By Ashna Yakoob
Falling in love was a shock to the system. I thought that years of watching romantic Bollywood movies would equip me to give into love entirely, however, I always found love difficult to navigate. I didn’t know how to react to demonstrations of romance, and my Western upbringing gave me a penchant for irony and a distinct lack of earnestness which put a damper on acts of love. I found myself unable to react to simple things: flowers, words of affirmation, and even I love you.
“I got you flowers today!”
“Um, thanks.”
Every word that came out of my mouth was layered with sarcasm, and behind it was an inability to take anything seriously. I embodied the social media generation’s poisoning meta-irony; I considered myself an embarrassment to my upbringing and mother tongue.
I was raised in an Urdu-speaking household, surrounded by linguistic romance as my parents casually rattled off elongated vowels and sultry consonants in a soft-spoken musical manner that mimicked a spider spinning winding silk. It was something I gradually noticed as I began trying to translate my parents’ winding Urdu sentences into English. The English language was too simple, too curt, too time-efficient to compare to the possibilities of the Urdu language. Coupled with my mom’s obsession with ghazals and nazms, I should have been destined to become an eloquent poet, weaving together unlikely words into devastating romantic fusions that leave the reader breathless from sheer astonishment. Instead, when I am at a loss for words, I find myself reliant on empty umbrella terms like vibes to convey meanings I can only gesture toward, never fully captured with my own tongue.
Language lies at the root of conflict. Pakistan is a linguistically diverse country with over seventy living languages. In 1947, Pakistan declared Urdu its national language in an attempt to establish national homogeneity, despite only 8% of Pakistanis speaking it as a first language. In particular, the linguistic partition alienated people in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. The Pakistani elite separated themselves from their Bengali counterparts and the Punjabi-speaking population in Pakistan, among other ethnic minorities.
Nowadays, the upper class in Pakistan has moved towards English as the unofficial means of communication. Private schools teach most subjects, governments conduct proceedings, and people converse regularly in English. The language someone speaks indicates their social class and capabilities, an all-encompassing remnant of Pakistan’s colonial past. English and Urdu are compartmentalized, as English typically represents subjects of higher intellect, such as STEM and higher education degrees, whereas Urdu has more of a cultural presence despite its residence among countless languages in Pakistan.
قفس میں مجھ سے رودادِ چمن کہتے نہ ڈر ہمدم
گری ہے جس پہ کل بجلی وہ میرا آشیاں کیوں ہو
In the cage, telling me the events of the garden, don’t be afraid, friend–
the one on which lightning has fallen yesterday–why would that be my nest?
Ghazal 126, Verse 5
–Ghalib
I tracked down a student of Fran Pritchett, a famous Urdu poetry scholar who has maintained an in-depth Urdu translation website since 2002–a technological artifact from when the Internet was just beginning. Periodically, I use Pritchett’s website to discover ghazals, a form of poetry that, like Urdu, suffered a political paradigm shift. Pritchett attributes this to the fall of the Indo-Muslim elite after the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, in which the British sought to assert their superiority through cultural Westernization.
Made up of grouped couplets with the same rhyming pattern and meter, and either disparate or linked in theme, the ghazal struggled to gain the same literary accreditation as Western forms due to its allusive, ambiguous nature, and its connection to Sufism. According to Pritchett, the ghazal was “tainted with narrowness and artificiality at the very outset of its career,” cursed to appear “unnatural” against Wordsworthian poetics. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that ghazals gained formal traction in the Western world, however, they remain out of reach for those without a formal education in Pakistan.
While on a Zoom call with Professor Zahra Sabri, an Urdu researcher and literary translator, she greeted me in Urdu. I felt my fight or flight overtake me. Suddenly, every word I learned in Urdu escaped me, and I cobbled together a couple of sentences. She commented that I was just fluent enough to get around in the bazaars, but not fluent enough to not get ripped off.
Sabri attributes the Pakistani move to English as a remnant of a “colonial inheritance.” She told me that “traditional Urdu teaching has become quite ghettoized in a socioeconomic manner.” As English-medium education systems gain more popularity and resources, the teaching methods, materials, and subjects in Urdu schools face decline.
The question I kept coming back to was: how?
How do we overcome something as abstract as colonial inheritance?
Sabri repeated that even among her Urdu-speaking students, vocabulary knowledge had immensely declined. She traces the lack of a common vocabulary back to the rise of streaming and social media. She said, “[The kids] do not watch any Pakistani channels because they are on the internet and they don’t watch television with their family. They don’t have a common viewership experience. That’s globally. Globally, people connect to the internet with private devices.” The lack of a collective viewership experience alienates social interactions and a collective grasp of language.
