উর্দু ভাষা সমর্থন
I have been prompted to write these few lines and publish them along with some official and semi-official note and letters which I previously wrote on the subject by a sense of duty which I feel I owe to Islam and my nation. My first and foremost duty is, I think, to warn the nation against the grave and serious danger with which the Eastern Province of the new Muslim State of Pakistan is immediately threatened.
East Pakistan’s immediate danger lies in the cultural conquest of the Muslims by the Hindus, which has been in progress since the abolition of Persian as the Court language of the country. The process gathered momentum, though imperceptibly, with the rise of influence and power of the Hindus in the administration of the country on the one hand and the growing apathy, due to their shortsightedness, of the Muslims to take to the learning of Urdu and thereby fill the vacuum which the diminishing extent and scope of the teaching of Persian caused in their cultural and religious education on the other. Old educated families who were imbued with Muslim culture gradually died out, and the new generations grew up under the increasingly dominating influence of the Hindus. Under such conditions the extent of the teaching of Persian and its scope could not be wider than those of any of the other languages, such as Arabic, Sanskrit, French and Latin, which were taught as classics in schools and colleges, and as such its influence was not powerful enough to give a permanent shape to the minds of its scholars. For, a nation’s mind in influenced and organically shaped only by the language in which it thinks, talks and sings. When the country came under the British rule at the extinction of the Muslim power, educated Muslims still thought and sang and at least wrote their private epistles in the Persian language – a language written in the character of their Holy Scriptures, full of Islamic literature and saturated with Islamic culture and traditions. The Bengali vernacular in which the uneducated Muslims expressed their thoughts and emotions was also impressed by Persian and Arabic vocabularies as well as by an Islamic conception. But the abolition of Persian as the Court language, which suddenly closed the door of the services of the State to them, and the Resumption Proceedings, which turned their wealthy landlords into paupers almost overnight, left them stunned, and the downcast community had no able and farsighted leaders to pull them up and guide them to make up for what had been lost. The hopeless Muslims thus left adrift began to swim with the current, and took to the Bengali of the Hindus, a language free from all Islamic influence and saturated with Hindu mythology. The Hindus as the grew in political influence and prosperity went on Sanskritising their Bengali which made it still more Hinduised. The continued influence of such a literature could not fail to develop and inferiority complex in the Muslims, and but for the non-proselytizing nature of the Hindu religion a large number of them would perhaps have gone back to the fold of Hinduism in which their fore-fathers were born before they embraced Islam. There cannot be a more eloquent testimony to the depth of degradation to which the Muslims fell under the baneful influence of the culture produced by the Bengali language than the following passages which are quoted from Dr. Dinesh Chandra Sen’s ‘History of Bengali Language and Literature’ published by the Calcutta University in 1911. The cultural conquest of the Mussalmans by the Hindus has been described by the author, though perhaps unconsciously, as follows:
“The goddess Laksmi or Cri was one of most familiar deities worshipped by the Buddhists. On the door-way of many Buddhist temples the image of this goodess is found in a prominent position carved in bas relief. It is curious to observe, that a class of rural Muhammedan folk of Bengal have, for their sole occupation, the reciting of hymns in Bengali in honour of Laksmi-Devi. This function exclusively belongs to them and their Hindu brethren do not seem to grudge this.” (page-368).
“Alaol has given descriptions of the religious ceremonies of Hindus, their customs and manners with an accuracy and minuteness which strike us as wonderful, coming as they do from the pen of a Mahomedan writer … in his accounts of the little rituals connected with the religious ceremonies of the Hindus such as the Pracastha Vandana, he displays a mastery of detail which could only have been expected from an experienced priest… The Moslem poet is profuse in his eulogies of Civa the Hindu God, and all through the work writes in the spirit and strain of a devout Hindu. Curiously enough his work has been preserved in Chittagong by Mohamedan readers. The manuscript of Padniavati hitherto obtained, all belong to the border lands of Aracan in the back woods of Chittagong, copied in Persian characters and preserved by the rural Mahomedan folk of those localities. No Hindu has ever cared to read them. This goes to prove how far the taste of the Mahomedans was imbrued with Hindu culture.” (page 625-26).
