An Urdufest whips up debate regarding which part of the subcontinent owns Urdu
OUT of depth? Oh yes, especially when the mailman rings and asks, aap ko Amrika kaisa legta hai? The dagger-sharp icicles crystallized on the eaves above the doorway, stared down as his words hung in the air. You know... the demons of winter in America play funny tricks on a mind already frosted.
So, I wondered if I was hearing things!
Embedded in a thickly WASPish (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) population with residents bundled up in a bridge-and-tunnel vision, as the latest edition of Oxford Dictionary would have us know on American suburbanites — unsophisticated and insular — the sound of Urdu was strange, to say the least.
Sohrab and I now speak Urdu whenever our paths cross. It’s an event in itself. Always refreshing and reassuring. The mailman and I have exchanged titbits on each other. He’s from India and went back seven years ago to marry a girl from his hometown Ahmedabad in Gujarat, bringing her to live here in a joint family of aging parents, brothers with wives and kids, all looking for the American dream.
Owning his language even though he breaks into Americanese whenever Sohrab runs into other residents, makes him a minority among the ABCD’s (American Born Confused Desi’s) who insist on speaking English even if they butcher the grammar.
The other month, I called up a Pakistani-American who lost a friend — the only son of a widow, shot and killed at the gas station where he worked. The Edhi Foundation in New York performed his last rites and arranged for his body to be sent to Lahore for burial. I merely wanted to inquire if the 24-year-old Pakistani was a victim of hate-crime. Barely able to make sense of his syntax, I tried to break into Urdu with my interlocutor only to be suitably snubbed from the other end. The chap merrily continued in English, only he could understand!
What’s wrong with Urdu? Even the Oxford Dictionary embraces the usage of yet more words spoken in South Asia in its 11th edition unveiled just recently. Words like dicky (car boot or trunk), batchmate (classmate) fitna (unrest or rebellion) jihad or jihadist: niqab; and punditocracy are now perfectly legit (as the Americans call it) to use as pucca English.
Not to be left behind is an editor at The Washington Post. In his book The Elephants of Style — A trunkload of tips on the big issues and gray areas of contemporary American English, Bill Walsh wrestles with troublesome lexicon: “Although the people of Pakistan are Pakistanis, the people of Afghanistan are Afghans. The word ‘afghani’ refers solely to the country’s main unit of currency. To call an Afghan an ‘afghani’ is like calling an American a ‘dollar’.”
Indians and Pakistanis romancing the past while slued in hoary time zones and hazy spaces, arrived in America for a dij‘ vu. Poets and scholars; literati and critics; editors and ex-diplomats; journalists and novelists; playwrights and politicians; bureaucrats and freelancers; men and women; old - really old and not so old, set up a Urdufest to stir fry their own unique flavours that they brought along with them, deliciously seasoned over decades.
Urdu Times, North America’s first and largest weekly published simultaneously from coast to coast, was the sponsor of the 3-day “World Urdu Conference” at Edison in New Jersey, coddling litterateurs from Pakistan, India, US, Canada and UK.
Among the glitterati was Gopi Chand Narang, President of the Sahitya Akaidami, New Delhi; Prof. Fateh Muhammad Malik, Chairman National Language Authority, Islamabad; Zahid Ali Khan, Editor of Urdu daily Siyasat, Hyderabad, Deccan; Prof. David Matthews, Head of Urdu Department, University of London, and Karamatullah Ghori (Canada) former Pakistan ambassador to Turkey now jettisoning diplomatic gobbledegook.
Among the heartthrobs were; Dr Shan-ul-Haq Haqqi and Razia Fasih Ahmed (living in Canada) Ahmad Faraz and Munno Bhai (playing hooky that day) Shakila Rafiq; Amjad Islam Amjad and Hamayat Ali Shayar.
Among the live wires were the Urdu Times owner Khalil-ur Rehman; Dr. ‘Abdurrehaman’ Abd (NY), Dr Syed Taqi Abedi (Toronto); columnist Vakil Ansari; BBC veteran Raza Ali Abidi (London); Tariq Khawaja, Chicago Times bureau chief, Hameedullah Khan, chairman Pakistan Federation of America (Chicago) and Farzana Khan, former Daily News reporter (Canada).
Do the above warrant further introduction? I think not. Most have a celebrity status already.
But let me quote Gopi Chand Narang who unlike some of our biggies — Ahmed Faraz, Amjad Islam Amjad, Attaullah Qasmi and Iftikhar Arif, is that ‘celebrated rare intellectual who has spurned the lure of office to pursue his scholastic work’ — reminded friend Faraz: “Do not monopolize and politicize a language. Urdu is one of the national languages of India and not a natural language of even a single region of Pakistan from Karachi to Lahore and Quetta to Peshawar. The litterateurs of the two countries must interact with each other.”
Indians are touchy when chauvinistic claims on Urdu by Muslims in general and Pakistanis in particular are made.
“Urdu, tinged as it is with Punjabi, Balochi, Multani, Sindhi or some North West Frontier Province dialect,” is “pathetic”, according to Indian diehards, “the real Urdu speaking people are in India alone”!
But David Matthews, the Londoner with flawless Urdu and oodles of charm, tells me: “One of the most animated topic to surface was Urdu ki nai bastian, that examined the status and future of Urdu in America and Europe. Those of us who work for Urdu in the ‘diaspora’ are acutely aware of the fact that members of the younger generation, living outside the homeland of Urdu, due to pressures of modern life, experience great difficulty in maintaining their interest in their mother tongue and its literary traditions.”
Matthews is the man who translated Quiver: Poems and Ghazals by Shabana Azmi’s hubby Javed Akhtar; recited movingly by legend Amitabh Bachchan and lauded by Gopi Chand Narang, at its launch some three years ago in New Delhi.
Till Toronto, next year, when the same saints will go marching into the Urdu Conference!
An Urdufest whips up debate regarding which part of the subcontinent owns Urdu 
