In Delhi, an Urdu Wala, and a ‘Dying’ Language’s Quiet, Vibrant Life
Professors and politicians cast Urdu—the language of great Muslim civilization’s past—as a relic in need of preservation. Raheem Sahab sees something more.
“If you crack him, you’ve cracked the Urdu language,” Akbar told me. We were discussing my new Urdu tutor, Raheem Sahab, who would be taking Akbar’s place while the latter took an extended leave. Raheem may be a little awkward, Akbar warned, but his passion for the language was immense.
Raheem had done his PhD in modern Urdu literature. His dissertation was nearly a book—and unlike many in Indian academia, he hadn’t ghostwritten it. Akbar had read it and quizzed Raheem, who’d practically got the thing memorized. “You know he’s a hafiz?” Akbar said, referring to a person who has memorized the Qur’an. And not just the Arabic version. Raheem knew the full Urdu translation. “That’s like, unknown here.”
I had been studying Urdu for several years, over two extended bouts living in India. Like many American students, I began with Hindi, before the allure of romantic Urdu poetry compelled me to switch streams.
It is an easy transition—the languages share a grammar and common colloquial vocabulary. Their separation into two distinct languages and association with different religious communities (Hindi for North Indian Hindus and Urdu for North Indian Muslims) was a product of colonial-era politics and divergent Indian and Pakistani nationalisms.
It is only in their scripts, Arabic-based for Urdu and Sanskrit-based for Hindi, and in their higher registers, as Urdu turns more Arabic and Persian and Hindi turns more Sanskrit, where the languages sharply diverge.
My own grandfather—who before his early death told me of his journeys across Africa and South Asia—spoke Urdu with his family in Johannesburg. Inspired in part by this legacy, I studied under Urdu professors in India and the U.S and attended the odd Urdu poetry recital.
In so doing, I became exposed to the refrain that Urdu is a “dying language.” The idea papers over the language’s healthy status and institutionalization in Pakistan, where it became a national symbol. But those who make this claim focus more on the fate of Urdu in its place of origin, the Doab plains between the Ganga and Jamuna rivers of Northern India.
Earlier historical accounts of Urdu centers like Delhi and Lucknow are rich with scenes of well-attended Urdu poetry recitals. Wealthy royals patronized Urdu poets, and courtesans were expected to educate their visitors in Urdu verse, both spoken and sung. The language represented the fusion of Indian and Persianate cultures, and it was dear to the region’s literary and artistic elite.
In those same cities today, however, it is increasingly difficult to find Urdu education. As schools have increasingly embraced English and Hindi as their medium of instruction, Urdu studies have largely been left to Islamic seminaries—no bastions of “modern” sciences—furthering the language’s reputation as antiquated.
The Muslim communities who continue to speak the language tend to be economically depressed and politically underrepresented—forced into informal, low-education sectors of the Indian economy. Meanwhile, the Modi regime’s flirtations with Hindi as a national language have worried many Indian liberals, for whom the loss of Urdu to Pakistan would represent a final blow to the iconic vision of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, of a secular and pluralistic state.
In my conversations with non-Urdu speakers in India, particularly those in the middle and upper classes, I sensed a belief that Urdu is a kind of cute but anachronistic inheritance. For those who champion India’s breakneck GDP growth and increasing global importance, Urdu and its speakers seem backward and essentially religious, a relic of the precolonial past.
Akbar was running the Indian language school out of his apartment in South Delhi, converting its two spare bedrooms to classrooms. The staff ushered me into one of these on the first day of classes with Raheem Sahab. Absent-mindedly opening the door and stepping in, I nearly tripped over my new teacher. My brain sputtered for a few seconds before registering his prostration upon a prayer mat—and concluding I had intruded on one of his five daily prayers.
I stepped back outside, embarrassed and suddenly conscious of my short sleeves and the tattoos peeking out from under them. To what extent would I be expected to censor myself, in order not to offend his apparently prodigious piety? With a deep breath I returned to the room and greeted Raheem with the customary aadaab arz. He reciprocated with a soft smile.
We did not acknowledge my prior intrusion, and I sat down at an old wooden desk across from him. It was the peak hour of post-lunch lethargy, but my nerves about our first meeting kept me alert.
