Azadi - Arundhati Roy

right to learn Sanskrit. But the changing times now required that it be promoted as the indigenous script of “the
people.” In fact, the more widely used script at the time was one called Kaithi. But Kaithi was used by non-Brahmin
castes like the Kayasthas, who were seen to be partial to Muslims. Extraordinarily, in a matter of a few decades,
Kaithi was not just discarded but erased from public memory. 13
To turn a battle for a new script into a popular social movement wasn’t easy when the literacy rate of the
population was in single digits. How is it possible to make people passionate about something that doesn’t really
affect them? The solution was simple but ingenious. In his erudite tract, Hindi Nationalism , Alok Rai writes in
some detail of how the mobilization for Devanagari came to be fused with the call for Hindu unity, cow protection,
and ghar wapsi . The Nagari Pracharini Sabhas (Societies for the Popularization of Nagari) and the gau rakshak and
the ghar wapsi evangelists shared the same offices and office-bearers. They probably still do. The campaign for
Devanagari had immediate and practical goals, too, such as eligibility for jobs in government offices, for which, at
the time, reading Persian was a basic qualification. The campaign gained velocity and was buoyed by the resistance
to it from the Muslim elite, including Muslim leaders with a vested interest in the status quo, such as the best-known
reformist and modernizer of the time, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. Here is his defense of retaining Persian-Arabic as the
only official script: “Would our aristocracy like that a man of low caste and insignificant origin, though he be a B.A.
or M.A. and have the requisite ability, should be in a position above them and have power in making the laws that
affect their lives and property? Never!” 14
It’s extraordinary how sworn enemies can find common ground in each other’s worst prejudices. As always, it
was a battle of old and new elites lobbying for opportunity, the new ones, as always, disguising their own aspirations
as the will of “the people.”
The Devanagari movement’s first victory came in April 1900, when Sir Anthony MacDonnell, lieutenantgovernor
of North-Western Provinces and Oudh, issued an order allowing the use of the Devanagari script in
addition to the Persian script in the courts of the province. In a matter of months, Hindi and Urdu began to be
referred to as separate languages. Language mandarins on both sides stepped in to partition the waters and apportion
the word-fish. On the “Hindi” side, anything seen as Persian influence, as well as the influence of languages thought
to be unsophisticated vernaculars, was gradually weeded out. (Somehow the words Hindi , Hindu , and Hindustan
escaped the dragnet.) Sanskrit began to replace Persian. But Sanskrit was the language of ritual and scripture, the
language of priests and holy men. Its vocabulary was not exactly forged on the anvil of everyday human experience.
It was not the language of mortal love, or toil, or weariness, or yearning. It was not the language of song or poetry of
ordinary people. That would have been Awadhi, Maithili, Braj Bhasha, Bhojpuri, or one of a myriad other dialects.
Rarely if ever has there been an example in history of an effort to deplete language rather than enrich it. It was like
wanting to replace an ocean with an aquarium.
As the positions on both sides hardened, even the literary canons came to be partitioned. The “Urdu” canon
erased the sublime, anti-caste Bhakti poets such as Kabir, Surdas, Meera, and Raskhan, a Muslim devotee of
Krishna. The “Hindi” canon erased the greatest of Urdu poets, Mir and Ghalib. (Something similar is at work in the
world of Hindustani classical music, although it hasn’t yet had the misfortune of being formally divided into Hindu
classical music and Muslim classical music.) Fortunately, progressive writers and poets, the very best of them,
resisted this pressure. They continued to produce literature and poetry that were rich and deep and fully alert to what
was being done to their language. But gradually, as the older generation passes, the newer one, whose formal
education comes from “new” Hindi books and textbooks that have to be approved by government committees, will
find it harder and harder to reclaim an ineffably beautiful legacy that is rightfully theirs.
It is for all these reasons that when Anjum’s father, Mulaqat Ali, recites his Mir couplet, his warning wrapped in
mourning, he is confident that his young guests—who belong to the generation of “new” Hindi—will not grasp its
true meaning. He knows that his straitened material circumstances mirror the straitened vocabulary of his visitors.
Today, many of the younger generation of Urdu speakers in India cannot read the Persian script. They can read
Urdu only in the Devanagari script. Urdu is seen not just as a Muslim language but as a Pakistani language. Which
makes it almost criminal in some people’s eyes. In March 2017 two Muslim members of the legislative assembly of
Uttar Pradesh were prevented from taking their oath of office in Urdu. 15 A member of the Aligarh Municipal
Corporation was charged with “intent to hurt religious sentiments” for trying to do the same. 16
Although Hindi’s victory has been a resounding one, it does not seem to have entirely allayed its keepers’
anxieties. Perhaps that’s because their enemies are dead poets who have a habit of refusing to really die. One of the
sub-themes of the 2002 Gujarat massacre was poetry. As Anjum discovers to her cost when she travels to Gujarat
with Zakir Mian, who was a friend of her father, Mulaqat Ali:
He suggested that while they were in Ahmedabad they could visit the shrine of Wali Dakhani, the seventeenth-century Urdu poet, known as the
Poet of Love, whom Mulaqat Ali had been immensely fond of, and seek his blessings too. They sealed their travel plans by laughingly reciting a