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.
If we try to
understand this situation from a linguistic point of view, the Hindu
argument does not remain tenable. According to research conducted by
Grierson, Punjabi is a distinct language with both a standard
literary form and a number of dialectical and subdialectal
varieties.[10]
It has its own grammatical system and vocabulary which makes it a
separate language. Although Grierson recognized its literary
capabilities, he judged that it was not a very extensive regional
literature.[11]
This charge was later refuted by Punjabi scholars.[12]
Most importantly, Grierson rejects the idea that Punjabi was just a
dialect of Hindi and he draws a fairly sharp boundary between
Punjabi and Western Hindi or Hindustani. In fact, the controversy
between Punjabi and Hindi protagonists was rife at his time and this
made him take a clear stand in regard to the Punjabi language's
separate identity. While writing on the features of the Punjabi
language, he concludes:
Even
at the present day there is too great a tendency to look down upon
Punjabi as a mere dialect of Hindustani (which it is not), and to
deny its status as an independent language. Its claim mainly rests
upon its phonetic system and on its store of words not found in
Hindi; both of which characteristics are due to its old lahanda
foundation. Some of the most common words do not occur in
Hindustani.[13]
With the
development of the sociolinguistic study of Indian languages, many
linguists like Gumperz, Pandit, Srivastva, and Pattanayak[14]
have shifted their focus from distinguishing languages and dialects
to the study of codes and their distances from one another in
bilingual situations. Gumperz conducted a study examining the use of
Hindi and Punjabi among the urban Punjabi community of Delhi. He
found that speakers in various contexts use different codes of
Punjabi. An educated speaker uses three linguistic codes. He may use
a Hindi code while conversing with a Hindi speaker, a Hindi/English
dominant Punjabi code while talking with an educated Punjabi speaker
and a native regional variety code with an uneducated Punjabi
speaker.[15]
The discussions by Grierson and Gumperz enable an objective observer
to understand that certain arguments advanced by Hindi proponents
against the status of Punjabi are incorrect. Saying that Punjabi is
nothing more than a dialect of Hindi is contrary to linguistic
facts. The area where Punjabi is spoken is fairly distinct. Both
advocates of Punjabi and Hindi at one time were willing to accept,
on the basis of the Sachar Formula or Regional Formula, that Hindi
speaking areas could be differentiated from the rest of the Punjab.
But Hindus argued that even the Punjabi-speaking region was
bilingual.[16]
The pro-Punjabi reply to this was that the mother-tongue of the
whole population of the Punjabi region was Punjabi. The only thing
needed to settle this argument was to decide whether the so-called
Punjabi region is inhabited by people of different religions
speaking the same mother tongue or people of different religions and
different mother tongues.[17]
The Hindu argument that Punjabi did not have Gurmukhi as its sole
script and the script was not as fully developed as Devanagari was
also not true. There is no denying that Punjabi was written in
Gurmukhi, Persian characters and Devanagari; but it was Gurmukhi
which was being used by both Hindus and Sikhs for writing their
literature. Since the Sikh scriptures were written in Gurmukhi, the
Sikhs naturally favored the use of this script for Punjabi.[18]
Hindus opposed Gurmukhi precisely for this reason and wanted to use
Devanagari for the Punjabi language.[19]
The contention over the scripts in Punjab caused Gurmukhi to become
the symbol of the separate identity of Sikhs. As a result it became
a focal point on which the cultivation of the Punjabi language and
pursuit of Sikh cultural aspirations rested.[20]
The Hindi
movement in nineteenth-century Punjab was led by Punjabi Hindus,
themselves educated in English and Urdu.[21]
In its origin, the Hindi movement was purely a religio-political or
sectarian movement promoted by the Arya Samaj to displace the
official status of Urdu in the Persian script due to its association
with Muslim communal identity and Hindi's with Hindu revivalism and
religious reform. The push to replace Urdu was also associated with
political aspirations. The Hindi-Urdu clash in British India erupted
first in 1882, a year after the decision of the government to
replace Urdu in Persian script with Hindi in Devanagari script in
the province of Bihar. Urban Hindus in Punjab soon made the same
demand.[22]
Both sides saw this as a manifestation of the Hindu-Muslim communal
conflict. The Anjumun-e-Islamiya of Lahore protested against this
demand, which it saw as delivering "a death-blow to the
prospects of Mohammadans."[23]
Lala Lajpat Rai, the famous Arya Samaj leader and Punjab politician
who did not even know the Hindi alphabet, entered the political
arena through this controversy. He came to believe that Hindi could
be the foundation for the edifice of Indian nationalism. Through the
Hindi-Urdu controversy, Lajpat Rai learned his first lesson of
`Hindu nationalism' and became convinced that political solidarity
demanded the spread of the Hindi language in Devanagari script.[24]
Muslims retained political dominance and Urdu its official status in
the Punjab until 1947, when India attained independence. The Simon
Commission had earlier rejected the demand of making Hindi or
Punjabi the medium of instruction at primary level in the schools of
British Punjab. The promotion of Punjabi and Hindi was, however,
overseen by denominational educational institutions run under the
aegis of the Chief Khalsa Dewan and Arya Samaj respectively.
