By Randeep Purewall and Kulwindar Singh Parhar
The garden’s beauty derives from its many flowers

A nation’s, from the unlikeness of things in it [1]

The poet’s coffin floats in the mosque’s shadow. The world bears witness to the funeral, the janaazah of Urdu. This is the closing of the film Muhaafiz (‘In Custody’).[2] Urdu, it would appear, recedes into history. Paradoxically, despite the lack of official patronage for Urdu since 1947, its preminence as the language of poetry, culture and refinement of India has not faded. One may speak of an Urdu spirit alive in the body of Hindi since the former suffuses the latter with the melody and metaphors used in popular media, lyrics à la Gulzar and Javed Akhtar, the moth and flame (shamah-o-parwaana), the rose and nightingale (gul-o-bulbul), qawalli, and above all, the Hindustani language, of which “modern” Hindi and Urdu are but two political divisions.[3]

The Hindi-Urdu[4] tradition is moreover a secular inspiration. Whereas Sanskrit and Arabic retained their respective associations with Pundit and Mullah, Hindi-Urdu drew life from a secular and philosophical dimension within Persian poetry.[5]

The post-partition decline of Urdu is symptomatic of the communalizing, polemicizing and purification of culture between India and Pakistan. The Hindu religious right in recent years, has for its part played an especially important role in Brahmanizing India [6]. Brahmanic obsessions with purity and pollution dictate cultural purity with the resulting products emblazoned on the psyche: mythological history and "authenticated" mythology; astrology; caste; Sanskritized Hindi; chariot rides (rath yatras); and idols of Ram and Hanuman. All are hallmarks of Brahmanism; none reflect a composite, or secular Indian civilization.

A secular Indian civilization would encompass both “secular” aspects of culture as we understand the term “secular”, as well as culture derived from religion and spirituality, while shorn of any sectarian and communal labelling.

Post-1947 secular culture has instead been dissected and slotted into tight-fitting castes, i.e. Hindu/Indian, Muslim/Pakistani and Foreign/Western. The Taj Mahal is now said to originally have been a Hindu temple.[7] Sikhism is a Hindu sect. Hindustani is bisected into Sanskritized and Arabicized half-breeds.[8] English is un-Indian. Brahmin cosmology also pipes in with its omens of kali yuga (‘dark-age’) where Dalits are uppity and Muslims molest Bharat Mata. So the conch shells sound. The Brahmin leads the masses toward varna dharma, a caste utopia realized through divide and rule communalism.

As Amartya Sen elucidates, Hindutva has little interest in the secular, ethical, philosophical, rational, scientific, liberal or otherwise progressive elements of Hinduism, let alone a secular Indian civilization:

The Hindu militant chooses instead to present India — explicitly or implicitly — as a country of unquestioning idolaters, delirious fanatics, belligerent devotees, and religious murderers."[9]

A secular Indian civilization would focus attention instead on historical, cultural and philosophical resources which would provide secularism and humanism, within India, both sustenance and legitimacy. Such a civilization will not be a nation per se. It will be, as Nehru once remarked, an idea whose strands tie together its constituents.

The cultures and ideas of Indians, de-communalized and then integrated into an all-inclusive sense of India is of course a nation-building exercise. A common civilization however should not entail a culturally homogenous nationalism for India or Indians. To paraphrase the great modern poet Iqbal, let India be a garden to which each flower lends its scent.

Secularism in the form of the Hindi-Urdu tradition could also help promote cultural co-operation between India and Pakistan, as evidenced by the Pakistani reception to the Bollywood epic Mughal-e-Azam. The success of the Pakistani film Khamosh Pani which starred Kiron Kher, and Pakistani artists like Atif Aslam and Zafar Ali striking chords across India, are also encouraging precedents for a more sustained cultural collaboration.

Secularizing India is one step toward making a modern India. Managing pluralism, poverty, illiteracy, environmental degradation and the devastating human and social cost of development, remain the major priorities for India today. Chasing chimeras of world power status will have to wait.

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[1] My paraphrasing of Hindi-Urdu poet Zauq (1789-1854): “the garden’s beauty derives from its flowers; the world’s beauty from the unlikeness of things in it”.
[2] At the close of the Ismail-Merchant film "Muhaafiz" ('In Custody' 1993).
[3] For an interesting article, see Alok Rai “The Persistence of Hindustani” in The Annual of Urdu Studies (Volume 20, 2005): online at http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/20/09RaiHindustani.pdf
[4] A tradition encompassing Hindu, Muslim, Sikh contributions: from “medieval” Amir Khusrao, Kabir, Nanak, Mirabai, Tulsidas to the “classical” high Urdu of Wali Decanni, Mir, Zauq, Ghalib to the modern literature of Iqbal, Faiz, Premchand, and Manto.
[5] As noted by Dr. Ali Asghar Engineer of the Centre for study of Society and Secularism in Bombay in “Urdu and its Contributions to Secular Values” which can be read online at www.urdutehzeeb.com.
[6] See Ian Buruma’s “India: Perils of Democracy” in India: a Mosaic Robert B. Silvers (ed.). New York Review Books, NY: 2001 (pp. 3-33) in which among other things, Buruma discusses the attempted Semitization of Hinduism by upper-caste elites.
[7] With the added advantage of Western scholarly input in Dr P.N. Oak’s Taj Mahal: the True Story (1989). For an on-line article see: http://www.hindunet.org/hindu_history/modern/taj_oak.html
[8] Alok Rai “The Persistence of Hindustani”: in The Annual of Urdu Studies (Volume 20, 2005): online at http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/20/09RaiHindustani.pdf
[9] “Strengthening Indianness” by Shashi Tharoor in The Hindu (Jan. 19, 2003), online at http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/mag/2003/01/19/stories/2003011900240300.htm.

images courtesy: TIME and pacificvillage.org