“Many a Mahmoedan offered puja at Hindu temples, as the Hindus offered sinni.at Mahomedan mosque… Mirza Hosen Ali, a native of the Tippera district, who lived a hundred years ago, not only composed songs in praise of the goddess Kali, but worshipped her at his house with great éclat and Gariv Hosen Choudhury of Dacca, a contemporary of the Mirza another Mahomedan zemindar, was a devout worshipper of Citala Devi, the goddess of small-pox, worshipped by the Hindu. Gol Mahmud is to-day the leader of a professional party singers in Tippera who sing only priasies of the goddess of Kali and his party carries the palm in the respect and gets engagements in preference to Hindu parties at the house of orthodox Hindus. Hindus have borne Mahomedan names and the Mahomedans are often called by Hindu names and such instances are very common in this country even no…” (pages 793-94)
“The Mahomedans of Rajshahi have the monopoly of Bhasan gan or songs on Manasa Devi. In Chittagong this fusion of ideas and interchange of customs and usages seems to have reached its highest point… Aptavuddin, another Mahomedan poet of Chittagong who wrote a poem called the Jamil Dilaram in 1750, writes that his hero, who was a Mohomedan, went to the another world to seek a boon from a boon from the Saptarsies or the seven sages of the Hindus…” (page – 796).
“In a work called Yamini Vahal by Karimulla — an inhabitant of Sitakunda in Chittagong (1780 A. D.), the heroine, a Mahomedan, is represented as praying to the God Civa and in another work named Imam Yatrar Puthi, the Mahomedan author has a hynn address to Sarsvati, the goddess of learning…”
“Karam Ali, a leading poet of Chittagong, sang exquisitely on Radha and Krisna, one of his padas runs thus : The poet Karam Ali says ‘Hear me Radha, Krishna is always in thin heart, enjoy the spiritual union, and do not weep.” (pages 798-99) “The works by Mahomedan writers noticed the head ‘Miscellaneous works’ have been mainly brought to light by the researches of Munshi Abdul Karim, late Head Master of Anwara School in Chittagong. We have not been able to see these Mss. but brief notices of them have from time to time appeared in the Vangiya Sahittya Parisat Patrika from which our accounts are gleaned. The Mss. may be traced with the help of Munshi Abdul Karim…
“The works mentioned above disclose plenty of songs by Mahomedan writers on Radha and Krisna, which show that the love songs of the Vaisnavas were appreciated beyond the pale of their own society, and inspired even that race of Iconoclasts who had once gloried in breaking up Hindu temples…
“The works of Mohomedan writers mentioned in this book are all written in more or less sanskritised Bengali, and not in that style known as Musulmani Bangala, which shows an admixture of Urdu, Persian and Arabic words with corrupt Bengali.” (pages 803-4)
Munshi Abdul Karim, late Head Master of a Muslim School, must have devoted his life to making researches in Bengali literature. But How many Muslim Head Masters of school can pronounce Arabic, Persian or Urdu words correctly even to-day?
Thus did the Mussulmans lose in the course of time all conception of Islamic traditions and brotherhood, though political necessity, particularly of ensuring a share in power and influence in the administration of the Country, may have compelled them to stick to the common organisation of the Mussulmans of India. A large number preferred the mode of life and dress of the Hindus, and those who did not go so far, at least felt more at home with Bengali Hindus than with non-Bengali Muslims.
Such had been the social and educational conditions of the Mussalmans of Bengal generally when the new Dominion of Pakistan came into being on the 15th of August, 1947.