The real
trouble started with the census operations of 1951 and 1961 when,
after independence, the Hindus of Punjab decided to record their
mother tongue as Hindi instead of Punjabi.[25]
The Punjabi language became an instrument of political struggle.
Punjabi Hindus took up the cause of Hindi with such great passion
that they abjured their links with Punjabi as their mother tongue.
As discussed, organized efforts to influence the censuses in favor
of a language by associations and individuals belonging to religious
communities was taking place even earlier. The major conflict during
the 1911, 1921 and 1931 censuses was between the educated Muslims
and Arya Samaj Hindus. Each urged their religious brethren to
declare Urdu or Hindi, respectively, as their mother tongues. In
this quarrel Hindustani--a common name used by the superintendents
of the census operations for both Hindi and Urdu--was weakened since
the use of Hindi and Urdu was insistently forced on the informants.
By 1941 communal feelings surged so high and deceptions were so
widespread that the mother tongue category was ordered not to be
tabulated.[26]
In 1951, instead of Hindi-Urdu, the conflict centered around
Punjabi-Hindi. Hindus under the banner of Arya Samaj exhorted their
co-religionists to record Hindi as their mother tongue. The Sikhs
urged fellow-Sikhs to record their mother tongue as Punjabi. In the
urban areas the census operations were being accompanied by the
shouts of 'Har Har Mahadev' by Hindu groups and 'Sat Sri
Akal' by Sikhs, charging the political atmosphere with intense
emotion. In 1961, under the leadership of the Arya Samaj and Hindu
militant organizations, such as Jan Sangh and Rashtriya Swayamsewak
Sangh, Hindus launched a concerted campaign to declare their mother
tongue as Hindi. The Sikhs were being advised similarly under the
aegis of the Shromani Akali Dal to record Punjabi as their mother
tongue. The vernacular papers of both groups, primarily published in
Urdu, appealed to their respective communities to show loyalties to
their own language. The Sikh newspapers also started expressing fear
that the Sikh religion was in danger and that the mighty Hindu
religion was going to devour all minority religions.[27]
The Hindu newspapers started propagating the idea that Sikhs were
traitors and that they wanted to set up their own independent state
of Khalistan.[28]
The atmosphere of mutual hatred and mistrust, fanned by intense
communal sentiments, further complicated matters.
As a result of
the 1961 census, the Hindi movement succeeded in reducing the
declared number of Punjabi speakers to a minority in the state for
the first time in the history of the census. The declared Hindi
speakers grew from a small minority into a big majority in Punjab
and Punjabi speakers, who never constituted less than 60% of the
total population of the pre-Partition province, became 41% of the
post-Partition Punjab state.[29]
Sikhs became a small minority in political power sharing also. Sikhs
were compromised by the fact that it was Hindus who controlled the
economic and political power.[30]
This also caused resentment among the Hindu population of what is
now Haryana because they did not share equally in economic and
political power with Punjabi Hindus.[31]
Sikhs launched a movement for the linguistic reorganization of
Punjab, as had been done in other parts of the country. In doing so,
they could not hide their real intentions of forming a Sikh majority
state within the Indian Union.[32]
The struggle for achieving respectable political status for Punjabi
in the state of Punjab was intermixed with the urges and aspirations
of the Sikh minority community which used language in its search for
cultural and political fulfillment. During this period, Sikhs
asserted themselves as a separate entity in competition with Hindus
through the Punjabi language. Increasingly, in post-Partition Punjab
the allegiance of particular groups has been in the arena of
linguistic conflict, and language and script have been politically
important markers of group identification.[33]
Another aspect
of this battle of languages in Punjab was that Punjabi literature
produced in the early twentieth century did not grow as a secular
Punjabi tradition representing the integral Punjabi consciousness.
