications of Urdu works in the Devanagari script, of course, serve a wider audience than that which I have just described. They serve the audience of Hindi speakers who do not know Urdu but are interested in what Urdu literature has to offer. I think that Hindi speakers offer the next most favourable audience for Urdu literature after that of Urdu speakers themselves. True that there are people – some people – in the Hindi speaking community who are the most vociferous opponents of Urdu, but it would be a great mistake to think that all Hindi speakers share their attitude. There are among Hindi speakers substantial numbers of people who do not want to make Urdu their first language, but are nevertheless interested in getting access to what Urdu literature has to offer. This is proved by the number of publications of Urdu works issued by Hindi publishers in the Devanagari script. Quite numerous selections from popular Urdu poets are being published by Hindi publishers. I know that in her later years, according to what she herself told me, Ismat Chughtai could always find a publisher for her stories in Devanagari before any Urdu script version was published. And Muhammad Umar Memon of the University of Wisconsin, US, tells me that almost all of Manto's works are now available in Devanagari. My experience is that champions of Urdu are for the most part simply unaware that this is going on and even if they are aware they take an attitude towards it more or less of indifference – and they certainly should not."

and

"There is another, I think increasingly important, audience for Urdu literature presented in English in the second and third generation immigrants from Urdu speaking areas into the English speaking and the English knowing world and there are substantial numbers of such people both in North America and in Britain, and to a lesser extent in other European countries. In short, there is a much wider audience for books presenting Urdu literature in English than there was, say, 30 or 40 years ago. There was published in England, The Penguin Book of Modern Urdu Poetry, selected and translated by Mahmood Jamal (1986), and in India a Penguin book on Ghalib (Pavan K Varma, Ghalib: The Man, The Times, 1989) and numbers of translations of Faiz, including The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems, translated by Agha Shahid Ali."

more at: Ralph Russell