Azadi - Arundhati Roy

He has a formidable repertoire of couplets, and can produce one for every occasion, every mood, every subtle shift
in the political climate. He believes that poetry can cure, or at least go a long way toward curing, almost every
ailment, and prescribes poems to his patients instead of medicine. When he hears the secret that his wife has kept
from him for so many years, and cannot find a poem to comfort himself with, he loses his moorings. He does his
best to steady himself, to come to terms with it, but eventually is unable to.
It is when we meet Mulaqat Ali that we get our first hint of the fraught history of language that mirrors the
fraught history of the Indian subcontinent. The churning that eventually culminated in the bloodshed of Partition
partitioned not just land and people, but a language, too, making one part “Muslim” and the other “Hindu.” This is a
description of how Mulaqat Ali conducts himself with the shallow young journalists who from time to time arrive to
interview him for various newspapers’ weekend supplements about the exotic culture and cuisine of Old Delhi:
Mulaqat Ali always welcomed visitors into his tiny rooms with the faded grace of a nobleman. He spoke of the past with dignity but never
nostalgia. He described how, in the thirteenth century, his ancestors had ruled an empire that stretched from the countries that now called
themselves Vietnam and Korea all the way to Hungary and the Balkans, from Northern Siberia to the Deccan plateau in India, the largest empire the
world had ever known. He often ended the interview with a recitation of an Urdu couplet by one of his favorite poets, Mir Taqi Mir:
Jis sar ko ghurur aaj hai yaan taj-vari ka Kal uss pe yahin shor hai phir nauhagari ka
The head which today proudly flaunts a crown
Will tomorrow, right here, in lamentation drown
Most of his visitors, brash emissaries of a new ruling class, barely aware of their own youthful hubris, did not completely grasp the layered meaning
of the couplet they had been offered, like a snack to be washed down by a thimble-sized cup of thick, sweet tea. They understood of course that it
was a dirge for a fallen empire whose international borders had shrunk to a grimy ghetto circumscribed by the ruined walls of an old city. And yes,
they realized that it was also a rueful comment on Mulaqat Ali’s own straitened circumstances. What escaped them was that the couplet was a sly
snack, a perfidious samosa, a warning wrapped in mourning, being offered with faux humility by an erudite man who had absolute faith in his
listeners’ ignorance of Urdu, a language which, like most of those who spoke it, was gradually being ghettoized. 11
The language known variously as Urdu/Hindi/Hindustani, and, in an earlier era, Hindavi, was born on the streets
and in the bazaars of North India. Khari Boli, spoken in and around Delhi and what is now western Uttar Pradesh, is
the base language to which the Persian lexicon came to be added. Urdu, written in the Persian-Arabic script, was
spoken by Hindus and Muslims across North India and the Deccan Plateau. It was not, as it is often made out to be,
the high language of the court. That, in those days, was Persian. But neither was it, as it is often made out to be, the
language of ordinary people everywhere. Urdu was the language of the street, but not necessarily the language
spoken in the privacy of most ordinary people’s homes, particularly not by the women. It came to be the formal
language of literature and poetry for Hindus and Muslims alike. Urdu varied from region to region. Each region had
its own high priests staking their claim to true pedigree. In fact, it saw its brightest hour as the Mughal Empire
faded.
The partitioning of Urdu began in earnest in the second half of the nineteenth century, after the failed 1857 War
of Independence (known to the British as the Mutiny), when India ceased to be merely an asset of the East India
Company. The titular Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was formally deposed, and India was brought directly
under British rule. Muslims, seen as the main instigators of the uprising, came in for severe punishment and were
treated with great suspicion by the British administration. Power bases began to shift, hierarchies changed, releasing
suppressed resentment and new energies that began to seep through the cracks like smoke. As the old ideas of
governing by fiat and military might began to metamorphose into modern ideas of representative government, old
feudal communities began to coalesce into modern “constituencies” in order to leverage power and job
opportunities. Obviously, the bigger the constituency, the greater the leverage.
Demography became vitally important, so the first British census was a source of huge anxiety. “Hindu” leaders
turned their attention to the millions of people who belonged to the “untouchable” castes. In the past, in order to
escape the stigma of caste, millions had converted to Islam, Sikhism, or Christianity. But now their religious
conversion was viewed by the privileged castes as catastrophic. Reformists rushed in to stem the hemorrhage.
Hinduism became an evangelical religion. Organizations of privileged-caste Hindus, who believed deeply in caste
and believed themselves to be Aryans, descended from the European race, sought to keep Untouchables and
indigenous tribespeople in the “Hindu fold” by performing ghar wapsi (returning home) ceremonies, a farce that
was meant to symbolize “spiritual cleansing.” In order to clearly define itself and mark itself off from other
competing constituencies, the newly emerging Hindu constituency needed cultural symbols—something to fire the
imagination of its evangelists and its potential recruits. The holy cow and the holy script became the chosen vehicles
for mobilization. Gau rakshak (cow protection) societies proliferated, and simultaneously the demand was raised
that Devanagari (Deva as in Dio/God—the script of the Gods) be officially accepted as a second script for Urdu.
Devanagari, originally known as Babhni, was the script of the Brahmins, 12 and had, like Sanskrit, been jealously
guarded, its purity protected from the “polluting influence” of lower castes, who had for centuries been denied the