Now the new state demands the homogeneity of the nation and the strength and security of its independence inter alia a uniform and thoroughly overhauled system of education and a common State language. Any intelligent and self-sacrificing people will realise The importance and urgency of these national needs, and help the State in the fulfillment of them, and in fact all the provinces of the western Pakistan, the N. W. F. P., the West Punjab, Sind and Baluchistan, though the language of these provinces are not Urdu, have extended their fullest co-operation to the state. But East Bengal which forms the eastern part of the state has alone struck a discordant note. A section of the people of the province has raised an agitation against Urdu being made the state language. This would not have been possible today, if in the past the Mussalmans of Bengal had freighted leaders who would have seen that at least adequate provision was made for the teaching of Urdu to Muslim boys and girls in order to create a thoroughly Muslim outlook in them, which was particularly necessary in the province which was remote from the rest of the Muslim (majority provinces of) India and completely isolated from independent Muslim countries, the mere creation of a new Muslim State now cannot change overnight a mentality which has developed under half a century’s social and educational influence of the Hindus, and he has not been chastened either, owing to its immunity from the horrors of arson, wholesale plunder and murder, which millions of Muslims in the northern provinces of India have recently suffered at the hands of the Hindus. The agitators are at present incapable of foreseeing that unless the Muslims of this far off Province fall in line with the rest of Pakistan, they will in the course of ten more years be completely denationalised and isolated from the Western Pakistan which is the stronghold of the State, being contiguous and akin in education and outlook to independent Muslim States, and extends the power of Islamic nations from Lahore to Morocco at one unbroken stretch. They cannot visualise that in that event they are bound to go down to Hindu India, losing completely their political identity and thus committing their children and grand-children future generations to the status of hewers of wood and drawers of water. At present their only fear is that if Urdu is made the State language, the West Pakistanis will get all the jobs in the service of the state, a groundless fear which selfish politicians are trying to magnify in their shortsighted minds. Bur they do not see that such a contingency will not arise, as the displacement of English, which has been the State language hitherto, by Urdu must be gradual. When the Pathans who speak Pushtu, the Panjabis who speak Panjabi and the Sindhis who speak Sindhi have all welcomed Urdu as the State language, is there any good reason why Bengali Muslims should be afraid of doing so, betraying thereby an inferiority complex and extreme narrow-mindedness? Cannot they realise that they will at least have equal opportunities and facilities in the Muslim State, which would not have been and would never be the case, if they are under the rule of the other Dominion, even with Bengali as the State language?
The agitators advance such commonplace arguments as that the prescription of Urdu as the State language will destroy the culture of Bengali Muslims, that Bengali-speaking population in Pakistan is larger than its non-Bengali speaking population, that the Bengali literature is highly advanced, and so forth. In answer I would say in the first instance that what is called the culture of Bengali Muslims was not threatened with destruction during a course of a hundred years when English was the State language of the country. Secondly, for Muslims there can be but one kind of culture and that is the Islamic culture, and from the Islamic point of view it does not matter in the least, if the Bengali or any other culture is destroyed. They cannot like all other Muslims go on shouting the national slogan “Islam Zindabad” and the same time unlike them hug to their bosoms a cultural begotten of heathen literature. Thirdly, numerical superiority does not connate merit or justify the continuance of cultural backwardness, otherwise history would have told us today a different story of the evolution of human civilization. As to the merits of the vernaculars it is yet to be proved that any of the languages spoken in the subcontinent other than Urdu is fit to be adopted as a medium of such education for more than a quarter of a century in the Osmania Universities like Oxford ands Cambridge.
Some other arguments are put forward against the adoption of Urdu as the State language, which only an immature intellect and superficially educated mind cold have thought to be a height of ingenuity. It would be idle to discuss and refute them, simply because they have been put forward by some persons who pose as leaders. As matters stand it is high time that the leaders of the Province became alive to the serious danger which the Eastern Province of Pakistan is facing today and will ultimately succumb to, unless the system of education prevailing in the Province is without any further delay thoroughly overhauled, so as to make the learning of Urdu compulsory for the students. Any opposition from quarter should be suppressed with a strong hand and without the least hesitation. A sensible and far-sighted man will not hesitate for a memento have his own festering finger… of to save his hand. But a timed and ignorant woman will never have the courage to punish her darling son who shows a pilfering tendency, and will not realise that the tendency will, if not checked at the very beginning, turn her darling into a robber and then into a murderer, leading him finally to the hangman’s rope. It is for the leaders of Eastern Pakistan to make up their minds as to which of the above two categories they should be under. Their task has not yet become too difficult, as the religious fervour of the Muslims of Bengal has not disappeared completely, and if a plebiscite were taken after explaining the PROS and CONS to the people on the question of whether Urdu should not be the State language of Bengal as well as the western Provinces of Pakistan, I am almost certain that at least 80 per cent of the votes would be in favour, and the mockery of the present agitation will be thoroughly exposed. Whether we have got wise and learned men, who alone have the capacity to be nation builders, is however another question which time alone will solve.
