My maternal grandmother, Saeeda Jaffrey, did not acquire any formal education. She was, as it befitted the tradition of the days of yore, cajoled into getting hitched to a distant relative when she was just 13 years old — something that she was utterly proud of and never regretted. Her husband, my grandfather, Shareef Hussain Jaffrey, was a graduate who took to teaching at a primary government school and retired as the headmaster of the institute before geriatrics had the better of him. He was six years older than his wife. Not only did the couple have an age difference but their formal educational qualifications did not measure up to one another’s either. But that didn’t matter at all.
The Urdu that Saeeda Jaffrey spoke was eloquent, peppered with proverbs and phrases that impart a distinct style to a language. For instance, if she scolded you for excessive eating habits but not maintaining proportionate body mass, she’d say, “Khaey bakri ki tarha, sookhey lakri ki tarha.” Or if she was furious at someone for squandering away money and wanted to stress upon the virtues of being frugal, she’d go, “Kamaey aadh ganwaey pon, is pagal ko samjhaey kaun.” It was a sheer delight to listen to her unleashing idiomatic expressions in a scholarly (with all the trappings of an angry old woman) manner.
To boot, Saeeda Jaffrey knew many an Urdu couplet by heart. Altaf Hussain Hali was her favourite poet (also because he was the native of the same city she hailed from, Panipat). She could recite Ghalib and Iqbal with proper cadences and with appropriate stresses and pauses, paying heed to the metrical composition of the verses. When she read, “Ki Muhammad se wafa tu ne to hum tere hain, yeh jahan cheez hai kia loh-o-qalam tere hain,” she knew how and when qafia and radeef were to be stressed.
But she never had any formal education. Nor was her familiarity with poetry or command over the Urdu language anything to write home about. For that’s the way a child was brought up in the not-so-distant past.
What’s happened to our society now?
There was a time when Pakistan Television programmes, educational as well as entertainment-related, disseminated knowledge, albeit in a subtle way, and inspired people to look good, speak well and think deep. Back then, listening to Zia Moheyddin’s rhythmic recitals, lending an attentive ear to Qureshpur or Iftikhar Arif’s articulate prattling and following Omar Qureshi’s note-perfect cricket commentary was part of a Pakistani’s daily routine life. So when someone conversed with you in the Queen’s English or uttered pure Urdu phrases, it never fuddled your mind.
In the late 1960s or early ‘70s, Mehdi Hassan, vocalist extraordinaire, used to sing the famous Faiz Ahmed Faiz ghazal, Guloon mein rung bharey baad-i-naubahar chaley in the remote villages of Punjab and small towns of Sindh. Mehdi sahib would receive encore calls from the seemingly rustic peasants. They never claimed to understand the ghazal, but they made an effort to dig deep into the mesmerizing composition. Such was the level of a common man’s interest in literary pursuits.
It is said that the factor that precipitated intellectual bankruptcy in our society was Ziaul Haq’s tenure. He tried to de-intellectualize Pakistan through carefully measured steps, by promoting certain activities and by imposing censor policies intrinsically damaging to cerebral undertakings. This remains debatable. It’s been more than 15 years since Zia breathed his last. Even if he had done something deleterious, the subsequent governments could have made an effort to bring our society back on track. But that didn’t happen. Why? Nobody has the faintest of clues.
Talking to a so-called educated person these days is a dead giveaway of the present intellectual state of Pakistan. If you used a phrase such as taaq-enisyan while discussing an important point, he or she would look at you as if you were a Martian.
Not much different is the case with regard to the apparently English-speaking class of the country. The way they murder the English language by employing incorrect prepositions with an Americanized accent is something that has to be listened to. What’s interesting to note here is that despite butchering the language, they take pride in the fact that their acquaintance with Urdu is of elementary level.
If one notices the innumerable signboards and hoardings of educational institutions that dot Karachi city, the argument that one is striving to drive home would gain verity.
There’s a technical school in the district west of the city by the name of ‘Good Breed’. It’s absolutely perplexing to get to the heart of what kind of knowledge the institute intends to impart to the young, impressionable students.
In Pakistan, computer mania appears to be turning the youth into a one-track-mind entity. Perhaps all this has something to do with an unofficial national drive to make things easier to understand. The way TV presenters have been hosting shows, mixing a terrible Urdu with a horrible English accent for more than a decade — some of them have burgeoned into stars charging thousands of rupees for doing such a terrible-horrible job — is a testimony to the fact that we have given in to “being easy”. “Just convey the message in the style that suits you most” seems to be the order of the day. Being eloquent is left to professors of reputed universities and to the septuagenarian Zia Moheyddin. Let’s see what happens when we hit rock-bottom.
