|

December 27, 2011

Communal politics and religionisation of urdu in India

. . . post-1980s, degree holders from dini madaris, the Islamic religious institutions, were declared eligible for university teaching in Urdu and Arabic. This gave Urdu teaching in universities an Islamic profile. With the Islamisation of the university teachers occurred the Islamisation of the political front of Urdu in free India. With students from religious institutions monopolising all those avenues, from Urdu institutions to Urdu newspapers, which had even the remotest connection with Urdu literature, the situation became worse.
[. . .]
Owing to their communal outlook, these university teachers of Urdu are equally ignorant about secular Urdu literature.

There are two major reasons behind this ignorance: first, the entire educational process in the dini madaris is dedicated to religious learning and, second, the only reason they studied Urdu or Urdu literature was to learn a language that could help them in Islamic studies. Since most of the Urdu teachers of university Departments are products of dini madaris, their perspective is mostly communal and archaic. For the alumni of dini madaris, Urdu literature is largely synonymous with profanity. Despite receiving big salaries in the name of Urdu, their hatred for the secular literary genre of Urdu is deeply ingrained. In sum, they do not have any interest in any activity other than the expansion of Islam; therefore, the Urdu Departments of universities have turned into arenas of politics of Muslim fanaticism and mediocrity. [...].

FULL TEXT AT: http://tinyurl.com/bwng7lq