ON THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE AND A POSSIBLE 5 SECONDS OF FAME

ON THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE AND A POSSIBLE 5 SECONDS OF FAME
28 september 2006

who knows, maybe i’ll appear on an Indian CNN broadcast. they showed up at our school today to do what i guess was feature story about Americans learning Urdu-- something which people here seem to regard with fascinated incredulity. the big question is always WHY we would want to do study this language. more on this below.

anyway. so, CNN showed up at our school. first they wanted to take footage of classes in session-- “just act natural” and all that [yeah, right]-- as we continued what we were doing, with painful self-consciousness. then they got all of us together in the main room and told us to keep going, even though we were done for the day. “that’s ok: dummy class.” [what? oh my god! but i thought all news footage was purely spontaneous, a transparent window on reality!] so our director made some announcements-- in Urdu-- of things we already knew about while the camera panned around our faces demonstrating our alert comprehension. it was all completely bizarre.

then they wanted individual interviews. they started by randomly choosing people, selecting the blondest, rosiest, bluest-eyed specimens of Typical Americans they could see. “what is your name? where are you from? why are you here? how did you come to study in this program? how do you like India? WHY are you studying Urdu?”
everyone did a good job i thought...but still, there was a lot of quoting of poetry, which the news crew liked, and a lot of statements like “well, i’m studying South Asian Islam, so...”
i felt like something was missing. so although i had not yet been picked-- lacking the necessary wholesome cornfed telegenitude perhaps-- i asked if i could speak too. i said, more or less,[prompts not included]
“My name is Maia Ramnath, and i’m a doctoral candidate in history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My work is in modern South Asian history in a global context. also my father was an immigrant to the United States from India. for these reasons i began studying Hindi, and then expanded my study into Urdu.
“for me it is very important to counter the idea that Hindi and Urdu are two completely separate languages, or that there is one language for Hindus and another for Muslims. i want to emphasize that this is one language, with one mutual base, which has a very large, rich vocabulary of Sanskrit-, Persian- and Arabic- derived words. depending on the context, i may choose to speak in different styles. but it’s not a matter of choosing only one or the other. why not read 2 kinds of script, and have a broader range of materials you can read? why not embrace a larger vocabulary to draw from, in a wider range of contexts? why use half of the whole?”

most likely they won’t use this; they’ll probably air some cute blonde person reciting classical poetry. still i felt it needed to be said.

so, will India’s legions of TV viewers get an answer? WHY would an American choose to study Urdu?

this question is based in a set of common Indian assumptions including: Urdu is a Muslim language. Urdu is the language of Pakistan. Urdu is the language in which terrorism is conducted. Muslims are different than Hindus. Hindus hate Muslims. Americans hate Muslims. Muslims are violent. India is America’s ally in the War on Terror against the Pakistani Muslim Urdu-speaking terrorists.
this Urdu-learning American must be either CIA agent or a terrorist sympathizer, and we’re suspicious.

OR...

Urdu is inseparable from the classical culture of Avadh. Urdu is the language of aristocrats and poets. Urdu is the language of Ghalib, Iqbal and Umrao Jaan. Urdu is a beautiful but arcane language of romantic nostalgia, not of cosmpolitan modernity. To speak Urdu IS to recite shairi [poetry].
this Urdu-learning American must be some sort of orientalist afficionado, and we’re flattered.

moreover, conversations [debates, arguments, fights] about the relative merits of Hindi and Urdu are liable to be carried out in what used to be called Hindustani. If it’s happening between a self-identified Urdu speaker and a self-identified Hindi speaker, they will both be under the impression that they are speaking their own native tongue. Zabaan. Bhasha. it’s true that the most formal and classicized styles of speech at either end-- and of course the written scripts-- are mutually unintelligible. but as for what the news guy called “general baatchit”, movies, daily conversation, etc, how can people possibly be insisting in identical words that they’re speaking different languages? unless you’re putting your fingers in your ears and shouting “Lalalalalala-ican’thearyou!”

still, specifying that you study Urdu and not that you study Hindi-- though for my money i’m studying both, just by walking through the street each day-- makes a unmistakable statement in the domestic Indian context. inevitably, it implies that you have an opinion on communal politics, whether actively pro-Muslim or simply anti-Hindu Right. it automatically places you in a conscious, counterhegemonic position, rather than the default setting of the National Language.

an aside-- along the side of the street outside the post office, there’s a row of men sitting on the ground with typewriters marked either English or Hindi [i didn’t see any Urdu scribes] to write letters for illiterate people. i thought that was pretty cool, because it gave me another idea for something i could theoretically do to make myself useful in the hypothetical society After the Apocalypse.

another aside-- i don’t know much about Indian CNN. but judging from the newspapers and magazines i’ve seen, the intellectual level of at least the print media is far above that of the dumbed-down saccharine-plastic level i’m unfortunately accustomed to. while they are responsibly factual, newspapers also do not flinch from heated editorializing, making erudite allusions, putting current events into historical context, and printing commentaries by publicly-engaged intellectuals-- many of whom happen to be ones who are listed in my QE bibliography. even mainstream centrist publications engage to some degree in discourse about legacies of colonialism, ecoomics and contemporary geopolitics, and take seriously the existence of a wide range of political opinions from far right to liberal to far left. it’s just normal. imagine that.

next time [unless some crazy event happens]: In Which Maia Describes Her Daily Commute to School.