DISTINGUISHED scholar Tariq Rahman has come out with a new linguistic study, From Hindi to Urdu: A Social and Political History, published by the Oxford University Press. The book is an exhaustive linguistic study of Urdu, tracing its ancestry while taking into account the social and political implications the language has brought in its wake. Thus, he has chosen a thorny field for his study.

Rahman looks at different theories about the origin and the place of origin of Urdu, as suggested by different scholars, and dismisses them for the reason that they all refer to words or sentences uttered by a Muslim person. When referring to a manuscript, these scholars make sure that it is not written in Devanagri, which Rahman suspects is an attempt to establish Urdu as a purely Muslim language.

Rahman, however, points out two exceptions to this approach, Muhammad Husain Azad and Jameel Jalibi. He says, “Azad had to imagine a mother of Urdu, which is simple, sweet, natural, and entirely Indian,” which in his view is Braj Bhasha. Jalibi, according to Rahman, is one of the few historians who mentioned Namdev, Kabir, Guru Nanak, Hemchandra, and Chand Bardai.

But in the final analysis these two historians too stand dismissed as they also provide examples only from Perso-Arabic manuscripts.

After rejecting the theses and theories of these historians, Rahman turns to a writer associated with Jamat-i-Islami. He introduces him as “Khurshid Ahmad, [the] ideologue of the Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan,” whose essay on Islamic writings in Urdu appears very convincing to Rahman. He then makes a survey of Islamic writings in Urdu and goes on to tell us about the religious writings of different sects. From this survey, he draws the conclusion of the weakening “of the association of Urdu with their factors, especially the amorous and the erotic”.

Rahman appears very convincing within the limits of his linguistic analysis though there are occasions when he can be questioned. He is right in being censorious to those historians who, while tracing the origin of Urdu, have taken care to cite examples from the references and writings of Muslim authorities alone. In fact, I am more angry at their attempt to ignore the role of the Bhakti movement, more particularly of Kabir, in the evolution of the common language which later came to be known as Urdu.

But Rahman is not so convincing when he judges the linguistics situation by putting it in relation to the social, the political and the religious. Strangely enough, Rahman has taken care not to include Urdu’s literary tradition in the subjects of his study.

Had he done so, it would perhaps not have been easy for him to draw the conclusions he has drawn.

Our poets, more particularly our ghazal writers, with their mystic traditions, always seem to be in confrontation with maulvis and mullahs. The allusions and references employed in ghazal, such as saqi, bada-au-saghar, dair-au-haram, kafir, Laila-Majnun, speak of their defiance of the mullahs and their fundamentalist preachings. How significant that the condemned term kafir goes under such a transformation at the hands of the poets that every poet appears to take pride in declaring himself a kafir.

As Rahman has not cared to make a study of the literary tradition of Urdu, he had to rely on the briefings offered by Anwar Sadeed. On the authority of Sadeed, he talks of a movement of Islamic literature which was patronised by Ziaul Haq. This movement should better be treated as a figment of Sadeed’s imagination. Of course he, in an address to the annual session of the Academy of Letters, had announced that “gul-au-bulbul ki shairi ab nahin chalaigi”. But the self delusional dictator did not have the power to dictate to the literary world in this respect.

It is also wrong to imagine that Urdu had grown more Persianised in the new environment of Pakistan. The induction of the Hindi form of ‘Doha’ in post-partition era speaks of an apposite trend.

In fact, the literary world in Pakistan went on dominated mainly by two trends, progressivism and modernism, which were in continuation of what was in vogue in the pre-partition years.

Rahman, in pursuance of his theory of the Islamisation of Urdu, has referred to the campaign to purify Urdu which aimed at ridding Urdu of its Hindi elements on the pretext of making it more refined. But he is not correct in thinking that Insha Allah Khan was allied with this campaign. Instead, he defied this trend by writing “Rani Kaitaki ki Kahani” in an idiom which did not carry any Persian or Arabic words. His ghazals too, abound in Hindi allusions and references.