I should like to mention that it is not the first time that I am pointing out to the nation the serious danger with which it is threatened, both politically and religiously, by the educational system, which is not only un-Islamic but anti-Islamic, prevailing in this province. I sounded a note of warning against the national calamity that is bound to follow the teaching of Urdu to our boys and girls thirty years ago. I had traveled while I was still a lad in the independent Muslim countries of Egypt, Arabia, Syria and Turkey where my youthful mind was clearly and strongly impressed by the common features of Muslim thought and culture. When a few years after, I was appointed a Special Officer for Muslim education in Bengal, my official tours took me into the interior of the country, which enabled me to see how 99 percent of the Muslims of Bengal thought and lived. I was surprised and rather shocked to notice that the Muslims of my Province had nothing in common with our coreligious of those independent Muslim countries and very little with those of northern and western India. It looked as if they were an entirely different people, though passing by the name of Muslims. That such a large population of Muslim India should be alien to the Islamic Conception, thought, temperament and culture, which instead of making them a source of strength made them a source of weakness and political danger to the Muslim world, naturally alarmed me, which made me investigate causes. I found out that the chief cause lay in the fact that they did not know any Islamic language, and received their primary and middle education through the medium of Bengali and higher thought that of English, both non-Islamic languages. This led me to write official note on the teaching of Urdu in Bengal, in which I passed the necessity of making proper provision for the teaching of the language to Muslim boys and girls reading in schools, colleges and madrassas, and recommended the constitution of a Board of Urdu Diploma Examination with a view to producing qualified teachers of the language. The note was printed by the education Department and circulated to all Divisional Inspectors of schools and finally considered by a Special Committee which was appointed — I think it was in 1916 — by the Government of Bengal to report on the ways and means of promoting the education of the Muslims of the province. The Committee accepted my recommendations, but unfortunately they could not be given effect to on account of the First World War which was then in full swing, and the scheme was put off for the time being, shortly after, I left the Education Department, and the matter was not revived till after some years, when I spoke about it to Sir Abdur Rahim who was then the Education Minister. The Minister called the file and immediately passed orders to give effect to the scheme. A board of Urdu diploma examination was accordingly constituted by Government, which existed till the creation of the Province of east Bengal in the dominion of Pakistan in August, 1947, and I suppose still exists.
The appendixes contain materials which may be found to be interesting and useful by all those who realise the necessity and importance of the Muslims of Bengal learning Urdu and would like to know why the teaching of the language has not yet made any appreciable progress in the Province.
In conclusion I should like to say:
To the youth of Islam-read the history of the early days of Islam and see the unique sacrifices the Muslims made and the unparalleled discipline they showed, which led to their phenomenal rise in the world. Do not let petty considerations get the better of your sense of courage and foresight. Think and act as god and his prophet want you to do, and spiritual enlightenment as well as material prosperity will come to you as a matter of course. You will never achieve them, if you will follow the dictates of your baser self.
To leaders,please educate yourselves so as to be wise and learned, so that you may despite selfish motives and have the courage to swim against the current of all ruinous and the suicidal agitations of the people and thus acquire the capacity to be builders of the nation. If you cannot write two sentences together correctly in any of the Islamic languages-Arabic, Turkish, Persian or Urdu, how can you be considered to be learned, and if you cannot realise . what this means for a Muslim, how can you be considered to be wise?
To the Quaid-i-Azam-darling of the nation! It is almost cruel to expect you to do more after the enormous strain you have undergone in your long struggle to make us a free people. You certainly deserve some rest now. God willing, you will enjoy rest and peace in paradise. I only pray that the nation may not through its unworthiness lose the independence, that you have achieved for it by your life long labours, and when you leave the world—as every mortal mus—you may leave in happiness. Amen!
