Language and Regionalism in Pakistan

Language and Regionalism in Pakistan

Although the two-nation theory on which Pakistan movement was based presupposed that the Muslim population of North-East and North-West India would constitute a monolithic nation, the fact is that this country is as heterogeneous culturally as any Asian or African state. The problem of national integration actually assumes a larger proportion in Pakistan because of its unique geography. The country consists of two wings rent about one thousand miles asunder of intervening Indian territory. The eastern wing, though only possessing one-seventh of the total territory of Pakistan, contains about 55% of its population. It constitutes only one province of the country, whereas the western wing, till its integration in ‘One unit in 1955, was fragmented into a number of provinces and princely states, namely, the Punjab, Sind, North-West Frontier Province, Baluchistan, Bahawalpur, Khairpur and Baluchistan States Union. Geographical diversity manifested itself into other differences regarding the language, habits of life, racial complexion, culture, climate and economy. Even a casual reference to these differences is enough to convince one that unless they are superseded by an overriding sense of national identity, they are likely to create regional problems of far-reaching character. That such problems were actually created even in Jinnah's life-time is indicated in several of his speeches.

The propose here is to show how far language has been a factor in and expression of regionalism in Pakistan and what efforts have been made to counter it by creating a consensus around the status of various languages. Since the language became a factor in politics of regionalism in early fifties, the figures relevant for the purposes of this paper are those shown in 1951 Census. According to this census six major languages were spoken in Pakistan. They were ( Bengali, Punjabi, Urdu, Sindhi, Pushto and English.) The percentage of people speaking them was 54.6, 28.4, 7.2, 5.8, 7.1 and 1.8 respectively. Significantly enough, language did not figures as an important factor in or vehicle of regionalism in West Pakistan. There the regionalism found expression in demands like greater provincial autonomy, increased representation in the national legislature and larger financial allocations. As for the language there was a broad consensus among the different regional elites about the special and supreme position of Urdu. 

Thus we find that Urdu, despite its limited speakers did not encounter a serious challenge by any regional language of West Pakistan. Interestingly, while Indian political system has witnessed reorganisation of provinces on linguistic basis, in West Pakistan the reverse trend took place. In 1955, the Constituent Assembly passed a Bill to the effect that erstwhile provinces of the Punjab, Sind, North-West Frontier and Baluchistan would be integrated into what was termed as 'One Uniť. This integration was, of course, to imply the suppression of regional language of West Pakistan by Urdu. The consensus around Urdu in West Pakistan owed itself to some important factor. First, all the regional elites of that wing were invariably Aligarh educated; they were not only fluent in Urdu which made communication amongst them in that language possible but also proud of it because of its association with the Moghul Empire in India. The masses were not influential in making regional languages potential threat to Urdu because of widespread illiteracy and political apathy prevalent among them. Politics in West Pakistan has always been an elite politics as contrary to mass politics.

Secondly, the Persian script and largely Persian and Arabic vocabulary of Punjabi and Sindhi, which they share with Urdu has minimised the cleavage between Urdu on one hand, and regional languages of West Pakistan on the other. Not surprisingly, the Report of the Commission on National Education, 1959 spoke of ‘an inherent and basic linguistic unity throughout West Pakistan.  The consensus around the supremacy of Urdu in West Pakistan can be deduced from the fact that it is the medium of instruction at the high school stage throughout the province, barring the erstwhile territories of Sind, where it, nevertheless continues to be taught as a compulsory second language. While Urdu enjoys the honoured status of lingua franca in West Pakistan, in the eastern wing it is spoken only in the limited learned and sophisticated circles in the urban areas. The language of the overwhelmingly large majority of the masses there is Bengali; to them Urdu is nothing less than an alien tongue.

 And considering the fact that East Pakistan

contains the majority of the population of the country and that most of the people speak Bengali, it emerges out as the language enjoying the largest constituency of speakers. Since the Bengalis from the vast outset were zealous of preserving their regional identity, the language controversy in Pakistan largely revolved around the demand for the recognition of Bengali as one of the state languages.

