The irresistible appeal of Urdu: Watching the news in Pakistan

I have written before about the nastiness of Pakistan’s Urdu media but let us look another aspect of it.The urban Indian reads and writes mostly in English, and often speaks a broken version of his mother tongue. In Pakistan, one is likely to find many more people who know Urdu almost as well as they know English. There is a very attractive bilingual quality to the urban Pakistani because of his knowledge of Urdu. This comes out in Pakistan’s news television. I enjoy watching anchors like Sana Bucha, guests like lawyer Salman Akram Raja, and leaders such as former foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi speak. Often, this does not have to do with what they are saying, but how it is said. Sometimes I even enjoy watching the comely though otherwise repellent Meher Bukhari because she has such great fluidity of expression. For those who do not know her, Bukhari is the anchor who pretty much sent Punjab governor Salman Taseer to his death. She conducted a most insensitive interview with him about Pakistan’s blasphemy law, which can be seen on YouTube. These people are a contrast to others, from the English press, who are not so fluent in Urdu on television. These include my friends Ejaz Haider and Nasim Zehra, who are also hosts of Urdu news shows. They speak more as Indians do, and must compensate by bringing in English words. Pakistan’s great scholar of languages, Dr Tariq Rahman says he has no problem with this mixing, either aesthetically or otherwise. I see his point. But I must admit that I like listening to those who can speak cleanly in one language. I had the same feeling when I heard Bangalore’s theatre director Prasanna speak a few months ago at an event. Prasanna spoke in Kannada and I only caught the gist of what he was saying; I could not understand all of it. I did however observe that he used not a single word of English in a fluent speech of about 20 minutes, and I found that both remarkable and pleasing. [caption id=“attachment_233539” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Reuters”] [/caption] Why is the Urdu of Pakistanis so attractive? Let me speculate. First, it is relevant. There is no similar high culture for the urban Gujarati, for instance, to access. Much of the Gujarati classical poetry was written in the middle ages. Some of it, for instance the writing of Narsinh Mehta was made popular by Gandhi. But on the whole there is not much poetry to go to and little that can be recited as a response to the modern world. It isn’t that there is nothing similar at all in any of our cultures, of course. Tamilians have their Kural, and all languages have their poetic sayings. But the sort of corpus that Urdu has accumulated from Ahmedabad’s Wali Mohammad Wali to Lahore’s Faiz Ahmed Faiz is, I think, unmatched. Second, it has more range. Urdu has a multicultural, multireligious vocabulary. This gives it a width of experience that can precisely nail a sentiment succinctly. Then there is the matter of how it is spoken. To some, I must include myself in this, just the sound of spoken Urdu is pleasing. I mean things like the correctly enunciated qaaf, khay, ghain and ain. Jinnah thought that Urdu should be the national language of Pakistan, and that Bengali should be recognised but demoted. Whatever his reasons may have been for feeling this, and whatever its other fallout, we must admit that some of the credit for what we are discussing goes to him. As far as I know, he himself spoke formally in Urdu only once, after Partition, in a short speech over Radio Pakistan. I have read it, but not heard it and I do not know what the quality of his diction was. In India, Hindustani in the Devanagari script became the national language. But far too many of India’s states were distant from Hindi and so it wasn’t really enforceable and so our regional languages have thrived. This has meant that the common medium of communication for urban Indians has remained English alone. In Pakistan, Urdu has permeated and flourished since Partition. There is one last thing that makes Urdu appealing. It is our language and can better express our emotions than English. Wielding it correctly, as so many Pakistanis do, makes the listener proud of our shared culture. Perhaps unfortunately for Pakistan, the only nation that can really appreciate this lovely quality of theirs is not China or America, but India.