The Sikh community, mainly contributing to the development of
twentieth-century Punjabi literature, started writing under the
influence of Singh Sabha, a Sikh religio-social reform movement
which devotes itself to revival. It largely spread through an
assertion against others of the superiority of the Sikh sacred texts
and history.[34]
This dominant tendency stressed separatism more than participation
in the multi-ethnic literary tradition handed down by Punjabi
literature of medieval times. One far reaching effect was that the
doors for the expansive instincts of the Punjabis were unlocked as
never before. They colonized vast arable lands within Punjab and
northwestern parts of Uttar Pradesh, joined the army in large
numbers, built railroads, roads and bridges in India as well as
abroad.[35]
Only a couple
of decades before British rule was established, Punjabis had enjoyed
the pride of being the builders of secular Punjabi rule. The
structure was established to an extent during the times of Maharaja
Ranjit Singh and acknowledged by the poet Shah Muhammad in his Jangnamah
mabein Sikhan te Frangian (a narrative describing wars between
the British and the Sikhs). The poet praises Sikh rule and cites it
as an example of secular rule where all religious
communities--Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs--lived in peace and amity.
The disintegration of this rule and subsequent annexation of Punjab
by the British greatly wounded the self-esteem of the Sikh
community. Furthermore the Sikhs enjoyed the reputation as
protectors of the weak and meek; a tiny group (2% of the total
population of India), they were in the habit of delegating to
themselves roles and images larger than life.[36]
Their reputation as the lions of the Punjab was supported by the
wide respect and affection with which they were seen throughout
India.
It goes
without saying that many Punjabis were very enterprising,
forward-looking and secular despite the fact that they were
interlocked in conflict with each other on the basis of religious
and linguistic identities beginning at the turn of the century.
Caste was much less pernicious in the Punjab than elsewhere in India
and functioned more as class did in European communities. Baldev Raj
Nayar in his book Minority Politics in Punjab observes that
there is a proliferation of caste groups in Punjab, but caste as a
social phenomenon is not as strong in Punjab (except in the Haryana
area) as it is in some other parts of India. In support of his
argument he quotes a governmental report from the 1920s which reads:
It
would be misleading to attach too great importance to the existence
of caste in the Punjab. . . Not only is it the case that the brahman
has no practical pre-eminence among Hindus, but as between
"caste" and "non-caste" Hindus the distinction
is not so marked as to create the political problems found elsewhere
in India . . . The problem in truth, if one exists, is rather of
classes socially depressed than of "out-castes" as such;
while much remains to be done for the social uplift of some of these
classes, they hardly present a separate political problem.[37]
In fact,
communalism in Punjab as elsewhere in India was definitely promoted
by the British as part of the colonial project, and some of the same
tactics are being used by the post-colonial governments. Gyanendra
Pandey in his book Communalism and Nationalism in North India
states that ". . . communalism is a colonial construct that
enabled state control in the guise of mediating religious
divisions." 38 According to him, communalism is a
form of colonialist knowledge. The paradox is that the nationalists
have done more than any one else to propagate its use. In effect
communalism as religious difference was constructed as "the
other" of modernity and nationalism; therefore it was necessary
for the emergence of India as a nation. Indian nationalist claims
for the Hindu character of the Indian nation and of Hindu
nationalism, occurred concurrently with the positioning of the
Indian nation-state as the keeper of law and order, just as the
colonial state had been.[39]
The British utilized the religious differences of the three
communities of Punjab to promote their `divide and rule' policy. The
successive Congress governments in the center after Independence
have done everything to give religious shape to negotiations of
economic, linguistic, and political issues in Punjab.[40]
The congruence
of religious with linguistic identities in Punjab at the beginning
of this century affected the Punjabi language in two ways. First,
the intense literary activity generated by the Sikh movement as it
sought self-definition converged with the desire to acquire a proper
