THE LANGUAGE DIVIDE IN PUNJAB

By Atamjit Singh

The language divide in Punjab at the turn of the twentieth century presents a complex phenomenon. In the wake of the reorganization of Indian states along linguistic lines in the fifties, the Sikh community in Punjab demanded a Punjabi-speaking State, in which Punjabi would be the official language. Its recognition was unduly delayed due to opposition from Hindus living in the states now Haryana and Punjab. Prior to Independence, Punjabi Hindus used Urdu as the language of administration, commerce and journalism. Urdu was also the major language of literary expression in British Punjab while Punjabi was the spoken language. As Punjabi Hindus were mainly a mercantile urban middle class, they were enthusiastic users of Urdu. They were also struggling to procure political status for Hindi which would displace Urdu. In their eagerness to achieve this objective, they began declaring Hindi rather than Punjabi as their mother tongue in the censuses with the intention of gaining numerical precedence over Muslims and Urdu.[1] Like the Hindus, and swayed by their leaders, Punjabi Muslims--who mostly spoke regional varieties of Punjabi--fought to maintain Urdu's official status on the lower and middle rungs of civil administration and education.

After Independence, as a result of the partition of India, most of the Muslim population from Punjab migrated to Pakistan and similarly the entire Sikh population together with most of the Hindus from west Punjab migrated to the Indian Punjab. In the Indian Punjab, language confrontation shifted from Urdu-Hindi to Hindi-Punjabi soon after the question of deciding the state language arose.[2] It was also accompanied by communal tensions between Hindus and Sikhs which had remained dormant during the British period since the struggle was primarily confined to the two major religious groups--Hindus and Muslims. As a tiny minority, the Sikhs previously had a deep and symbiotic relationship with the Hindu community at large. In fact, the two were tied to each other through a complex of laminated attitudes and reciprocities, besides the bonds of blood and bone.[3] Since Hindus and Sikhs jointly constituted a minority against the Muslim majority in the British Punjab the Sikhs, by and large, threw in their lot with Hindus.

The emergence of Hindu and Muslim nationalism in Punjab led to a distortion of certain cultural processes, with the most potent expression showing in the identification of language with religion.[4] In fact, this situation prevailed in all the provinces of North India in which the Hindu and Muslim populations were numerically balanced--albeit rather precariously. Prior to Partition, the Muslims had a slight majority over the Hindus in the united Punjab.[5] The British rulers made Urdu a medium of school instruction and administration at the lower and middle levels with this in view. After the Muslims migrated to Pakistan, Urdu was displaced as a language of administration and education due to the disappearance of Muslims from the political scene. It should have been natural for Punjabi to take its place for the simple reason that it was the spoken language of the people. But this did not happen. A battle of succession started, the Hindus fighting for Hindi and the Sikhs for Punjabi.[6] The Hindus as a majority identified themselves with Hindi, and Muslims in Pakistan abandoned Punjabi and made Urdu a communal badge of their ethnic identity. Even in British Punjab they were committed to Urdu since it was the language of their religious identity. In Indian Punjab, Hindus started cultivating Hindi with fanatic devotion and Punjabi became a symbol of the Sikhs' cultural and political identity. Under the impact of Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform organization, the Hindus had already adopted Hindi as communal symbol of Hindu nationalism and Sikhs began constructing their minority identity through Punjabi language and literature under the influence of the Singh Sabha movement.[7]

In this paper, I will explain (1) how religion, politics and language were intermixed in Punjab, resulting in ongoing communal conflict between Hindus and Sikhs, giving birth to Sikh separatism. (2) I will also try to demonstrate that the religious symbols improvised and utilized by leaders of political parties to mobilize nationalist sentiments rarely appealed to minority communities and indigenous groups. Most of these minority groups later opted for demands of statehood autonomy with special status. (3) I will further try to show that such separatism, as developed in Punjab later, gave rise to Sikh militancy in the eighties as the minuscule leadership aspiring for power exploited the racial and ethnic sentiments in their own narrow political interests. The politics of evasion, intransigence and backsliding combined with the growth of both Hindu and Sikh fundamentalism made the situation still worse. (4) Another dimension of this conflict is its serious impact on the development of the modern Punjabi literary tradition. It limited the development of the tradition into a dialogue of the Sikh minority community with itself, curbing the tradition's potential for growth as a Punjabi secular tradition. This contributed to the growing insularity of this literature in the midst of India's cultural pluralism. (5) Considering that conflicts between the rights of ethnic and linguistic minorities to use and preserve their languages and the desire of centralized states to establish a national language in South and Southeast Asia have often been resolved in an atmosphere of liberal linguistic pluralism in which multiformity is largely preserved, I would like to suggest that India's lengthy tradition of multilingualism and societal bilingualism can offer a just and fair solution to the conflict.[8]

The Punjabi-Hindi conflict in the fifties and sixties, by and large, revolved around three issues.[9] The first was the status of the Punjabi language. Hindus argued that Punjabi was not a full-fledged language. It was only a dialect of Hindi without a strong literary tradition and one that could not be raised to the status of a state language due to its backwardness. The second reason given was that Punjabi did not have a thoroughly developed script of its own. Finally, there was no specific area or region in Punjab where it was being spoken, because Hindus, claiming Hindi as their mother tongue, lived all over Punjab. Hindus, therefore, argued against Punjabi not because they had convincing reasons, but because Hindi was the language of their religious discourse and a symbol of their political dominance. In their fight against Urdu they had already adopted Hindi as a symbol of their distinct socio-political identity.

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