I do not want to say anything to those who belong to the nation by mere accident of birth and only bear Muslim names, who have nothing at stake, as it will not make any difference to them whether they are under Muslim rule or under the rule of heathens, and who are incapable of thinking and acting like Muslims. The Creator of mankind says : “Deaf, dumb (and) blind, so they will not tumn back” (Al-Quran, 2:18) who among his believing creatures then can ever hope to be able to convert such men?
Appendix A
34, Circus Avenue
Calcutta, the 2nd December, 1943
Dear Hon’ble Mr. Tamizuddin Khan,
I am very glad to learn from your Parliamentary Secretary that . you take a keen interest in the teaching of Urdu in Bengal. You may have learnt froin your Secretary that Provincial branch of the All India Anjuman-e-Taraqqie – Urdu is going to be established in Bengal with Sir F. Rahman as its President. We feel that the success of the proposed organisation will largely depend on your sympathy and help. In this connection I should like to make the following observations, which I think it is necessary to bear in mind in taking steps to popularise the Urdu language in this Province and prepare a progressive scheme for its proper teaching..
The past generation of the Muslims of Bengal were enthusiastic about their children learning Urdu, as will appear from Sir Archdale Earle’s scheme which led to the establishment of maktabs and muadrassals (I am speaking from memory) some thirty years ago. But as the education Department never provided qualified teachers of this language, presumably under the erroneous idea that Moulavis appointed to teach Persian and Arabic in schools and madrassals were also competent to teach urdu, the scheme proved a failure, and the students were not able to learn the language. The apathy, rather hostility, shown by the present generation to the learning of Urdu is only a reaction to the past failure. The Muslims of Bengal have now begun to think-erroneously of course that it is impossible for Bengali Muslims to learn how to speak and write Urdu correctly, leave alone mastering the language, and that only those born and bred in U. P. can acquire proficiency in the language. This absurd feeling is I am afraid the result of an inferiority complex and nothing else, which they do not dare confess. As a camouflage for hiding the fact, of which they may not themselves be fully conscious, some of the influential members of the community base their hostility to the teaching of Urdu on such fallacious grounds as that Urdu threatens to supplant Bengali which is their mother tongue, that Urdu must be simplified, if it is to be learnt by Bengali Muslims, that is not necessary to learn Urdu to acquire religious education. If one knows Arabic and Persian, and so forth. They do not realise.
(i) that there is no question of Urdu versus Bengali in learning Urdu, as there is none of Arabic, Persian or English versus Bengali in learning any of these languages;
(ii) that the knowledge our boys generally acquire is schools and colleges of Persian and Arabic is very superficial which does not enable them to study books on Tafsir, Hadis or Fiqalı in those languages, and so our boys practically learn only English and Bengali which are of little use to them from the religious point of view;
(iii) that while it is the duty of the Ulema to specialise in Islamic learning, it is also incumbent on every Muslim who has the means to acquire education to acquire sufficient knowledge of the Book of God and the Traditions of His Prophet, and that no Moslem can be considered to be educated in the sense of the word, unless he possesses such knowledge.
(iv) that the mother tongue of the Muslims of the Punjab, the next Muslim province in numerical importance in India, is not Urdu, but Punjabi, and yet the Punjab has produced some of the best Urdu writers and poets and publishes the largest number of Urdu newspapers and periodicals that come out in any Province of India;
(v) that they are only humiliating the great Muslim population of Bengal by practically proclaiming to India that the Mussalmans of Bengal cannot learn Urdu, that is to say, that the Mussalmans of Bengal are incapable of doing what the Mussalmans of Punab have done;
(vi) that our Hindu countrymen have shown far greater political foresight than us masmuch as that during the Congress regime its provincial ministries lost no time in taking all possible step to compel all Hindus to learn Hindi with a view to promoting the solidarity and unity of their community all over India, and, if I remember alright, Mr. Rajagopalachria during his Premiership of Madras went so far as to send to jail all those who refused to learn Hindi, although Hindi has no religious importance for the Hindus;
(vii) that while on the one hand it would take our boys much less time to acquire a fair degree of proficiency in Urdu, in view of its being a spoken language of India, than in Arabic and Persian, on the other hand the teaching of Urdu in Bengal would have farreaching consequences for us from religious, cultural and political points of view;
(viii) that experience has shown that as a rule and Urduknowing student of Arabic or Persian can be a far better scholar of those languages than a non-Urdu-knowing student;
(ix) that by showing hostility to the learning of Urdu they are only helping the non-Muslims in their cultural conquest of the Muslims of Bengal, and that, unless immediate steps are taken to stem the tide of this conquest which has already begun, the future generations of the Muslims of Bengal will have nothing but name in common with the rest of Muslim India and Muslim world;
(x) that the promotion and diffusion among the Muslims of Bengal of Islamic culture and ideas with which the Urdu language and literature are saturated will not only prove a source of great strength to them and place them on a common Muslim platform in India, but will on account of their numerical superiority make them the leaders of Muslim politics in India;
(xi) that it is no use shutting our eyes to the fact that man to man the Muslims of Bengal do not show the same standard of general efficiency and broad outlook as their co-religionists of the U. P. and the Punjab, who are well versed in the Urdu language and literature do, and that this is chiefly because their minds are less influenced and impressed by Islamic conceptions and ideas on account of their ignorance of this language.