status for Punjabi. Here a conscious shift in the choice of language
as a literary medium is noticeable. In the nineteenth century, the
language of medieval literary texts was Braj in Gurmukhi script, but
Bhai Vir Singh chose spoken Punjabi as a medium for his writings.[41]
This change indicates a loss of interest in Braj bhasha which came
to be considered more a part of Hindu literary and cultural
heritage, though poetic narratives in the Gurmukhi variety of Braj
centered around the life of Sikh Gurus.[42]
Conversely, Hindus began to lose interest in the Braj classical
literature of Punjab because it was transcribed in Gurmukhi, a
script identified with Punjabi and the Sikh Gurus.[43]
Under the influence of the Arya Samaj, Hindus had attuned themselves
with the revival of Vedic religious tradition. This resulted in
neglect of a significant part of the medieval Punjabi literary
tradition which, though it had its roots outside Punjab, still found
a hospitable ground to develop on Punjabi soil. The modern Punjabi
language was unfortunately deprived of the richness of the
pan-Indian experience of this literary tradition.[44]
Another
outcome is that the Qissa stream of the medieval Punjabi tradition,
nurtured by the Muslim Punjabi poets in Persian script, was also
ignored by the Sikh revivalist writers, and therefore could not
contribute fully to the development of a modern Punjabi idiom due to
its association with Muslim life and culture.[45]
The modern literary scholars, imbued with Sikh religious fervor,
repudiated Qissa poetry as qualitatively inferior and excluded it
from their imaginative scope.[46]
Hence the art of Qissa-writing was left to stagnate. The work of a
few writers who adopted it in the present century, such as Dhani Ram
Chatrik, was seen as second rate.[47]
Urdu drifted away from Punjabi and became closer to Persian
classicism and orthodox Islam. Since it became a badge of Muslim
nationalism in Punjab, Qissa writing was disassociated with the land
and the people of Punjab. This also inhibited the development of
modern Punjabi registers.[48]
The dismemberment of a common Punjabi literary culture through the
rise of various religious nationalisms led to a shrinkage of
historical and cultural perspective, obfuscating Punjabi
literature's links with Indian literary classicism spreading over
thousands of years and distant lands of Arabo-Persian writings.[49]
Thus the beginnings of modern Punjabi literature witnessed the
crumbling of the plural and multicultural constitution of the
Punjabi literary tradition and the advancing of a singular,
monolithic voice of a minority of Sikhs.[50]
The linguistic idiom born out of this situation also testified to a
near absence of spontaneous and vital dialogue with intellectual and
literary activity in other parts of the country.[51]
The Punjabi language, due to the inhibitive impact of the
neo-religious Sikh literary movement, expressed secular ideas coming
through the Western world at the start of the British period until
the writings of Prof. Puran Singh, Dhani Ram Chatrik, Mohan Singh,
Amrita Pritam, etc., appeared. The neo-Sikh movement together with
the denial of Punjabi in educational and administrative affairs
slowed the emergence of Punjabi culture's secular character.[52]
As discussed
above, the diminishing secular, open and generous tendencies in
modern Punjabi literature were accelerated under the influence of
Western literature. It is important to note that against the
scenario created by Sikh literature in the spirit of revivalism,
Punjabi language and literature strived to adopt secular themes. In
the medieval period of Punjabi literary history, secular themes
found their expression mainly in Qissa poetry. Punjabi poets in
1920s and 1930s were especially attracted to the idea of Punjabi
nationalism. In this regard Attar Singh says,
.
. . identification of renascent Punjabi language with an idea of the
Punjab was only too natural as such an identity alone could impart
to it a distinctive cultural personality especially when no other
language could have acquired Punjabi personality as authentically
and as effectively as Punjabi--the language of the soil.[53]
Punjabi
writing progressively aspired to project a common, composite Punjabi
culture taken from social, political, and cultural elements. The
national freedom movement, the influence of the Ghaddar Party in
both India and the United States, the Akali protest movement against
ritualism and priesthood in Sikh shrines, and the impact of the
Western way of life in Punjab came together to shape a secular
consciousness and sensibility. All these factors helped in creating
a secular voice through the use of Punjabi in diverse forms of
literary discourse as well as intellectual debate and discussion.
