The Bengali-Urdu Language Controversies - Essay Example

LANGUAGE CONTROVERST OF THE BENGALI AND THE URDU affiliation Introduction In simple English, you can define the word language as thecapability of human being to get hold of as well as using the complicated systems of communication. We can also say that a language is a system of words people used in their thinking and expression of what they fell to each other. On the other hand, a controversy is an argument between one or many people who have a substantial disagreement about a particular thing.  You can term controversy as a massive difference among different groups of persons. In this essay, we are going to access the Bengali-Urdu language controversies. To a group of people, language is a crucial part that defines and determines their nationalism or ethnicity..Language is one of the biggest driving forces in the unity of people and it makes them distinguished from other nation. You can never impose a language on a group of persons, but they can adopt it. After adopting it is very difficult for them to change into something else until they decide to do so. The language of the Pakistan state was an issue from independence in the year 1947. Imposition of the Urdu language as the national language of Pakistan created a devastating crisis in the Pakistan country in the following years. In the East of Pakistan, there was a strong opposition. The opposition was especially when the government decided to use the Urdu language in printing of money orders, currencies, postal stamps, as well as railway tickets. They did this without formally adopting the Urdu language as an official language of the state of Pakistan (Mazumdar 2014) The citizens of the Bengali speaking community felt that the language issue was going to bring a new form of colonialism replacing the British Imperialism. The language issues the people of East Pakistan to think that the imposition of Urdu language will create an economic, social and political dispossession on their part. They also complain about the unequal distribution of resources, growth, and development. The act of the government to neglect Bengali brought out a feeling of mistrust and discontentment amongst the intellect the politicians as well as the students in the East of Pakistan. The common citizens from the East of Bengali even started speculating on the motives of the Anti-Bengali ruling elite (Mazumdar 2014). The government reasonable accepted its position by saying that they decided to make Urdu as the national language just like in Indian where Hindu is made the national language. To counter this decision of imposing Urdu as a national language, the intellect, students and other citizens from East Bengali. They demanded that Bengali should also be made one of the Pakistan national languages along with Urdu. They put out their reasons for opposing Urdu because Bengali made 54% of the population of the Pakistan compared to Urdu that only made 7% of the language spoken. The Bengalis referred this imposition as a way of one ethnic group to dominate culturally (Mohsin 2007). Initially, the Urdu language evolved during the last days of the rule of Mughal. By then, Persian was the official language while Turkic and Arabic languages were also in use. Arabic language was only used in religion and in scholarly purposes, and the Turkic was the mother tongue (Bashir, 1998). Because of the interaction of local people and the ruling group of Persian-Turkic speaking Muslim, a new language called Hindustani came up. In the Persian version, Hindustani was called Urdu. With time, the language grew in popularity but remained in the north of India. Urdu has a bunch of Persian words, and you can write it in the Persia-Arabic characters while Bengali and Hindi have Sanskrit words, and you can write it in the Devanagari scripts (Afzal, 2001). Since the North India was dominated by Muslim rulers and British empires, the Urdu-speaking Indians Muslims from North had an advantage in receiving enhanced education and jobs as compared to other areas. These benefits brought dominance of Urdu-speaking Indian Muslims from the North in South Asia.They availed the chance and succeeded in bringing some other non-Urdu-speaking Muslims towards Urdu, who were in search of better education and status. This spread and the government declared that a large number of Muslims preferred Urdu to Bengali. Because they were not prepared to accept Urdu as the only state language, they launched an efficient Bengali language movement to counter the decision. In 1952, this struggle resulted in the killing of people by the police. It ended when Bengali was recognized as one of the state’s language. The movement succeeded in mobilizing people throughout the province. The Bengali language activists and the aligned political forces remained vigilant in opposition to anti-Bengali political elite. There were also several individuals who pushed for anti-Urdu like Dr.Shahiddah, who wrote articles in the promotion of the Bengali language. An example is the “Pakistan er Bhasha Shamashya” which means “The language problem in Pakistan”. As the head of the East Pakistan Arabic Association, he campaigned against the Arabization of the Bengali scripts. He termed this as being an external aggression against the Bengali language (Jabeen et al. 2010). Also the “Gono Azidi League” also called the “The Peoples Freedom League played a significant role in the mobilization of the public to support making Bengali as the state language. With the leadership of Kamruddin Ahmed, they insisted on making Bangla the official language. An organization like the “Gonotantric Jubo League”, the ‘Democratic Youth League” played a significant role in staging of the language movement. Also, there were newspapers and written pamphlets that advocated Bengali language. Tamuddun Majlis’s pamphlet demanded that; Bengali should be a medium of instructions in the Eastern Pakistan, should be used as a court language and official language to the people of East Pakistan. It also said that Urdu and Bengali should be put on two official languages of the central government of Pakistan. Bengali will be treated as a second language and should be used with the people living in the West of Pakistan since the region has a large number of Urdu speaking population. The government felt all this pressure and resolved to give official recognition of Bengali members to the Muslim League of members. Bengali was adopted to be one of the official languages in the country in 1956. What were the impacts of the controversy? There were positive and negative effects; the positive ones were that; at last there was peace on the East side of Pakistan got what they demanded. There was equal representation in the Muslim League of members, and people from Bengali were happy to read newspapers in a language they understand. The negative results were the killing of people during the unrest. There were unsatisfied groups who also demanded their words to be included as national languages. As Bengali was included as the national languages, there were more demands to rename the Eastern part of Pakistan as Bangladesh. There was also increased cultural animosity in the Eastern Pakistan as political and economic struggles increased. Despite the numerical superiority of the Bengali, the Punjabis, and the Muhajir political dominance was still going on. Conclusion A national language is meant to unite a nation, but the introduction of Urdu as a national language sparked a controversy between the Urdu speaking people and the Bengali speaking people. The people from the East of Pakistan had to resist the imposition of a language they did not want. This imposition was the biggest mistake the government of the time had done. It brought a long term negative consequence like hatred and continuous warfare. From this essay, we learn that u have to seek the people’s consent and allow them to learn the language before you can make it an official national language. References Afzal, M. R. (2001). Pakistan, History & Politics, 1947-1971. Oxford University Press.Brief History of the Bangladesh Language Movement. (2008, July 18). Retrieved March 18, 2015. Bashir, Al-Hilal. (1998). History of the Language Movement. Dhaka. Jabeen, M., Chandio, A. A., & Qasim, Z. (2010). Language controversy: impacts on national politics and secession of East Pakistan. South Asian Studies, 25(1).). RESOURCES FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE POLICIES AND LANGUAGES OF AFGHANISTAN AND ITS NEIGHBORS. Language Policy and Language Conflict in Afghanistan and Its Neighbors: The Changing Politics of Language Choice, 2, 339 Language problem in Pakistan. (1947, July 29). Retrieved March 18, 2015.Mohsin, K, M. (2007). Mazumdar, A. (2014). Indian foreign policy in transition: relations with South Asia. Routledge.  The language issue during the initial years of Pakistan, 1947-1956 in Bughio., Read More