The dilemma that confronted the national leadership which in the initial phase of Pakistan's life consisted of Urdu-speaking politicians, was that the country which was already ravaged by so many differences, needed one common language which could bridge those differences and knit the country in a single homogeneous unit But there was the danger that existing differences might be aggravated if they rode roughshod and imposed Urdu on the unwilling people of East Pakistan.

Jinnah was, however, very clear in his mind on the question of state language While addressing a Bengali audience at Dacca on March 21, 1948, he remarked: Let me tell you in the clearest language that there is no truth that your normal life is going to be touched or disturbed so far as your Bengali language is concerned. But ultimately, it is for you, the people of this province, to decide what shall be the language of your province. But let me make it very clear to you that the State Language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language. There were two arguments given in favour of the adoption of Urdu as the only state language. First, it had close Muslim associations, and when Muslims spoke of themselves as constituting a separate nation at the time of demanding a separate state, they had Urdu as their language in their mind. No less a person than Liaqat Ali Khan said in the Constituent Assembly:

Pakistan is a Muslim state and it must have as its lingua franca the language of the Muslim nation ... Pakistan has been created because of the demand of a hundred million Muslims in this sub-continent and the language of a hundred million Muslims is Urdu. Negatively interpreted this argument insinuated that Bengali owed its origin to and had liaison with Hindu history and culture. There were suggestions in some quarters that the demand for the rank of state language for Bengali was un-Islamic, and the fears that this status would give rise to Bengali nationalism which in turn, would tend to cultivate stronger and closer ties with its cultural counterpart in West Bengal at the cost of its ties with its political counterpart in West Pakistan.

Second argument given in favour of Urdu being the only state language was that only it was capable of providing that linguistic unity which precedes all national unity. Far from convincing the Bengalis these arguments actually caused much resentment among them. The ignoring of their legitimate democratic right of having Bengali as their state language was unjust enough, but to label the demand for that right as contrary to the ideals of Islam, they thought, amounted to adding insult to their injury. As for the claim that only one state language could bring about national unity, they cited the examples of multi-lingual states like Switzerland and Canada which were as cohesive and monolithic nations as any other. They maintained that far from loosening the bonds of political, national and religious fraternity between the peoples of two wings, the recognition of Bengali as one of the state languages, would convince the people of East Pakistan of the fairplay and good sense of West Pakistan, thus resulting into increased cordiality and unity.

There were two reasons why East Pakistan felt very strongly on the language issue. First, its people are very proud of their cultural and literary heritage. They could not tolerate the contemptuous attitude of West Pakistan towards it. Secondly, they thought that if their language was not given the official status, the government affairs and patronage would become the monopoly of the Urdu-speaking people of  West Pakistan, and thus their already neglected economic interests would receive a further setback. Bengali movement, then, became a symbol of East Pakistan's struggle for political, economic and cultural equality with West Pakistan. Each new effort on the part of Urdu-speaking central leadership to impose its language on the Bengalis strengthened the latter's fear that former was bent upon converting their province into a colony. 

This fear reinforced regionalism and set in motion the chain-reaction of other demands like grant of provincial autonomy and allocation of a larger proportion of representation in the federal legislature than that of West Pakistan. The feelings of the Bengalis on the language issue can be gauged from the fact that Jinnah was publicly booed by the students of Dacca following his state language statement. And when in January 1952, the Basic Principles Committee of the Constituent Assembly which had been constituted to report on the constitutional framework of the country, did not make recommendation in favour of Bengali, the situation came to such a pass that Dacca was rocked with strikes hartals, demonstrations and eventually police-firings. On February 21, in a pitched battle between the police and the students in the campus of Medical College hostel, about 19 students were killed; and their ‘martyrdom till today is commemorated by observing.