As seen above,
during various census operations conducted by the British
Government, the census superintendents promoted a composite
all-India language called Hindustani, a blend of Hindi and Urdu.
Communal passions aroused by different religious groups of the
province fighting for Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi during these periods
eroded the effort. Even then an attempt to evolve an all-India
linguistic idiom which could become an instrument of communication
beyond the narrow considerations of different religious groups was
made. This could not take shape due to the creation of
"communal languages" in the colonial period. Peter van der
Veer, referring to the work of David Lelyveld, laments the eclipse
of a language called Hindustani, which could have had the potential
of acquiring the role of a lingua franca in the post-Independence
period.[54]
This language was observed by John Gilchrist, a Scottish physician
and indigo farmer. It was a unified language with three major
dialects distinguished by the use of Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic,
or ordinary Hindi words. Gilchrist was prepared to publish his
lexicon of Hindustani in both the Arabic and Nagari (Sanskrit
script) as well as in Roman transliteration.
The idea
behind the project of Gilchrist was not to create an instrument of
wider communication for the people of India. Lelyveld notes that
this project, undertaken at the end of the eighteenth century, was
very similar to language projects in England and France during the
same period. The clientele in this case was not indigenous but were
the officers of the East India Company. The project was also
intended to establish further rapport between the rulers and the
"natives."[55]
During the latter half of the nineteenth century under British rule,
this project was turned into linguistic surveys to identify spoken
languages through which the foreign rulers could forge better ties
with local people.[56]
The purpose of this colonial survey was to find a suitable language
to replace Persian as the official language. Gilchrist's Hindustani
later became Urdu which, after standardization, was made the
official language of a large part of North India, including Punjab.
This arrangement continued to exist until India became independent.
Urdu, Hindi and Hindustani are all literary languages constructed to
suit the purposes of literate elites. It is by their scripts that
Hindi and Urdu were identified. Through their written form they are
tied to the idea of civilization, which is simultaneously that of
religion. Peter van der Veer further states that the development of
Hindi as the language of Hindus and Urdu as the language of Muslims
is as fraught with contradictions as any other aspect of religious
nationalism.[57]
Lelyveld provides a fascinating story of the role played by All
India Radio. In 1940, A.S. Bukhari, Director-General of All India
Radio, appointed two well-known writers of Hindi and Urdu to prepare
a lexicon for Hindustani news broadcasts. They were both to find the
most common, precise and, if possible, neutral terms from either
Hindi or Urdu to create a new Hindustani, a language of secular
nationalism. It took five years to prepare and at that point was
already a lost cause due to the chaos of Partition. With Partition,
Urdu emerged as the official language of Pakistan and the Muslim
minority within India. Hindi became the all-India language, a
position it shared with English, and the main language of Hindu
nationalism.
Interestingly,
Punjabi did not receive a proper role or status even under Maharaja
Ranjit Singh.[58]
Though he was able to establish the myth of Punjabi secular rule, he
never thought of granting official status to the Punjabi language,
the spoken language of the people of Punjab. As a result, Persian
continued to occupy the position of the administrative and judicial
language. Since Persian had been and was the dominant language in
Punjab, elites learned it to gain employment and favor with the
ruling classes. Some Punjabi sayings ridicule the adoption of
Persian. Two such adages `asb aab kar moion puffra farsian ghar
galle' and `parho farsian vecho tel' express Punjabi
attitudes toward slavishly adopting a foreign language.[59]
The denial of
Punjabi in administrative and educational domains at different
points in the history of Punjab was lamented in the early thirties
by the non-Sikh poet,[60]
Feroze Din Sharaf. According to the poet, Punjabis are guilty of
neglecting their mother tongue. Sharaf writes that mother Punjabi is
wailing:
To
those whom I have been lullabying to sleep, I am now a stranger.
