Saakhi: Hearts Divided by Scripts

It is always a pleasure to listen to the poet Javed Akhtar speak. His clear diction, his subtle sense of self-deprecatory humour and his flawless accent remind me of conversations in our early years. It was a time when writers full of dreams for their young country met regularly, exchanged notes and familiar banter about publishers and occasionally talked of promising young voices in various vernaculars. For us, the Midnight’s Children of writers, these informal baithaks proved that the Partition was just one incident in a long history of migrations and change. That there were no constants in cultures. Assimilative intermingling of peoples, languages and cultural practices was the rule. 

With age, one realised that waves of immigration and gentrification have been passing through the northern plains ever since history came to be written. And the post-partition angst of the northern plains was nothing new. The area had long been witness to bands of migrants looking for shelter and others departing for faraway lands from Punjab, UP, Rajasthan, and Bihar. The local schools and universities we attended in the mid-60s were reflective of this rich and mixed heritage of the Hindi belt. Firaq Gorakhpuri, the celebrity Urdu poet taught postgraduate classes in the English department. Another great Hindi poet and socialist leader V.D.N. Sahi lectured on 18th century England and the beginnings of popular journalistic prose. Comrade P.C. Gupta, his well-known cricket commentator son Skand and his diminutive wife of mixed parentage from Uttarakhand, were all a merry group of dons constantly interacting with students as equals, debating, quarrelling and making up later about questions of political ideology, language and the state of the arts. 

Up until the early 80s, both in schools and universities, the children of the relatively well-off and lower middle classes, speakers of Punjabi or Urdu or Awadhi-laced Hindi kept the essential hybrid variants of Hindi alive. They came from all communities: Hindus, Sikhs, Mona Sikhs, Muslims, Brahmo Bengalis, Vaishnava Bengalis, Catholics, Protestants and what have you. Several of them also had families that suffered awfully during the Partition, but most of them remained, as Javed sahib so beautifully put it that evening, innocent, eager to learn, full of curiosity about the world around them and full of dreams Sahir wrote of: Woh subah kabhi toh ayegi. (That morning will come someday.)  

Each region in North India, even before the Partition, spoke a mixed regional language fed by several local dialects each with a long tradition of oral literature. When Munshi Naval Kishore set up the first major commercial printing press for bringing out vernacular books and tracts, it was these hybridised Urdu and Hindi variants that fed the pool. Even late in the 70s, most major Hindi Urdu publishers like Munshiji himself, traced their roots to pre-Partition Lahore, a multilingual town if ever there was one. Truth be told, a rather fractious political history between the popular variants of Urdu written in Farsi script and Hindi in DevNagari, lay like a deeply buried faultline. However, the hard controversy and bitterness began crystallising only around the late 20th century. 

In the Hindi belt, an extraordinary solipsism began to be visible when the Right made steady inroads as coalition partners with various Samajwadi leaders. Together, both insisted on retaining a Sanskritised elite version of Hindi as the medium of education and official correspondence. In Mumbai, Hindi films still leaned heavily on Urdu writers from Khwaja Ahmed Abbas to Krishan Chander and later Salim Javed, but in Delhi, Lucknow, Bhopal, Patna and Chandigarh, script slowly became a communal symbol and even children whose parents knew Urdu and Gurumukhi, opted out of other scripts and chose Nagari or English instead. Since English medium was available only in private schools that charged a hefty fee, most midnight’s children in the Hindi belt, like this columnist, grew up reading and writing in Hindi.

After 2014, that allowed the question of a common national language to become the collateral damage to a power tussle between India’s regional political parties and the Centre. The word Bhasha that the BJP uses forcefully to mark its Hindu territory, is baffling to the older writers of Hindi. Bhasha or Bhakha, has actually been the term for an inclusive bouquet. The northern plains that covered areas from western UP, Awadh, to Varanasi, Mithila, and Bhojpur right up to Bihar, the Bhakha was arranged and rearranged to suit the area. As Tulsidas wrote in the 16th century, “Bhakha bhanati more mati thori..” I am somewhat handicapped writing in the Bhakha that I know… Any of us Hindi writers will agree. The Bhakha one writes in carries the genetic codes of innumerable tribes and languages, and will not pass muster with the Sanskrit favoured by Pundits still manning the towers.  

The Hindi one writes in, is no different from the Urdu Javed sahib or Gulzar sahib (a Sikh, by the way) write in. It is the Hindi that has been trickling effortlessly slowly down south, through songs and poems from great poets and composers. In the 14th century, it was Amir Khusrau, who wrote the song “Chhap Tilak sub Chheeni re Tosey Naina Milay ke” made famous by a Bollywood film. Again many famous Bollywood songs were retouched a bit by a Bachchanji or Gulzar, like, “Mere Anganey mein tumhara kya kaam hai?”, “Kajrare, Kajrare terey karey karey naina” or “Bareilly kee bazaar mein Jhumka gira re”, are originally old folk songs. Kumar Gandharva similarly brought into the popular repertoire a host of old Nirguna songs by chiselling them a bit. He had heard bands of pilgrims and Sadhus singing these timeless poems of love and devotion in a Khichdi of languages called Sadhukkadi.

So the real takeaway from Javed sahib’s long meandering talk was that literature travels caravan-like, gathering new words, contexts and sonorous notes through nations. It obeys no rules except its own made of Sur (pure notes) and Laya (meter). Like the Elizabethan English, this Hindi-Urdu mix is a liquid bubbling with steam, fumes and a certain fury against the system. To the footloose and fancy-free male and female saints and fakirs who danced to these, caste-based hierarchies and politically favoured or disfavored communities were meaningless. When the Hindi poet Ashok Vajpeyi – leading a band of Hindi writers, playwrights and doyens of Hindustani music – returned their government-given awards as a protest against the persecution and killings of fellow Tamil, Kannada, Bangla and Marathi writers, they were taking this legacy forward in our times. 

If there is any true common denominator for popular Hindi writers, musicians, film/TV makers, media men and women, it is this: their Hindi-Urdu must once again cohabit the audio space and translate more and more if they are to contain this gushing river of a composite living culture that thrives on oral language.  

Pity that most of our incisive economists, social historians, philosophers and feminists choose to write their extremely informative and well-researched books exclusively in English. And those who are from the non-Hindi speaking areas and often justifiably talk of Hindi imposition will not introspect either why they have not spontaneously made out well-argued cases for their beliefs in their native Bangla, Tamil, Kannada or Odia.

As for literary historians of Hindi and Urdu, they have remained similarly trapped in writing angry competing historical narratives for Hindi and Urdu. A calm, composite, comprehensive history of Indian literature is yet to be written. One that spans both Hindi and Urdu as peoples’ languages and allows the streams of local dialects to enrich it organically instead of travelling back in time to trace remote streams of Sanskrit or Farsi.

Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.