Had it not been for the efforts of the Pakistanis living in Tokyo, the international conference organised by Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS) would have been a one-sided affair with minimal representation from Pakistan. The Pakistani delegates were flown in to Tokyo through the courtesy of Pakistani expatriates. The international Hindi-Urdu teaching conference organised during December 12-14 by TUFS as part of the centenary celebrations of Hindi-Urdu teaching in Japan was dominated by the Indians and things improved slightly towards the end when a few Pakistani delegates appealed to the organisers’ sense of justice.

Hindi and India dominated the banners put up at the venue, the programme’s schedule and the certificates issued to the participants. The schedule of the programmes that were to take place during the three-day Hindi-Urdu conference was in Hindi and English. The badges given to us showing our names were in Roman and Nagari — Urdu was missing from the printed material of the Hindi-Urdu conference as if it was a Hindi-Hindi conference. The tags giving our names in Urdu script were added to our badges on the third day, though only after our protests.

At the inaugural session, held on the university’s premises, small flags of India and Japan were placed on the dais and the Pakistani flag was missing. The Indian ambassador to Japan presided over the inaugural session. All the sessions were conducted by a Hindi teacher from India who was at pains to speak a language that he thought was pure Hindi, trying not to ‘contaminate’ it with a single word of Urdu, though I doubt if the majority of India’s teeming millions would be able to grasp it completely. The other scholars of Hindi who spoke on the occasion were also ever so careful not to speak the simple, plain language spoken in the Indian Hindi (read: Urdu) movies. As for me, all I could understand was ‘hai’, ‘tha’ and ‘hoga’, that is, the few words that mercifully could not be Sanskritised. The way they are trying to fashion a new and artificial language in the name of Hindi, they may well end up alienating the masses.

Day Two also belonged to India, though the spirits of Pakistanis, who had come from faraway places, were lifted a bit by the paper read out by Dr Suhail Abbas Khan Baloch, the visiting professor of Urdu at Osaka University School of Foreign Studies. He began with a satirical one-liner about the Sanskritised language that had clouded the conference and went on to crisply describe the issues related to teaching Urdu in Japan, peppering his talk with witty comments. Another high point of the conference was the presentation given by Prof Kensaku Mamiya, of Osaka University, on a new project of the university that facilitates learning Urdu on the internet.

Then began the third and last day of the conference. Pakistanis and the lovers of Urdu were exasperated over the treatment meted out to Urdu. Four Pakistanis were to present their papers that day and they were determined to repair the damage. What came as a morale-booster was the presence of Pakistan’s ambassador to Japan, Imtiaz Ahmed. He arrived in the first session on Day Three and stayed on till the very end.

I would not comment on my paper on ‘Early Urdu bilingual versified dictionaries and textbooks,’ though I took the opportunity to remind our Indian friends (much to their chagrin) that in the beginning there was only one language shared by both Hindus and Muslims and it was written in Perso-Arabic script. It was the British who carefully planned to bifurcate a common language by using Devanagari script to write it and labelled it as ‘Hindi’. Even a biased scholar like Gian Chand Jain has conceded in his book that before the establishment of Fort William College at Calcutta in 1800 there were hardly 10 to 12 books in Nagari script.

The other paper presented by Dr Tanzim-ul-Firdous of Karachi University dealt with the teaching of Urdu in a global perspective, deliberating upon the tools and the techniques of teaching Urdu in a different and trans-cultural environment. Prof Dr Tehseen Firaqi, chairman, department of Urdu, Punjab University, seconded my opinions on Hindu-Urdu conflict before dwelling upon the challenges and problems of teaching of Urdu as a foreign language. He also shared with the audience some of the interesting experiences of teaching Urdu as a second language he had had during his three-year stay at Tehran University.

Prof Dr Moinuddin Aqeel, chairman, department of Urdu, International Islamic University, Islamabad, was visibly disappointed at the treatment given to Urdu and Pakistan during the conference but kept his calm as usual and presented Urdu’s and Pakistan’s case in a very composed manner. While deliberating upon the historical perspectives of teaching of Urdu in Japan, Aqeel Sahib bemoaned that the services of Prof Gamo and Prof Suzuki Takeshi, the great lovers of Urdu who tirelessly worked for the promotion of Urdu in Japan, were completely ignored during the conference. Dedicating a session to them, he said, would have been the least the organisers could have done to commemorate their superb role. Had these lovers of Urdu and Pakistan been alive and there, there must have been three flags on the dais instead of two, he said. And they must have seen to it that the centenary volume and the schedule of the conference were in Urdu as well as in other languages.

At that moment, I raised the participation certificate given to me a short while earlier and loudly complained that it was in Hindi and not in Urdu. Dr Aqeel went on to give a presentation by using multimedia along with clippings of an Urdu play on Hiroshima, staged in Pakistan by his students of TUFS. The response of the audience was a rapturous round of applause. In response to the points raised by Dr Aqeel, Prof Asada Yutaka, chairman, department of Urdu, TUFS, apologised for the lapses. Immediately, a small Pakistani flag was brought on to the stage and a teacher of the Hindi department apologised for the certificates and promised to send the new ones made out in Urdu.

After the conference, an Urdu-Hindi mushaira transformed the atmosphere and everyone enjoyed a beautiful evening in a congenial environment. In addition to Dr Suhail Abbas, Dr Tanzim-ul-Firdous and Dr Tehseen Firaqi, two Pakistani poets settled in Japan, Abdur Rehman Siddiqi and Mazhar Danish, recited their poetry and the audience, including Japanese scholars and students, appreciated them with the traditional ‘wah wah’ and ‘mukarrar irshad’. But the pick of the poets that evening was the Hindi poet Shri Kunwar Baichain. Every Pakistani was pleasantly amazed to see the Sanskritised language make place for the plain and beautiful Hindi (read: Urdu) in Baichain’s poetry. So, all in all, the conference ended on a positive note.

Dr Aqeel bridged the gap further the following day in the reception given by the Pakistanis when he said that though the tension between India and Pakistan was running high, it would wane soon as it was artificial and the people, intellectuals and writers of both the countries were not in favour of war. The Pakistani ambassador and the Indian intellectuals unambiguously agreed with him.

Plans are said to be afoot to celebrate next year the 50 years of an independent Urdu department at TUFS, as it was separated from the ‘Hindustani’ department in 1959. One hopes that the planned event will not be allowed to be hijacked, as it were, by representatives of one language or one country. One also hopes that other Japanese scholars of Urdu, such as Prof Hiroji Kataoka and Prof So Yamane, who were conspicuous by their absence this year, will attend the event.

drraufparekh@yahoo.com