Hindu right-wing forces in India forced a leading firm to withdraw its festive season advertisement after it featured a couple of words from the Urdu language, which in the popular imagination in the country is a “Muslim language”.
The company, FabIndia, issued an advertisement for Diwali – a significant Hindu festival that falls next month – showcasing its latest collection of clothes. The text at the top read: “Jashn-e-Rivaaz”.
“Jashn” in Urdu means a celebration while “Riwaaz”, which is actually “Riwaaj”, means tradition. The title translated to “A Celebration of Tradition”.
But a young parliamentarian belonging to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who often makes headlines for his Islamophobic remarks, was not happy.
“Deepavali is not Jashn-e-Riwaaz,” 30-year-old Tejasvi Surya posted on Twitter, calling Diwali by its more traditional name.
“This deliberate attempt of Abrahamisation of Hindu festivals, depicting models without traditional Hindu attires, must be called out.”
FabIndia is a household name in India and sells clothes, furniture, home furnishings and food items. It has hundreds of showrooms across the vast country and abroad.
Surya said the company “must face economic costs for such deliberate misadventures”.
Soon, other members of the BJP and other Hindu nationalist groups started attacking FabIndia on social media, accusing the brand of “hurting” the religious sentiments of Hindus.
“The Hindutva project sees Urdu as a ‘Muslim’ language. And invisibilising Urdu is part of the larger project of marginalising the Muslim community, in fact, physically eliminating it,” Nivedita Menon, professor at the Centre for Political Studies at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, told Al Jazeera.
“Hindutva” refers to a century-old Hindu supremacist movement which seeks to convert India into an ethnic Hindu state.
Urdu was born in India
The Urdu language was born in northern India during the Mughal rule. Linguists and historians say Urdu and Hindi originally developed from Khadi Boli, a dialect of the Delhi region, and Prakrit. It also borrowed heavily from Persian, Turkish and Arabic languages.
Until the British colonised the subcontinent, Urdu and Hindu languages were collectively referred to as Hindustani. It was British linguist John Gilchrist who for the first time classified and defined Hindustani into two broad categories – words inspired largely by Persian and Arabic were identified as Urdu, and those inspired by Sanskrit became Hindi.
However, spoken Urdu is similar to Hindi and the two share a common grammar and a large percentage of their vocabulary.
For centuries, Urdu was widely spoken by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in undivided India. Many of its celebrated poets and writers are non-Muslims, including Munshi Premchand, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Firaq Gorakhpuri and Gulzar to name a few.
Today, Urdu is among the 22 languages officially recognised by the Indian constitution.
Apart from poetry and literature, Urdu had a huge influence over Bollywood, the site of India’s “Hindi” film industry based in the western city of Mumbai. A large number of Urdu poets and writers wrote film scripts, songs and dialogues.
But many believe that too has changed in a religiously polarised India.
After the FabIndia controversy, many social media users shared memes featuring popular Bollywood dialogues and songs, replacing their Urdu words with Hindi counterparts in an attempt to showcase that the effect is not the same.
Screenwriter Javed Siddiqui, who has written several Bollywood films, told Al Jazeera that Urdu had a “better position than any other language” in the Indian film industry and that the “trend changed in the past few decades”.
But Siddiqui added that the influence of Urdu in India’s popular culture will always remain.
“You cannot write [any song] without ‘dil’ [heart in Urdu] and ‘mohabbat’, ‘ishq’ [both mean love in Urdu] and so on. I don’t think there is a lack of words in Hindi, or it doesn’t have words but the phonetics and the music which Urdu has, no other language can provide,” he said.
Legendary Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, who died in 1955, perhaps summed it up best.
“Why are Hindus wasting their time supporting Hindi, and why are Muslims so beside themselves over the preservation of Urdu? A language is not made, it makes itself. And no amount of human effort can ever kill a language.”
‘Outrage against ad manufactured’
Writer and historian Rana Safvi questions the right-wing argument that Urdu is the language of Muslims.
“If Urdu was a Muslim language, people would be reading the Quran in Urdu and not in Arabic and Muslims in [West] Bengal and Kerala would be speaking Urdu and not their local languages such as Bangla and Malayalam,” she told Al Jazeera.
Safvi said Urdu was projected as the language of Muslims because of its Perso-Arabic script.
“In 1947, when Urdu became the national language of Pakistan, this association was strengthened,” she said, adding that it was for the same reason the language did not get the “kind of attention it should have otherwise got” in India.
Apoorvanand, a professor of Hindi at Delhi University, said it is a fact that post-1947, the Hindus and even Sikhs moved away from Urdu and the language was “sheltered by the Muslims”.
“We should be grateful to them for saving one modern language,” he said, adding that Urdu was “defamed and attacked because of its association with Muslims and Pakistan”.
It is for these reasons that politics around the language intensified since the BJP came to power in 2014.
Academic Menon said the “outrage against the [FabIndia] ad was manufactured” and not a “genuine outrage on the part of ordinary people”.
Ali Khan Mahmudabad, a historian and political scientist who teaches at Ashoka University in the capital, agreed with Menon and said the whole controversy was broadly more illustrative of the “deep-seated prejudice over anything associated with Muslims now”.
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