It was Wednesday April 14, 2010 when the last page of the 22nd and final volume of the Urdu Lughat: Tareekhi usool par (Urdu lexicon) rolled off the press. The state ignored this historic achievement which took 52 years to be completed, even though the news was reported in the national press.
Perhaps officialdom does not know Urdu is the national language, nor that it is ranked among the major languages of the world: along with English, German, Arabic and Persian, that have such a comprehensive dictionary.
After waiting for recognition through April, May and June, the Unikarians, a body of old students of the Karachi University, in collaboration with KU, celebrated the historic achievement with a programme filled with pride and joy held at the KU arts auditorium last Saturday.
Eminent speakers recounted the history of Urdu; the dream of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan of a comprehensive Urdu dictionary; the conceptualising of that dream by the legendary Moulvi Abdul Haq aka Baba-e-Urdu; the ransacking of the Delhi office of Anjuman Taraqqi-e-Urdu, where the dictionary was being compiled, in 1947; the great difficulty with which he brought the ruined manuscripts and surviving books of the Anjuman to Karachi where he began work on the dictionary afresh; the establishment of the Urdu Dictionary Board (UDB) in 1961; the publication of the first volume in 1977; the continuous struggle of the staff, researchers, editors and scholars to produce the remaining volumes despite shortage of funds, poor pay, and attempts to either derail the project or have it bureaucratised.
The speakers unfolded an heroic struggle full of dramatic twists and turns and legends of real-life heroes and villains that an exciting and most readable history of the creation of the Urdu Lughat can be written. I hope someone undertakes the project. From a felicitation volume, compiled by fellow journalist, Abdul Hasanat, it seems there is at least three hundred years of documented material about Urdu language and of efforts to give the importance it rightly deserves, through promotion of literature, dictionaries and advanced studies in Urdu.
Although I was highly impressed by the proceedings at the function organised by the Unitarians all the way home, driving along the 24 kilometers from Karachi University to Defence Housing Authority, my mind was swamped with nostalgia, some happy some sad, of Karachi and her involvement with the Urdu language. What is written below is my celebration to mark the completion of the prestigious and historic Urdu Lughat, a landmark event in the history of this city.
Urdu is not the mother tongue of the majority of Karachiites, but all people have adopted it as their very own. The version of Urdu we speak is neither standard Delhi or Lakhnow idiom. Yet it has vigour that is characteristically Karachiwala Urdu. With aplomb speakers add on expressions from their vernacular idiom. For instance, a long last old friend will be greeted thus: by a Sindhi "Vari, tum kidhar tha?", a Makrani: "Are tum kidhar mur gaya tha?" a parsi of Bombaywala: "Sala tum kan tha?" We have made a mess of the grammar, of course, but you cannot deny we enjoy speaking Urdu.
Recalled also was the bitter contempt in Rais Amrohi's couplet: Urdu ka janaza hai, zara dhoom se nikley (It is the funeral of Urdu, proceed joyously) which he wrote during the language riots when Sindhi replaced Urdu as the official provincial tongue in the 1970s.
For the Senior Cambridge exam (now called O-Level) a second language was compulsory. Nearly all the students in school took Urdu, some took French, but I took Hindi because most of my schooling had been in India were I studied Marathi and Hindi. I cannot write Urdu, but I have learnt to read it well enough to peruse poetry and novels at speed. I am a bookworm and simply could not ignore Urdu literature. So I taught myself to read it. I have read a lot of Hindi literature, of course, and I state with conviction that Hindi does not have such a rich literary scope, nor as many books as Urdu does. Comparison of literary output in the two languages will show which is the superior, alive and universal tongue. Gujarati speakers comprise a significant majority in Karachi. Besides Indian Gujarat and Mumbai, Maharashtra's capital where Gujarati is the dominant language and not the provincial Marathi, Karachi is the only other place where Gujarati is widely spoken. These Gujarati speakers have done a lot for promotion of Urdu, particularly in Mumbai through the film industry. The Parsi film producer Sohrab Modi was bankrupt when he made "Mirza Ghalib". He had spent all his money on an epic film "Jhansi ki Rani" which was a flop at the box office. He made "Mirza Ghalib" on a shoestring budget. The film was a block buster throughout India and Modi recouped his losses from "Jhansi ki Rani" and made a hefty profit too. In gratitude to Ghalib he refurbished the dilapidated grave of the great poet. Nearly 30 years after Modi, a new version of "Mirza Ghalib" was filmed and it, too, proved to be a box office success.
Soon after the 1971 war and the fall of Dhaka, Bollywood thought it could discard Urdu, but the attempt failed because without Urdu there can be no Bollywood. Hindi terms that had proliferated films made in the 1970s were quietly discarded. Spoken Urdu and literary Urdu continue to be the medium of expression in the so-called Hindi films.
In the 1960s and 70s a burning issue discussed on all forums, including Press, Radio, debates, public speeches, was why Urdu could not be the medium of instruction for higher education especially in Science and Technical subjects. Immigrants who had studied in Usmania College (or is it University?) failed to convince others that they had no such problem, that sufficient terms were available for teaching Science in Urdu at the college in Hyderabad Deccan. But no one cared to listen. It is said it was actually the bureaucracy which did not want to promote higher education in Urdu medium since the majority of them did not know Urdu themselves: they were all Pukka Ungrez.
In the saga of the Urdu Dictionary Board's struggle to produce the 22 volumes of Urdu Lughat, one also notes the same bureaucratic mindset attempting to downgrade, belittle and even ignore the stupendous achievements of all those who worked to produce the dictionary. But try as they may, they cannot write off the value and importance of the Urdu Lughat. It is a national asset.
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