Raheem wore a simple cream button-down shirt and brown pants. Retrieving square, framed spectacles from his shirt pocket, he began to sus out my Urdu competence.
He spoke slowly, with an economy of words, and often trailed off into a mumble at the conclusion of his sentences. I noticed he would often close his eyes and look down and away as if to further impregnate the pauses in our conversation.
There is a perception in India that Muslims are less friendly than their countrymen of other faiths. I’ve heard people rationalize this stereotype through some superficially constructed understanding of Islamic doctrine that demands Muslims segregate themselves in the name of purity.
My travels throughout different subsections and localities of the North Indian Muslim community, however, had not supported this theory—and helped me understand that what is often perceived as unfriendliness likely results from the ghettoization of Indian Muslims and their exclusion from many economic sectors. For some, it appears easier to believe in an outwardly hostile Islam than it is to examine the myriad, potentially self-incriminating reasons that have driven Muslims from public spaces.
Raheem’s words were few yet exceptionally kind. Nearly every WhatsApp message he sent to me began with “aadaab arz hai, umeed hai khairiyat se honge”—greetings, I hope everything is well with you. It was the kind of charmingly polite (and somewhat archaic) Urdu that you’d hear in classic Bollywood movies about the golden age of Islamicate India. Raheem said he was excited to work with me and appeared pleased with my attempts to demonstrate my knowledge of Urdu and its culture.
Raheem began class by asking me a series of simple questions about my day, how my research was going, and what I had been up to. We went through this same series of questions almost daily—probably a hundred times—with almost no deviation in my response.
I asked him about his home life but couldn’t establish much more than that he lived a middle-class life in a Muslim neighborhood called Jamia Nagar and spent most of his time outside of teaching reading the Qur’an or making sure his children were studying.
After this initial chat, most of our class time was occupied reading an article Raheem had selected. Where previous teachers and I had read scholarly work on Sufi Islam and revolutionary poetry, now I was reading single page articles titled “the world of birds,” “community radio,” and “pollution.”
These somewhat demeaning articles and the almost-rehearsed quality of our conversations made me wonder if Raheem would be the one to shepherd my breakthrough from language learning materials into the proper Urdu literary cannon.
We were averaging three hours a day, five days a week together. Somewhat mercifully, Raheem would often end class by putting a film on the computer monitor. Our first film was to be Umrao Jaan, a classic movie about courtly life in 19th century. I watched the monitor as Raheem used his two index fingers to type “umrao jaan full,” proceeding to click the very first result Google gave us.
Fortunately, it was an actual full-length upload of the movie in decent quality on YouTube. But Raheem was not a smooth operator on the computer. The slightest pause in the loading of a webpage was met with a torrent of clicks, and I would wonder what the right Urdu conjugations might be for “freeze,” “more,” “if,” “don’t,” “let,” and “load.” When the films Raheem put on depicted romantic touch or violence, he would avert his eyes or skip forward. When a character appeared drunk on screen, he sucked his teeth, turning toward me to shake his head in disapproval.
Class continued in this manner for a few months. Delhi’s summer heat slugged on. I grew tired of the thrice a day cold showers and crippling afternoon torpor, which hit exactly during Raheem and I’s conversations.
Needing to step away, I followed the well-worn path of the Delhi elite, escaping into the nearby Himalayan foothills for a five-day trek in the mountain air. Returning to camp on the last night of the expedition, I felt light, having shed several pounds of pollutants and ghee-laden adipose. I felt liberated from the malaise of my routine, and as I returned to Delhi, I was determined not to let it return.
There is something about communicating in a foreign language that liberates you from the social baggage you accumulate in your own. All that buildup of negative and positive feedback you had received when saying certain things in certain ways, the ensuing familiar patterns of speech you stick close to and only deviate from when you really need someone to get something—this all melts away.
In a foreign language, I’ve felt, you can say bold things and things true to your heart, because you don’t have any history there to freeze you and make you second-guess yourself. Our social instincts ossify in our mother tongue.
The day of my return our normal classroom was occupied, so Raheem and I met in a different bedroom, with a slightly more jaundiced lighting and a tad more AC. In this unfamiliar space, the mountain jaunt having lifted my inhibitions, I tried to realize the possibilities before me.
