An Ever Festering Wound
Alok Rai
REDEFINING URDU POLITICS IN INDIA by Ather Farouqui Oxford University Press, 2008, 307 pp., 595
February 2008, volume 32, No 2

The blurb on the dust jacket of Ather Farouqui’s Redefining Urdu Politics in India makes a bold claim: ‘This volume breaks new ground on the issue of the Urdu language with the backdrop of language politics in the pre- and post-Partition eras.’ It is no disrespect to the great energy and stamina that Ather Farouqui has brought to the cause of Urdu in India to say that it is virtually impossible to ‘break new ground’ in this paradoxically trodden wilderness. These issues have been so tirelessly—and tiresomely, too—rehearsed over the last century or so, that there is an air of tedium, albeit of a resentful and angry tedium, that attends any attempt to reopen the subject. It is not as if there is no wound, and it is certainly not the case that the wound has healed—but there appears to be little point in opening it up to yet another round of scrutiny and comment, with little possibility of any redress. Indeed, the problem is so involved that even a select and sophisticated group of individuals such as Ather Farouqui has assembled here cannot agree on any set of recommendations—and I for one am disinclined to blame them.

This is, quite frankly, a historical swamp—and perhaps the only way to move across it is to move fast and lightly, before the mud begins to gather around one’s ankles!

At the very outset, there is the problem of definition. Thus, no one can say quite what Urdu is—and one way of resolving this inescapable difficulty is by identifying Urdu with the Perso-Arabic script in which it has traditionally been written.

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