دیکھا ایک خواب تو یہ سلسلے ہوۓ۔
دور تک نگھا میں ہیں گل کھلے ہوۓ
یہ گلہ ہے آپ کی نگھاؤں سے
پھول بھی ہو درمیاں تو فاصلے ہوۓ
میری سانسوں میں بسی خوشبو تیری
یہ تیرے پیار کی ہے جادوگری
تیری آواز ہے ھواؤں میں
پیار کا رنگ ہے فضاؤں میں۔
All of this has happened since I had a dream.
Flowers bloom as long as my gaze.
This is a mistake of your gaze —
even if they are flowers, they cause a distance between us!
Your fragrance resides in my breaths
This is the bewitching magic of your love!
Your sounds are in the air.
The color of love is in the wing!
“Dekha Ek Khwab” (I Saw A Dream)
–Javed Akhtar
During my postgraduate days, I became increasingly concerned with my relationship to language and what language I will pass down to future generations. I learned to speak Urdu at a young age, though I never learned to read it. I consider it to be my mother tongue, yet I find the script foreign. A slew of vaguely familiar swirling letters that do not lend themselves to translation, even with a rudimentary Arabic background. I poured through my parents’ poetry collections, confused why they did not endeavor to pass down the language they loved so much. When pushed on this topic, they respond with typical parental narratives: they had other things to worry about, they were more concerned with providing my sisters and I with a better life, or that they simply did not have the time.
However, Professor Mustafa Mennai at the University of Pennsylvania finds this sentiment commonly stems from the same elitist populations Sabri referred to. Elite families view Urdu as a waste of time and would rather have their children concentrate on earning good marks or receiving top-tier college acceptances.
As countless job applications morphed into rejections, and I grew tired of craving institutional validation of my writing, I decided I could turn to something well within my own control: learning Urdu. This is not new to me. I had tried plenty of times through rarely-attended Urdu classes taught by Mennai or my mother yelling at me as I tearfully attempted to translate a kindergarten-level book. But none of those attempts stuck, and I remained woefully unfamiliar with a language I only admired from afar.
غلط ہے جذبِ دل کا شکوہ دیکھو جرم کس کا ہے
نہ کھینچو گر تم اپنے کو کشاکش درمیاں کیوں ہو
The complaint about the attraction of the heart is erroneous; look–whose is the fault?
If you wouldn’t pull yourself away, why would there be tension between us?
Kisi Ko De Ke Dil Koi Nawa-sanj-e-fughan Kyun Ho
– Mirza Ghalib
When I began this piece, I was overwhelmed by the thought of Urdu fading away within my life and from the pressure of globally oppressive languages, but as I spoke to Sabri, I thought of the space I occupied and what I owed to a colonial entity that made it impossible for me to learn my language in the first place. I felt this yearning to learn Urdu for years, yet my mastery of it remained out of reach. My life was inevitably controlled by the need to find work, to concoct a long-term plan, to use my precious time toward the pursuit of forward-thinking endeavors.
As Sabri and I continued talking, we touched on the “brain drain” and elitism that enables a dependency on English, even in countries like Pakistan, where Urdu bridges language-barriers between minorities. As a Pakistani-American, my parents sold me the narrative that we came here for a better life. Sabri complained of elitist attitudes the diaspora frequently eschews, specifically when it comes to living in a country that celebrates values and democracy.
“And yet,” Sabri smiled. “You never built it. You just got the society ready-made.”
نام گُم جاۓ گا
چہرہ یہ بدل جاۓگا
میری آواز ہی پہچان ہے، گر یاد رہے!
وقت کے ستم کام حسین نہیں،
آج ہیں یہاں، کل کہیں نہیں!
وقت سے پرے اگر مل گۓ کہیں-
میری آواز ہی پہچان ہے، “گر یاد رہے۔
My name will be lost, this face will change,
my voice is my true identity, if you remembered!
The tyrannies of time are no less beautiful,
today they are here, tomorrow where did it go?
If we meet beyond the limits of time somewhere—
my voice is how I will be recognized, if (you) remembered!
–Naam Goom Jayega
Gulzar Sahab
Every weekend, I hop on Skype with my Urdu tutor, and he walks me through elementary phrases, grammar rules, and beginner poetry. I have been guilty of skipping class at times; however, I am brought back to how I felt when I was falling in love. I didn’t realize how much I loved Urdu until I traveled to Pakistan after my college graduation and saw my mother’s personality shift before my eyes. In English, she can be a bit timid, yet will try to bite you with her words, a personality trait I admire as I watch her skillfully attempt to talk her way into a better bargain, out of a speeding ticket, or lie about my countless high school absences. I realize that my own personality shifts as I embrace Urdu and give and accept love.
Learning Urdu meant that I had to relearn what it meant to accept love earnestly, the same way I must accept that I need to rethink my existence and why I am here. I am resolved, not only to learn my mother tongue, but also empower myself to exist radically in a way that honors my ancestors. It is my duty to learn, for my voice will fade and my face will wither, but my writing is forever.
The Woodlands 