My note-addled and sun-faded-yellow folder laid on the table between us. He motioned at it, as he had done so many times before, so that I would take out the article we had been working on before my trip. Instead, I asked him if we could talk about something else for a bit before we returned to the syllabus. He quietly nodded.
I pushed my Urdu to its limits. In a conversation that must have appeared to have occurred while I experienced repeated strokes as I struggled to find the right words, I tried to describe my random interests—in the ill-effects of digital technology, the meaning of human flourishing, disenchantment with modernity. Most of this I had hardly spoken to anyone beside myself, even in English.
I paused to give my breath and the straining language centers of my brain a break from what had probably been the longest chain of original thoughts I had spoken in Urdu to Raheem. Raheem had straightened from his characteristic afternoon slouch, his eyes a touch wider than before.
He withdrew the dated smartphone from his pocket and held it out toward me, gesturing at it with his open palm. He closed his eyes and affected a heavy, almost parental headshake of disappointment. He said that he too often thought about how cell phones had corrupted our ability to think; clearly perturbed, he described the many hours his children spent engulfed in video games instead of reading or studying with him.
I leaned back in my old wooden chair. The facial tension from the novel tongue and throat contortions my Urdu tirade required began to ease. This rare detail of Raheem’s family life was a heartening treat, and I continued.
I knew that Mohammad Iqbal, one of the major proponents of the Pakistan movement and a rockstar Urdu poet, had been influenced by the writings of Nietzsche during his time studying philosophy in Germany.
I suggested we could explore these ideas through his poetry, and Raheem seemed elated. Iqbal, I learned, was his favorite poet.
With the curl of a smile forming at the corner of his lips, Raheem said he would prepare some introductory materials, and two of Iqbal’s most famous poems for us to read in class.
Iqbal’s poems, written in heavily Persianized Urdu, occasionally break into straight Persian for a stanza. After struggling with one of these stanzas for a second and realizing that there was not a single Urdu verb to offer me a buoy, Raheem took one look at it, translated it into Urdu, and then simple English.
“Do you also know Farsi?” I asked. Looking down and to his side he responded, “Just a little.” I had been struggling with the Persian inscriptions on a folio of a bird that had been introduced from South Asia to my home state, and when I later pulled a photo of it up on my phone, he quickly read it for me. We continued, Raheem smoothly alternating between Persianized Urdu and pure Persian.
Iqbal wrote Shikwa amid a crisis among Indian Muslims that began during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and peaked in the early 20th century as European powers partitioned the impotent Ottoman Sultanate.
“Shikwa” means complaint, and the poem is written as a petition to God—a Muslim equivalent to Jesus Christ’s “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”It contrasts the glory of the Islamic conquests and the early Muslims—who spread God’s word and subjugated the non-believers from Cordoba to Bengal—with the decrepit state Indian Muslims found themselves in. How, the speaker asks, had God’s favored people lost his favor and love?
In contrast to the Blue’s Clues-esque articles Raheem used to bring, these poems contained suffering, disillusionment, and triumph, expressed via the chivalrous Persian found in those chronicles commissioned by the Indian Mughal dynasties and Persianate rulers of the past.
In Jawab-e-Shikwa (the complaint’s answer), Iqbal’s speaker decries the moral corruption he sees amongst his fellow Muslims. He laments the triumph of mysticism over material, collective struggle—the sort which had heralded Muslim victories over Byzantium and Persia’s grand Armies, the complete eradication of pre-Islamic religion in Arabia. Only through emulating these early heroes in their day-to-day actions, the poem suggests, would modern Muslims be returned to god’s favor.
As I read aloud, stumbling through a field of novel vocabulary, Raheem nodded, interrupting with stories he felt confirmed the poem’s lessons.
One time, he asked me if I had interacted with any of the caretakers that sit outside Delhi’s Sufi tombs. I had; clad in spotless white clothes, glittering gold jewelry, and fanciful hats that set them apart from the mostly poor shrine attendees, they tried to sell me amulets and solicit large donations. That’s exactly what Iqbal was criticizing! Raheem said. Corruption, the monetization of god’s favor—it was all around us.
One day, I joined Raheem in the common area for a largely silent meal of dal and potatoes. He went to pray namaz while I went into our appointed classroom and fiddled with my phone. He returned and handed me a printout of “Pure Chand ki Raat,” by Indian writer Krishan Chander, in which two former lovers meet in old age under the same full moon and at the same lake that witnessed their youthful tryst.
