Last week, Hindu right-wing forces in India forced a leading firm to withdraw its festive season advertisement after it featured a couple of words from the Urdu language, which in the popular imagination in the country is a \u201cMuslim language\u201d.
The company, FabIndia, issued an advertisement for Diwali \u2013 a significant Hindu festival that falls next month \u2013 showcasing its latest collection of clothes. The text at the top read: \u201cJashn-e-Rivaaz\u201d.
\u201cJashn\u201d in Urdu means a celebration while \u201cRiwaaz\u201d, which is actually \u201cRiwaaj\u201d, means tradition. The title translated to \u201cA Celebration of Tradition\u201d.
But a young parliamentarian belonging to Prime Minister Narendra Modi\u2019s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who often makes headlines for his Islamophobic remarks, was not happy.
\u201cDeepavali is not Jashn-e-Riwaaz,\u201d 30-year-old Tejasvi Surya posted on Twitter, calling Diwali by its more traditional name.
\u201cThis deliberate attempt of Abrahamisation of Hindu festivals, depicting models without traditional Hindu attires, must be called out.\u201d
FabIndia is a household name in India and sells clothes, furniture, home furnishings and food items. It has hundreds of showrooms across the vast country and abroad.
Surya said the company \u201cmust face economic costs for such deliberate misadventures\u201d.
Soon, other members of the BJP and other Hindu nationalist groups started attacking FabIndia on social media, accusing the brand of \u201churting\u201d the religious sentiments of Hindus.
\u201cThe Hindutva project sees Urdu as a \u2018Muslim\u2019 language. And invisibilising Urdu is part of the larger project of marginalising the Muslim community, in fact, physically eliminating it,\u201d Nivedita Menon, professor at the Centre for Political Studies at New Delhi\u2019s Jawaharlal Nehru University, told Al Jazeera.
\u201cHindutva\u201d refers to a century-old Hindu supremacist movement which seeks to convert India into an ethnic Hindu state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Urdu was born in India When did Urdu-Hindi divide begin? \u2018Outrage against ad manufactured\u2019 Last week, Hindu right-wing forces in India forced a leading firm to withdraw its festive season advertisement after it featured a couple of words…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":12585,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c102-muslim-minorities"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
<\/strong>The Urdu language was born in northern India during the Mughal rule. Linguists and historians say Urdu and Hindi originally developed from Khadi Boli, a dialect of the Delhi region, and Prakrit. It also borrowed heavily from Persian, Turkish and Arabic languages.
Until the British colonised the subcontinent, Urdu and Hindu languages were collectively referred to as Hindustani. It was British linguist John Gilchrist who for the first time classified and defined Hindustani into two broad categories \u2013 words inspired largely by Persian and Arabic were identified as Urdu, and those inspired by Sanskrit became Hindi.
However, spoken Urdu is similar to Hindi and the two share a common grammar and a large percentage of their vocabulary.
For centuries, Urdu was widely spoken by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in undivided India. Many of its celebrated poets and writers are non-Muslims, including Munshi Premchand, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Firaq Gorakhpuri and Gulzar to name a few.
Today, Urdu is among the 22 languages officially recognised by the Indian constitution.
Apart from poetry and literature, Urdu had a huge influence over Bollywood, the site of India\u2019s \u201cHindi\u201d film industry based in the western city of Mumbai. A large number of Urdu poets and writers wrote film scripts, songs and dialogues.
But many believe that too has changed in a religiously polarised India.
After the FabIndia controversy, many social media users shared memes featuring popular Bollywood dialogues and songs, replacing their Urdu words with Hindi counterparts in an attempt to showcase that the effect is not the same.
Screenwriter Javed Siddiqui, who has written several Bollywood films, told Al Jazeera that Urdu had a \u201cbetter position than any other language\u201d in the Indian film industry and that the \u201ctrend changed in the past few decades\u201d.
But Siddiqui added that the influence of Urdu in India\u2019s popular culture will always remain.
\u201cYou cannot write [any song] without \u2018dil\u2019 [heart in Urdu] and \u2018mohabbat\u2019, \u2018ishq\u2019 [both mean love in Urdu] and so on. I don\u2019t think there is a lack of words in Hindi or it doesn\u2019t have words but the phonetics and the music which Urdu has, no other language can provide,\u201d he said.
Legendary Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, who died in 1955, perhaps summed it up best.
\u201cWhy are Hindus wasting their time supporting Hindi, and why are Muslims so beside themselves over the preservation of Urdu? A language is not made, it makes itself. And no amount of human effort can ever kill a language.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/strong>During the 400-year-old Mughal rule of the Indian subcontinent, Persian was the official language of the administration.
