Resources for all concerned with culture of authoritarianism in society, banalisation of communalism, (also chauvinism, parochialism and identity politics) rise of the far right in India (and with occasional information on other countries of South Asia and beyond)
Why are Indian Muslims using the Arabic word ‘Ramadan’ instead of the traditional 'Ramzan'?
Increasingly, Indian Muslims are looking to a globalised Saudi brand of Islam for inspiration.
It’s
that time of the year again. As the annual month of dawn-to-dusk
fasting begins, people everywhere are girding their social media loins
to fight the inevitable lexical war that’s about to break out: Ramzan or
Ramadan?
This contentious battle is being fought over the name of
the ninth month in the Islamic calendar, which is also when Muslims
fast to commemorate the first revelation of the Quran to Prophet
Muhammad. Historically, most Muslims on the subcontinent have called
this month by its Persian-origin name, “Ramzan”, loaned by languages
such as Urdu, Bengali etc. In the past decade or so, however, a great
many subcontinental Muslims have rejected these names in their native
languages and taken to using what they believe is the Arabic word for
it: Ramadan. Linguistic purity fail
The name of this month in Arabic can be transliterated into Roman characters as “Ramadan” – the “d” there being a rather arcane and ancient Arabic sound
that really has no equivalent in any Indian language or English and is
terribly difficult to enunciate. For non-Arabs, the “d” is usually
approximated to the soft “d” of “dal-chawal” or (by English speakers)
with a hard “d” (as in “dad”).
Ironically, even modern-day Arabs pronounce this “d” sound
quite differently from the time the Quran was written, a natural result
of the phonological changes that any language goes through with time.
End result: in spite of the intentions of speakers to mimic Quranic pronunciation, it’s a lot easier said than said correctly.
Language
is a powerful marker of intent and identity and, more often than not,
people try and mould it into idealised shapes. Unfortunately, as this
example shows, language is also an incredibly difficult thing to change,
hardwired as it is into our brain. Arabic isn’t the only example. The
brouhaha over teaching Sanskrit, right after the Narendra Modi-led
Bharatiya Janata Party came to power was quite ironic since, right now,
millions of Indian children supposedly study the language without even
learning how to pronounce Sanskrit’s ancient sounds, which have long
since ceased to exist in India’s modern bhashas. Indo-Persian culture
If,
however, Indian Muslims have jumped from one incorrect pronunciation to
the other, what was the point of it all? Twisting the pronunciation of
Ramzan does not serve any explicit theological purpose, but it does
serve as a rather prominent cultural marker, signalling a significant
change in the way Indian Muslims – specifically Urdu-speaking Muslims –
look at their culture.
Much of what is Indian Islam – with
possibly the exception of Kerala – comes down not from the Arabs but
Central Asians and Iranis, members of the Persian cultural sphere that
dominated the Eastern Islamic world. India was itself a part of this
cultural sphere and for hundreds of years, Persian was the country’s
lingua franca, resulting in native languages such as Marathi and Bengali
being inundated with Persian words. This influence was so pervasive
that India’s largest language has a Persian name: Hindi (literally,
“Indian”).
The language of Indian Islam is, therefore, highly
Persianised – an oddity for a religion that has Arabic as its liturgical
language. The word for the Islamic prayer is the Persian “namaaz”
(Arabic: salaah) and for fast, the Persian loan “roza” (Arabic: sawm).
Most prominently, the common everyday word for "God" is from Farsi:
Khuda.
These borrowings, mixed in with local elements, created a unique Indo-Islamic culture that stood for a great many centuries. Arabisation
Events
in faraway Arabia, though, changed matters. After World War I, a family
called the Saud, driven by a fanatical version of Islam called
Wahhabism, captured much of the Arabian peninsula including the two holy
cities of Mecca and Medina. In spite of housing these two cities,
however, this patch of desert land had never been very powerful and the
great Arab empires ruled from up north in what is now Iraq. A singular
stroke of luck changed that for the Saudis: the land spouted oil, great
fountains of it – a crucial mineral in the age of machines.
In the
subcontinent, meanwhile, Muslim elites, defeated by British colonialism
and facing a precipitous decline in their fortunes, weren’t terribly
upbeat about their own cultural moorings. The influence of the rich
Saudi state, both soft and hard, crept into the subcontinent, as its
Muslims looked to the ultra-conservative theocratic state for cultural
and theological ballast.
In Pakistan, for example, massively
popular televangelists took to pushing Arab credentials as a marker of
piety. Similar dynamics were at play in India too: superstar
televangelist from Mumbai, Zakir Naik, wouldn’t be caught dead calling it the Urdu “Ramzan”.
Muslims
elites across the subcontinent borrowed these Arab liturgical words,
now as markers of their religious identity. Not only were they Muslims,
but a certain kind of Muslim, following a Saudi-influenced brand of
Islam, so strict that even in common speech, no measure of so-called
unIslamicness was allowed to creep in. “Ramzan” hasn’t been the only
target, as can be expected. The word “Khuda”, a mainstay of cultural
expressions such as Urdu poetry, is also being expunged, since God can
only have an Arabic name. The standard Urdu expression for “goodbye” –
“Khuda hafiz” – is now being bowdlerised to “Allah hafiz”.
Renaming
God and fasts is still fine – men have been known to do odder things
for religion. But when people begin chopping and changing their word for
“goodbye”, then you know you’ve got a serious case of cultural
insecurity on your hands.