The poem’s serene rendering of the Kashmiri landscape smacked me upside the head. It was about the circumstances of life that can force lovers to be married off to others, an unsurprisingly common theme in India, where arranged marriages remain the norm.
I asked Raheem Sahab what he thought of love marriages. To my surprise, he did not give the answer I’d heard many times before about the foolishness of youth and the West’s high divorce rates. He seemed comfortable with the concept in theory. Would he be okay with his children pursuing a love marriage? Though he’d like them to keep some conditions in mind, he said, he would ultimately permit his children to pursue love.
In my next lesson, I asked Raheem how he felt about art and musical censorship. Escapism from the duties of life, he said—but he would still sometimes listen to Sufi music on his phone.
Later, we read a story by the legendary writer Premchand contrasting the treatment of a widow and a widower when the two consider remarriage. When I inquired how he felt about the full participation of women in society, Raheem said women should wear hijab, but, especially given the average Indian family’s financial insecurity, he supported women working and participating in society.
We read a newspaper article on a recent flare-up of violence between Muslims and Hindus. There is an idea that merely existing in a non-Muslim society ruled by non-Muslims is a form of impiety in Islam—a fundamental argument for the creation of Pakistan and a question that had long fascinated me.
Raheem near totally disagreed with the sentiment. He was proud to be an Indian citizen and believed, he said, in the importance of all citizens of a country putting their public duties above religious matters. A line of Islamic thought permits Muslims to set aside their normal religious obligations to avoid persecution or harm the sentiments of their non-Muslim neighbors. He would not chastise others for drinking alcohol, for example, nor would he be greatly perturbed to live in a state where its consumption is legal, even though he would never partake himself. And he would extend the same respect to his Hindu countrymen, seeking not to offend their sensibilities through acts like consuming beef.
The more time I’ve spent learning Urdu and soaking up the culture of its community, the more the narrative of its decline feels discordant. The story, I believe, is propagated by a few groups that are either unable to confront evidence to the contrary or for whom the narrative is beneficial.
In the U.S., a small core of South Asian professors bring the narrative of Urdu decline into reading materials, lectures, and class discussion. Of course the language appears to be dead or dying to them. They focus on poets and writers of the language’s bygone golden age, and India’s Urdu publishers are small and even today receive many of their orders and subscription requests through snail mail.
In India, Urdu professors castigated me for not knowing my Ghalib or Faiz better, and seemed trapped in an echo-chamber of appraisals—and reappraisals—of such classics. The Indian cultural elite are happy to amplify and identify with any minority issues that contrast with the past decade of right-wing political domination. With pop culture festivals like Jashn-E-Rekhta, rich founders pitch an effort at “saving the language;” which makes Urdu seem already like a dead, static thing which must be preserved.
Even some Muslim politicians and leaders themselves latch onto the narrative of decline, obsessing over Urdu’s status in education to stir up votes and forge a common Muslim political identity.
One day, as the soft patter of rain outside announced the arrival of the monsoon and relief from summer’s tyranny, Raheem handed me Allah Miyan ka Karkhana, a story by Mohsin Khan about a young boy whose father belongs to a Muslim revivalist organization.
It was to be the first full novel I attempted to read in Urdu. The book’s translation into Hindi won the inaugural Bank of Baroda Rashtrabhasha Samman prize, bringing its author Mohsin Khan 2,100,000 Indian Rupees, around 20 times what a top earner in India would make in a month.
The cash prize had shocked Raheem Sahab, who’d never heard of an Urdu novel receiving such recognition. As I worked through the book with Raheem and Akbar, I asked some Urdu professors, grad students, and general members of the literati what they thought of the book. Most of them had never heard of it. Some said the novel format was alien to Urdu and could basically never be achieved.
But for Raheem, Mohsin Khan had given voice to the many everyday issues that afflict him and other Indian Muslims: Navigating faith and everyday life, struggling with economic hardship, the search for good education for their children. In Raheem’s reservedness, his trouble with technology, and strict piety, I’d seen a sign of ossification and backwardness. But in his own quiet way, I think Raheem is keeping his finger on the pulse of a language alive and well. ▩