Though I am a queen of the land of five rivers, my existence is
reduced to a very low position.
Utterly neglected, I am sitting in a corner with my fists closed.
I am a broken Rebecca cast away by its musician-master.
O Sharaf! I am the speech of those, who never cared to give me any
regard.
The
language divide in Punjab has another interesting aspect. The
political history of the province has permanently scarred the memory
of the people's collective consciousness. As we have seen during the
linguistic reorganization of the Indian states in the fifties, the
Shromani Akali Dal made a demand for a Punjabi Suba. Punjabi Hindus,
though Punjabi-speaking, threw their support to the Hindi speakers
of undivided Punjab. Under the influence of the Arya Samaj they
declared Hindi as their language. Consequently, both Punjabi Sikhs
and Hindus were deprived of a linguistic state of their own though
they constituted a major linguistic group in India. Ironically, the
battle between Punjabi and Hindi was carried on through Urdu in
Persian script. The vernacular press from Jullundhar, published in
Urdu, incited both Hindus and Sikhs to fight with each other on the
language issue. The Punjabi suba movement and its campaign for a maha
Punjab had major forums in Prabhat owned by Master Tara Singh
and Pratap owned by Lala Jagat Narain. Both papers fueled
animosity between the two communities, often pushing them to
physical violence.[61]
The history of
the Punjabi suba movement, therefore, throws adequate light on the
importance and functions of language in the development of
subjective group identities. In the case of Urdu, a self-conscious
elite (supported by the socially mobilized segment of the Muslim
community) sought to differentiate Urdu from Hindi in North India.
In doing so, Urdu was used to transmit a sense of separateness to
the unmobilized, largely rural Muslim population. Through this move,
Urdu consciousness was made co-existent with Muslim identity.
Language also plays a similar, although somewhat ambiguous, role
among Sikh leaders. They take Gurmukhi as a badge of their
separateness. This ambiguity, according Paul Brass, "has
surrounded the language issue, because the rulers do not permit the
Sikhs any more than the Muslims to make a demand based on religion,
but only on language."[62]
The resulting consequence has been the infusion of religion with
language identification in Punjab.
Though the
government leaders did not want to accept such a demand on the basis
of religion, a Punjabi suba was finally carved out in 1966. This was
not on a purely linguistic but also, on a religious basis.[63]
After two decades of struggle by the Sikhs, the linguistic division
in Punjab was made on communal lines granting the Sikhs a
Sikh-majority state excluding vast Punjabi speaking territories
outside. The Sikhs themselves were an active party to this political
arrangement first in 1956, when a compromise on Regional Formula was
reached, and subsequently in 1966, when large chunks of Punjabi
speaking areas, especially Kangra, were portioned off from the newly
carved state. Territorially apart, vast sections of Punjabi speaking
people within the new Punjab and many outside in Himachal Pradesh,
Jammu and Kashmir, Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi were alienated from
the Punjabi language. Speakers of Dogri and Kangri have now started
seeking an independent identity for these two major Punjabi
dialects. All these developments have adversely affected the growth
of the composite personality and its reflection in the literary and
cultural configurations in the past fifty years. As a consequence
millions of Punjabis have remained outside the Punjabi mainstream in
cultural estrangement.[64]
The Punjabi identity is gradually veering to a posture of growing
isolation from the national mainstream. Large segments of the
population living in Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, in spite of
Punjabi being their language, give Telegu or Sanskrit as their
second language.[65]
Long outstanding issues such as the transfer of Chandigarh to
Punjab, the allocation of river waters and the inclusion of Punjabi
speaking areas left out of new Punjab have languished until now.[66]
Until the
early eighties the Akalis continued their struggle for settlement of
the pending issues, but their internal factionalism ensured a
divided house. In general, Hindus did not have political trust in
the Sikh community and most allied themselves with non-Punjabi
Hindus. In order to wrest power, the Congress rule at the center
undertook a series of maneuvers which worsened the political
situation in the state. Whereas the Akalis won Sikh support by
raising pro-Sikh issues and unsettling post-Punjabi suba disputes,
the Congress government at the center played communal games to
achieve its narrow political ends.[67]
Unfortunately for Punjab this situation continued for a long period,
accentuating the political conflict and deepening the crisis. Atul