I feel it is my duty to sound a note of warning to my Muslim countrymen that it is high time that serious and prompt attention was paid to the problem of teaching Urdu in Bengal, otherwise the entire Muslim population of the province will in course of time be completely denationalised from the Islamic point of view, and our future generations will not remember us with gratefulness for our apathy and lack of foresight.
In this connection I would suggest that you may call for and go through the files which contain a note it is a printed one on the teaching of Urdu in Bengal written by me when I was a Special Officer for Muslim Education some thirty years ago, and the scheme for the creation of a Board of Urdu Diploma Examination which was constituted in pursuance of that note. Under that scheme an Urdu Diploma Examination was prescribed, which is still in force, but unfortunately nothing practical has been done so far to encourage students and scholars to pass that examination. Even a certificate has not, as far as I know, been prescribed and printed to be awarded to those who may take interest in the learning of Urdu and pass the examination. I on my part, did my best in this direction, it is now for the Education Department to advance the cause by property working the scheme which Government approved after consulting all Divisional Inspectors of Schools to whom my note had been circulated.
May I tell you, dear Minister, that you will be rendering a colossal, may a religious, service to the community, if during your regime as Minister in charge of Education you be pleased to take up this important educational problem of far reaching consequences for the Muslims of Bengal and introduce an exhaustive and effective scheme for the teaching of Urdu in the Province I hope you will agree with me when I say that the political advancement of the Muslims is closely linked up with their religious and cultural advancement, Can Pakistan, if it is achieved, ever thrive and Hourish. It the Muslims inhabiting the component provinces do not in the meantime prepare themselves for it and begin to think like Muslims and act like Muslims, which is only possible, if our children can learn what is Islam as it was taught by the Holy Prophet (May peace be on Him!) and not as it is generally understood today?
In conclusion I would assure you that my humble services are always at your disposal, should you require my advice and assistance in the matter.
May God bless the band of enthusiastic young Muslims of Bengal who have risen to the occasion and are working in the cause of Urdu! May God guide and help you to rescue the Muslims of the Province from the atmosphere which has been created by an extremely faulty system of education prevailing in the Province, which is poisoning and undermining day by day the mentality, character and outlook of our younger generation!
Yours Sincerely,
B. D. Ahmed
Minister
Government of Bengal
13, Dilkusha Street
Calcutta
The 11th December, 1943.
My dear Khan Bahadur Saheb,
Hearty thanks for your letter of the 2nd instant. The views you have expressed in your letter are almost identical with mine. Our position with respect to Urdu might have been the same as in the Punjab, only if our former leaders acted with foresight in the matter. The situation has now become difficult. But I do not think it is irretrievable. The present moment seems to be particularly opportune because the Pakistan Movement has driven home to the Musalmans of India the necessity of a common language which cannot but be Urdu. I am thankful for your kind offer of assistance which I hope to be able to utilise in due course.
Yours sincerely
T. Khan
Khan Bahadur Badruddin Ahmed
সূত্র: ভাষা আন্দোলনের দলিলপত্র – রতন লাল চক্রবর্ত্তী সম্পাদিত