Mushtaq Soofi 

Punjab Governor Muhammad Sarwar Chaudhry declared some time back that an imposition of education emergency was on his agenda with the express objective of achieving a high literacy rate in the shortest possible span of time. One wonders how he is going to sell the idea to Mr Shahbaz Sharif, our chief minister who seems to be occupied with his dream of building modern material infrastructure in his province which is no doubt a step forward in the right direction. Without the modern infrastructure contemporary life would come to a grinding halt. But is that all the people of Punjab need? No sir. It could be just one of the things on our wish list. After the World War-II poet Brecht wrote:

“I knew that cities were being built I haven’t to any, a matter of statistics, I thought, not history What is the point of cities, built without the people’s wisdom?”

Is there someone to tell our hardworking chief minister that the people who are going to use the roads, the bridges, the under-passes and the flyovers constructed by his government are equally important if not more? He needs to invest in the projects designed for the social and cultural uplift of people. His overriding concern with the visible projects which obviously give him a political windfall will make greater sense if those seemingly invisible masses using them come to know how to benefit from them. And that will not be possible without a process of social and cultural transformation initiated by political leadership with a holistic vision of human development. The holy Bible thousands of years ago said: ‘Man does not live by bread alone’. What it hints at is the need of multi-dimensional human development.

If you are serious Mr Governor, get a brief report on education in Punjab from 1849 to 2013. Make a team and include in it some scholars who know Punjab’s history. Remember the year 1849 sir? The year is watershed in the modern history of Punjab. That was the year when the administration of colonialist East India Company occupied Punjab that ultimately proved to be a clean or unclean break with our past spread over thousands of years. It was the year that saw the introduction of a new education system which within a few decades made us illiterate from being highly literate people in the Sub-Continent. Find hard to believe it? Just get hold of a copy of the famous ‘A report on education in the Punjab’ based on an extensive survey conducted by Dr GW Leitner, one of the great linguists. After the occupation or what the East India Company called the ‘annexation’, the question of language to be used for the educational and administrative purposes prompted a debate. “In 1849 the Governor General of the Company, based in Calcutta, formed a three member Board of Administration in Lahore, who were to follow Act 29 of 1837, which made it mandatory on them to use vernacular languages in the administration in the lower and middle courts, as well as lower public offices,” quotes Majeed Sheikh in his write-up ‘How a company tussle set back the language of Lahore’. Most of the British officials came from Central India. The troops mostly comprised of ‘Purbias’ whom a popular saying describes thus:’ Hindustani baray shatani, aakar aakar chalte hain’ (Satanic Hidustanis haughtily fool along). This ‘satanity’ reflected the contempt the occupiers had for the Punjabis who resisted them very fiercely. The officials coming from Central India who could understand or speak various versions of Hindi or Urdu, insisted on introducing Urdu at lower level in the administration and in the new schools they planned to set up. A number of officers like J. Wilson,

deputy commissioner of Shah Pur (now a part of Sargodha district) and Robert Cust who supported the introduction of the Punjabi language lost the battle. ‘The Persian and Urdu might be taught in all schools under the patronage of government. But other languages and characters, such as Hindi, Sanskrit, Gurmukhi, Punjabi need not be used’ says The Administration Report of the Punjab (1851-52). The political implications of introducing the Punjabi were not lost on the perceptive colonialists. Dr Tariq Rehman in his ‘The Teaching of Punjabi: A Study in Power and Prejudice’ has quoted a British officer who wrote: “If Punjabi were adopted as the court language in the Punjab the whole of our educational system would be stultified. We are teaching the population to read and write Urdu, not Punjabi. Besides, any measure which would revive the Gurmukhi, which is the written Punjabi, would be a political error” (Melvill 1875). And ‘error’ they did not commit. Years before that Charles Napier had sensed the threat the Punjabis and their language posed. He wrote in 1849: “Punjab has been occupied but not conquered. The Punjabi and his language have yet to be conquered”. Majeed Sheikh has discovered an extremely important poster published by the colonial administration which one can see even today in Lahore Museum that promised “Two annas for a sword and six annas for a Punjabi Qaida”. In other words if you returned a sword you would get one anna and if you returned Punjabi Qaida (primer) you would get six annas as a reward. The colonialists feared the Punjabi language much more than the Punjabi sword. That was the measure of power the people’s language had. The language reminded the people who they were while political need was to force the people to discard their self-image and to internalise the new image of them created by the occupiers. And the best way to destroy the people’s self-image was to create a new system of schooling. In the newly established schools the role of language was crucial to building a politically perceived new image of Punjab, the Punjabis and the Punjabi language. To alienate the people from their language and what it symbolised they first dubbed it as a ‘rustic’ language, deliberating ignoring the historical fact that since 11th century the most learned minds like Ismaili saints, Saad salmon, Baba Farid, Guru Nanak, Guru Arjun, Shah Hussain, Damodar, Nosha Ganj Buksh, Bulleh Shah, Sultan Bahu, Waris Shah, Hafiz Barkhurdar, Mian Mohammad and Khawaja Ghulam Farid employed it for their creative expression. The Punjabi language had such a prestige and potential that the last Mogul emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, whom the colonialists dethroned, also wrote poetry in it. The Punjabi language was a political threat to the colonialists and it still is, to those who inherited the colonial ethos. — soofi01@hotmail.com