Kohli, in his book Democracy and Discontent expresses that
"though these issues were significant and controversial, still
they were not that important to justify the loss of thousands of
lives in the anarchy that followed." He further states that
"we know that during 1982-84 the two sides were close to
agreement on two occasions, but at the last minute Indira Gandhi and
her advisers detected some hitches and recanted."[68]
According to Kohli,
The
most persuasive explanation for actions is not indecisiveness which
would have been quite unlike her [Indira Gandhi] but rather her
typical fear of losing power. A settlement would have meant a
political victory for the Akalis and would have had adverse
electoral consequences for her Congress. That certainly was true not
only within Punjab but elsewhere in North India as well, especially
in the state of Haryana, which stood to lose Chandigarh and
irrigation waters in any negotiated settlement.[69]
The continuing
evasiveness, indifference and insensitivity to Punjab issues and
Sikh sensibilities has given rise to militancy in Punjab which
during the past two decades has been suppressed through the
introduction of draconian laws, thus thwarting all channels of
democratic expression. The repeated failure of negotiations between
Indira Gandhi and the Akalis, and non-implementation of the
agreement reached by Rajiv Gandhi with Sant Longowal allowed the
ranks of the militants to swell since 1983-84.[70]
In 1984, the storming of the Golden Temple by the Indian Armed
Forces (part of Indira Gandhi's political plan to win back Hindu
masses) followed by her assassination, led to a series of horrendous
events which deepened the Punjab tragedy. The pre-planned massacre
of the Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere greatly increased the alienation
of the Sikh community making them feel like a humiliated minority
whose future was dark and uncertain in their own country.[71]
They made supreme sacrifices in the fight for freedom against
British colonial rule and had identified their destiny after
Independence with India.[72]
Though the militancy in Punjab cannot be condoned, the deep gash
inflicted on the Sikh psyche by the bloody drama hurt and anguished
the community beyond measure. Again to quote Kohli,
The
main political actors in Punjab all have tended to act on their
short-term ambitions without much regard for the public good. Such
an unrestrained power struggle, in turn, has been a crucial driving
force behind the descent toward anarchy.[73]
Police
atrocities, fake encounters, and the abrogation of basic human
rights in Punjab all further complicated the situation. The Anandpur
resolution of 1973 which contained an economic agenda for Punjab and
demands for looser state-center relations was rejected and dubbed a
secessionist demand.[74]
The Punjab crisis deepened further, when the language divide between
the two major communities turned into a relationship of mutual
distrust and hatred. The cumulative result was non-commitment by the
successive governments at the center, repeated betrayals and
non-implementation of agreements, police repression, etc. This also
added some social-psychological dimensions, e.g., rural-urban and
farmer-trader tensions. The strengthening of identities based on
language and religion has become so overwhelming that the
territorial issues seem irrelevant today. As Atul Kohli asserts:
Indira
Gandhi's narrow partisan concerns were important causal ingredients
in the Punjab's tragic turmoil. Many innocent lives would have been
saved if Indira had put the larger concern for public good ahead of
concern for her own and Congress's electoral fortunes. In
retrospect, therefore, there is little doubt that a more
self-assured or more enlightened leader could have put the conflict
in Punjab on a different track. 75
The language
problem exists in all South Asian countries, particularly in those
countries, which were ruled by the British. In other parts of India,
linguistic conflict has been strong and persistent, but nowhere else
has a situation like that in Punjab developed. Tensions increased
when linguistic issues were confounded by the politics of
communalism and culminated with violence. The state terrorism
inflicted on the masses has so affected the psyche that it will take
some time to heal the minds of the people. India, like many other
South Asian countries, has a language policy, which can tackle the
Punjab problem without any difficulty. It requires tolerance and a
change of consciousness. The cultural diversity and multiplicity of
languages, if taken as a positive value and recognized as integral
to cultural continuance, has precedents in governmental policy
decisions. There is a need to give linguistic minorities a role in
the policies that will determine the fate of their language. There
is a need to start rethinking the language policy of the Federal
Government in regards to Punjab.
Source: South Asia Graduate Research Journal
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