SPEAKING IN TONGUES
In the midst of our brutality and our venality, the mere mention of Urdu symbolises a dream of cosmopolitan elegance, of romance and of eloquence. It is also a fact that, for some people, Urdu also symbolises an alien presence, a mark of invasion, of transgression. That must be the reason why Sanghi activists were reported to have defaced some Urdu street signs just after the triumphalist euphoria of 2014. Be that as it may, for better and for worse, Urdu has considerable historical gravity. It is an important part of the narrative of our modern becoming—which is not quite the same as our becoming modern!
Jennifer Dubrow’s book—Cosmopolitan Dreams : The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia—fills out a crucial part of the story. The narrative of Urdu has got so enmeshed in the story of the Hindi-Urdu struggle—the contention, the division, the messy divorce with shared custody of lexicons and icons—that it is important to remember, to cite Francesca Orsini’s title, that there was a time Before the Divide (2010). And in this time, Urdu was the language of an emergent modernity—a modernity that was at once cosmopolitan, and indigenous. Dubrow writes: “Urdu was central to both the experience and the critique of colonial modernity in South Asia; it was the language in which modern life was lived, satirised, disputed, and challenged.”
Dubrow reaches into the archives of 19th century Urdu periodicals. Here, in the heterogeneity of journalism, she finds satire and poetry, she finds humorous sketches and serialised proto-novels. But in and through this variety, she shows convincingly and in considerable detail, the ways in which Urdu functioned, to cite another scholar, as a vehicle for “imagining a common secular future.” “... In stressing affiliations beyond region, religion, caste, and nation,” Dubrow writes, “the Urdu cosmopolis acted to resist the fractures of communalism and nationalism...”
And then one day it didn’t. The matter of the Islamicisation of Urdu is a tricky question—is it the result of a process of assertion, or does it come about through hostile attribution? Did it happen some centuries back, in the twilight of the Mughal empire, a minimal culturalist claim amid the ruins? Or did it happen in the heat of the modern struggle, with identities crystallised by Curzon’s census, and mobilised by the colonial administration?
Dubrow provides a deliciously local sidelight on a complex process that has had such monumental historical consequences. At one level, “Hindi-Urdu” is part of the radical reordering of the colonial order in the aftermath of 1857. What she brings to light is the contribution that was made to this process by the commercial rivalry between two
Urdu was central to both the experience and the critique of colonial modernity in South Asia
—Jennifer Dubrow
publications in the late 19th century Lucknow—Avadh Panch and Avadh Akhbar. Avadh Panch was generally critical of its more successful rival, and attacked it, slyly, by referring to the Baniya caste of its publisher, Munshi Naval Kishore. However, the serial success of Ratan Nath Dhar Sarshar’s Fasana-i-Azad in Avadh Akhbar prompted Avadh Panch to broaden the attack, “using Sarshar’s ethnic and religious identity as a Kashmiri Hindu, to imply that such a writer could not be a master of the Urdu language.” Clearly, the Urdu cosmopolis could not survive such fractures for very long.
The fracturing of that cosmopolis could not but have grave consequences for the “modernity” that emerged from the rubble. What we got, arguably, was the “navajagaran” beloved of the Hindi ideologues—the pseudo-renaissance that was fatally imbricated with the caste interests of the savarna Hindus who seized their historical opportunity in the post-1857 dispensation.