That day as a provincial holiday. The climax of Bengali wrath against the Central Government was, however, reached in March 1954 when at the provincials polls, a 'United Front of opposition parties on purely regional issues, the most important of them being the status of Bengali, threw the Muslim League government which had long been identified with East Pakistan's oppression by West Pakistan, not only out of office but also out of the province. The lessons of East Pakistan's revolt were driven home and the Muslim League government at the centre by a modification in the Basic-Principle Committee Report promptly accorded to Bengali official status equal to that of Urdu. That this step was, however, more an act of expediency than a change of convictions becomes apparent when one sees that the new language formula did not abandon the policy of adoption of a common national language; it only made it a long-term goal. It would be relevant here to quote the author of this formula, the then Prime Minister. Mohammed Ali of Bogra, who, it might be mentioned, was incidentally a Bengali himself. He said in the Constituent Assembly:

Sir, it is true that Pakistan has most peculiar feature and that is that we have two separate geographical units, separated by a distance of one thousand miles of foreign territory. In view of this it would have been certainly helpful if we could have adopted or evolved a common national language, so that there could be forged a linguistic unity, to promote cohesion and solidarity, between all the units that make up Pakistan. But under the present political situation it is considered necessary that the sentiments and feelings of the sections of the people in Pakistan should be respected. But we do realize, Sir, that in our present position it would be helpful if we could have adopted one language. Therefore, in the formula that I have presented to the House we have a provision whereby a directive is given to the State which says: 

“The State shall take all measures for the development and growth of a common national language." Although Ayub Constitution also recognises Bengali and Urdu as the two national languages of Pakistan, he himself has, however, expressed from time to time, his desire for evolution of a common national language. The most important problem which his regime has inherited from the past regimes is that of weaving the two wings in a single political community. The major hurdle in this solution of this problem, he feels, is Bengali culture loaded with Hindu influences. As early as 1954 he had remarked that Bengalis have been and still are under considerable (Hindu) cultural and linguistic influence? 12 Hence, he feels that a change in the Bengali script would give 'tremendous psychological freedom to the people in East Pakistan from the forces of Hindu culture and influence'. 

13 The changeover of the script, he once said, should be preferably to a one which would be common to Bengali and Urdu. This would eventually give birth to a composite language which would neither be Bengali nor Urdu but a Pakistani' language.  Besides change of script, interchange of vocabulary between Urdu and Bengali has also been suggested. As far as Bengali is concerned this would in effect mean its deSanskritisation and creation of Muslim Bengali' as distinct from "Hindu Bengali.

But the hazards which the implementation of these suggestions will have to encounter become evident when one sees that a recent ban on recitation of Ravindra music on Radio Pakistan had to be lifted because of a volley of protests it evoked from East Pakistan. Similarly, in West Pakistan, Radio Pakistan's experiment with introducing Bengali vocabulary in its Urdu programmes provoked a sharp rebuke from Jamaat-i-Islami, an ultra-orthodox party of Pakistan, which said that Radio was using Hindi' words despite the availability of richer and more meaningful Urdu equivalents.

It appears, then, that whatever efforts are made towards the evolution of a common national language in Pakistan, the policy pursued in this respect would be that of caution and moderation. Ayub fully realises that any attempt to the contrary is bound to prove disastrous and may set in motion in East Pakistan the events of early fifties, thereby providing Bengali regionalism with additional fire. Since India is also confronted with similar linguistic problems, nothing would be a more fitting conclusion of this paper than to recall the lessons of Pakistani experience in this respect. Any endeavour on our part to impose one language on our country composed of diverse sub-nationalities is likely to widen regional cleavages, as in Pakistan. True, the linguistic unity promotes national integration.

But the matters affecting language, tradition and culture touch the deepest of human emotions and any effort to artificially contrive uniformity regarding these may, instead of countering regionalism, create problems of far serious regional character.  Let not our zeal for national unity via linguistic identity induce us in committing the proverbial blunder of throwing out of the tub, the baby along with the dirty bathwater.