Sohail Hashmi spoke to GANITA about the effect of nationalist politics on language and culture with special reference to Delhi
He is a passionate Dilliwala who loves to talk about his city dime a dozen, conduct heritage walks, make documentaries and write stories about the known and unknown. Sohail Hashmi, a man who is actually a book full of tales about the evolution of this city, believes that languages encode culture and have to be inclusive. The heterogeneity of language is primarily an urban process, he believes.
Hashmi was one of the panellists of the curtain raiser of the sixth Indian language Festival, Samanvay. It is aimed at generating dialogue across Indian languages at various levels and has emerged as the only literature festival dedicated exclusively to Indian languages. This year the theme is “language as a public action.” The curtain-raiser dealt with the rise of Hindustani in India and its various forms of expression in public. “It engages with the country’s pluralistic culture,” said Rizio Yohannan Raj, creative director, IlF Samanvay.
Explaining the origins of Hindustani, Hashmi said Jats and Gujjars were the native people of Delhi, the rest being outsiders. Migrants contributed to the mix of different languages and cultures over centuries that gave birth to Hindustani. Asked about the effect of nationalist politics on Hindustani, Hashmi said, “In India, language is associated with a religious identity, which we don’t see anywhere else in the world. If someone is speaking in Urdu, people perceive him/her as a Muslim and if one talks in Hindi he/she is perceived as a Hindu. In the 19th century, the same language which everyone spoke in the city began to be written in two different scripts. This started at Fort Williams College in Calcutta. They picked up some scholars of Hindustani who happened to be Hindus and asked them to write in Devnagri script, and they began calling it Hindi. The same language, when written in Persian script, they called it Urdu.”
Hashmi exclaimed that Ghalib wrote letters and phenomenal prose known as ud-ae-hindi, meaning fragrance of Hindi, and they were all in the Persian script. “By the 1830s, a cleavage had been created. Urdu became the language of Muslims and Hindi became the language of Hindus. You will not find this kind of division anywhere in the world. Do only Christians speak EnglishIJ Religion and language have no connection. The first history of Urdu literature was written by a Hindu. The first epic novel in Urdu was written by a Hindu. One of the earliest epic poems, Masnavi, was written by a Hindu. It is politics that has started dividing culture in terms of religion,” said the heritage activist.
He also doesn’t like the confinement of the idea of being Indian to speaking Hindi. “You cannot define Indianness by speaking Hindi. By that definition, all of northeast is not India. Neither are Tamil Nadu and Kerala if we go by that logic. Only Uttar Pradesh remains in India and everything else lies outside it.... how can a language be the benchmark of being IndianIJ That is the politics that one needs to question,” said Hashmi thoughtfully.
Commenting on the intolerance of Indians, he argued, “You cannot simultaneously say that we are a tolerant nation but everybody has to speak and know Hindi. Where is the toleranceIJ We, north Indians, make fun of every other language. Tamil has a much older written literature than Hindi. Hindi as a language was born in the 19 th century. Still we make fun of Tamil. We make fun of people from the northeast. And we make fun of Jats who speak Haryanvi and are the original inhabitants. How can you call yourself tolerant and intrusive and keep making fun of others’ culture and languageIJ That is the problem with this whole nationalist discourse that we have developed. When we say we celebrate the languages of Delhi, we celebrate the diversity of the city. And by celebrating the diversity of Delhi, you are celebrating the diversity of the country.”
Talking about history as a discipline, he said the way history is taught, especially in schools, makes the subject boring for students. It is just taught as a series of events and dates. He believed that history, if looked in terms of development of civilisations and culture, becomes more interesting. “The other problem is that today everybody is only studying business management and commerce. But try to think what will happen ten years later. It is not only a question of history, also pure sciences. Ten years later we won’t have scientists in the country. You can’t become a nation of shopkeepers and accountants, but nobody is bothered. History is crucial, if you don’t study history you won’t understand what your country is all about and where you are going. Everyone is getting trained to get a job and earn money. That’s not education,” he said.
Asked about the treatment that liberal arts are given in India he sighed, “Very bad!” Same for sciences too. “People are studying applied sciences. They are getting training to become only engineers. But basic sciences are where you begin to unravel the secrets of science. And to understand what this country is all about, you have to study the history of this country. The young generation is learning how to do business. But one-and-a-half-crore people can’t survive on commerce. You have to produce and to produce, you have to learn pure science,” he said, rounding off.
