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Language policy and the ruling elite.
Dr Tariq Rahman.
Pakistan emerged on the map of the world on
14 August 1947 as a consequence of a political movement. This movement
mobilized the Muslims of India through two symbols: Islam and Urdu.
English, Urdu or...?
Dr. Tariq Rahman
Language is a key to understanding complex
political matters as the distribution of power within ethnic groups,
between social classes, and even between individuals, observes Dr Tariq
Rahman.
World mother tongue day
Dr. Tariq Rahman
The 21st of February is celebrated as World
Mother Tongue Day. The UNESCO, which hopes to make people conscious of the
importance of the mother tongue, declares in its latest publication
Education in a Multilingual World (2003), that the most suitable language
for teaching basic concepts to children is the mother tongue. Indeed, the
UNESCO declared this as early as 1953 in its report The Use of Vernacular
Languages in Education. Yet, as the world modernized, the smaller and
weaker mother tongues started dying. The schooling system, the media and
the jobs all demanded the languages of power - the languages used in the
domains of power i.e. administration, government, military, commerce,
education, media etc. - which had to be learned by people in their own
interest.
People and Languages in Pre-Islamic Indus Valley
Dr. Tariq Rahman
What was the language of the Indus Valley,
present-day Pakistan, in the pre-Islamic period? Did this region have one
language or many? Did it have one language family or many? In which
script, or scripts, were they written? These questions cannot be answered
by the linguist alone. To answer them one needs the help of the
archaeologist, the historian and the anthropologist. Let us then begin
with the evidence about the Indus Valley civilization brought to light by
the archaeologists first.
The
Punjabi Movement
Dr. Tariq Rehman
The activists of the Punjabi movement want
Punjabi to be used for educational, administrative, and judicial purposes
in the province of the Punjab. As the Punjab is the most populous and
prosperous province of the country, notorious for its dominance in the
army and the bureaucracy, many people find this language movement
incomprehensible. Indeed, most Punjabis of the upper and the middle
classes do favour Urdu, and submerge their Punjabi identity in the
Pakistani one. What is difficult to explain is why the activists of the
Punjabi movement do not do so. Would the Punjabi activists gain power?
Considering that most of them are generally competent in Urdu (and some
even in English), they could choose the easier way of joining the Punjabi
elite rather than opposing it. Moreover, some of them such as Hanif Ramay—who
was the chief minister of the Punjab under Z. A. Bhutto’s PPP rule in
1972-76 and is the Speaker of the Punjab Legislative Assembly at the time
of this writing—possess political power; nor is it difficult for others to
join mainstream politics and rise to eminence as Pakistanis (as Ramay
asserts in his book: 1985: 29). Does the lure of the movement extend only
to the less successful, as Christopher Shackle suggests?
The Right to Learn In Your Mother Tongue
Dr. Tariq Rahman
If one goes to an elitist
English-medium school and meets the principal, or whoever condescends to
grant an audience, one finds out that one's mother tongue - assuming one
is a Pakistani - is held in supreme contempt. I once asked a certain
principal whether Punjabi children had the right to be educated in Punjabi
even in the juniormost classes and she gave me the kind of look one
reserves for the mentally handicapped. |