When the British East India Company started ruling India in the middle of the 19th century, it replaced Persian with English at higher levels of administration and local vernaculars at the lower levels.
\u201cFrom 1857 onwards, this Hindi-Urdu dispute was created, particularly in present-day Uttar Pradesh state, which continued until 1900,\u201d Mohammad Sajjad, a professor of history at the Aligarh Muslim University in the same state, told Al Jazeera.
Sajjad said the linguistic divide, \u201caggravated by the colonial state\u201d, was based on the script. Urdu uses Nastaliq, borrowed from the Perso-Arabic script, while Hindi uses the Devnagri script.
Christopher Rolland King in his book, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India, wrote that Hindi and Urdu are \u201cconsidered two different languages on political and cultural \u2013 not linguistic \u2013 grounds\u201d.
As demands to make Devnagri official script for Hindi grew, the British administration in 1900 ordered the optional use of the script in courts. Since then, Hindi increasingly came to be associated with north Indian Hindus, and Urdu with Muslims.
In his book, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism Paperback, Orsini Francesca explains: \u201cThe Hindi-Urdu controversy of the late 19th century was not only a competition between old service elites and new groups, a competition for jobs and status; it was also a struggle for cultural self-assertion, with several symbolic undertones.\u201d
Despite Urdu\u2019s Persian-Arabic script and its so-called \u201cMuslim\u201d association, many leaders of India\u2019s freedom movement used the language in their fight against British rule.
Linguist Ganesh N Devy told Al Jazeera that when iconic freedom fighter Subhas Chandra Bose, from what is now the West Bengal state, formed an army to fight the British in 1942, he named it \u201cAzad Hind Fauj\u201d. \u201cAzad\u201d in Urdu means free or independent while \u201cfauj\u201d is an army.
\u201cHe did not use \u2018swatantra\u2019, the Hindi word for freedom,\u201d he said, adding that most slogans of the freedom movement were in Urdu, including \u201cInquilab zindabad\u201d (Long live revolution).
\u201cThere is a move towards unity and also a move towards segregating the two, and both the tendencies existed in pre-independent India during the late colonial times,\u201d Devy said.
He said while Urdu was given the respect it deserved after India\u2019s independence by its inclusion in the eighth schedule of the constitution, the language was now \u201cunder attack\u201d.
Devy said Urdu was among the top seven languages spoken in the country, according to the 2001 census. In the 2011 census, the data of which was disclosed in 2018, the \u201cfortunes of Urdu started sinking in our country\u201d.
\u201cWhen the [2021] census takes place, my fear is that many speakers of Urdu might simply report Hindi as their mother tongue. There is a fear perception among Urdu speakers of getting identified as Muslims though Urdu is not a language of Muslims,\u201d he said.
Experts say while the number of Urdu speakers in India was dwindling, Hindi speakers have shown steady growth since independence. The ruling BJP has time and again hinted at making Hindi India\u2019s national language, but has so far faced stiff opposition from non-Hindi speaking states, mainly in the south and the east.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/strong>Writer and historian Rana Safvi questions the right-wing argument that Urdu is the language of Muslims.
\u201cIf Urdu was a Muslim language, people would be reading the Quran in Urdu and not in Arabic and Muslims in [West] Bengal and Kerala would be speaking Urdu and not their local languages such as Bangla and Malayalam,\u201d she told Al Jazeera.
Safvi said Urdu was projected as the language of Muslims because of its Perso-Arabic script.
\u201cIn 1947, when Urdu became the national language of Pakistan, this association was strengthened,\u201d she said, adding that it was for the same reason the language did not get the \u201ckind of attention it should have otherwise got\u201d in India.
Apoorvanand, a professor of Hindi at Delhi University, said it is a fact that post-1947, the Hindus and even Sikhs moved away from Urdu and the language was \u201csheltered by the Muslims\u201d.
\u201cWe should be grateful to them for saving one modern language,\u201d he said, adding that Urdu was \u201cdefamed and attacked because of its association with Muslims and Pakistan\u201d.
It is for these reasons that politics around the language intensified since the BJP came to power in 2014.
Academic Menon said the \u201coutrage against the [FabIndia] ad was manufactured\u201d and not a \u201cgenuine outrage on the part of ordinary people\u201d.
Ali Khan Mahmudabad, a historian and political scientist who teaches at Ashoka University in the capital, agreed with Menon and said the whole controversy was broadly more illustrative of the \u201cdeep-seated prejudice over anything associated with Muslims now\u201d.
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