Whose Urdu is it anyway?
- Independent Ink
- Aug 24
- 15 min read
Updated: Aug 26
This collection of writings is an attempt to bust stereotypes and address a persistent misconception: that Urdu is the language of India’s Muslims and that it addresses subjects that are, or should be, of concern to Muslims, and Muslims alone. Empirical evidence shows, it is not so.
By Rakhshanda Jalil
Is Urdu the language of Muslims?
Or, to be more precise, the language of Indian Muslims?
Not to be confused with the Urdu spoken in Pakistan, which was a language smuggled in by the muhajirs and somewhat injudiciously declared the national language and adopted with much misgivings by the Punjabis, Pathans, Sindhis not to mention Bengalis.
in modern-day India, is Urdu a language of Upper India?
And within that narrow category, a declining minority of sharif Muslim families?
And if we must be geographically precise, is it the language of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, for surely the effective first language of Kashmiri Muslims is Kashmiri or Laddakhi, and Muslims in the eastern parts claim Bangla or Asamiya as their mother tongue. What of the Deccan plateau, then, which was once the cradle of Urdu? Can the India south of the Vindhyas lay claim to Urdu?
What of the sweet cadences of the Urdu of the Malwa region or the princely states of Bhopal and Hyderabad or even the rural hinterland of present-day Telangana which has suffused Urdu with a lilting charm over a period of slow distillation spanning several centuries? Or, for that matter, what of Gujarat that had once boasted Wali Dakkani as a proud son of its soil?
So, whose Urdu is it anyway?
Getting away from matters of geography, who can best lay claim over Urdu? Can it be just the poets and politicians and polemicists? Is Urdu only for the shair who sings of romance and revolution, the orator who can count upon the vim and vigour of rousing Urdu poetry to pep up the dullest of speeches, or the sloganeer who needs a catch-all 'Inquilab Zindabad!' or 'Hum Dekhenge', or even a 'Bol Ke Lab Azad Hain Tere...'?
Is Urdu just for those who want pretty words full of sound and fury signifying nothing? Is the 'Hindi' film industry, located in Mumbai, the last bastion of Urdu poetry that can still reach the nooks and crannies of popular imagination?
And what of Urdu prose that is so often, and so unfairly, overshadowed by its more glamorous twin, Urdu poetry? What of the vast treasures of Urdu fiction, creative non-fiction, its memoirs and reportage, its long history of journalism?
These are not mere rhetorical questions; they address larger concerns that will, in the years ahead, determine how Urdu survives. For as long as Urdu is yoked to religion – Islam – and a certain community – Muslims – it will never be understood in its entirety. This collection of writings is an attempt to bust stereotypes and address a persistent misconception: that Urdu is the language of India’s Muslims and that it addresses subjects that are, or should be, of concern to Muslims, and Muslims alone. Empirical evidence shows, it is not so.
As the 16 stories chosen here demonstrate, there is a glorious diversity of issues and registers, not to mention tones and tenors. While, it is true that some of the stories I have chosen from the ‘partition generation’ of writers demonstrate an over-arching concern for what was left behind and the lingering scars of communal violence in the immediate aftermath of the partition, as in the stories by Ratan Lal or Ramanand Sagar. In equal measure, writers from the same generation speak of entirely different concerns too such as footpath dwellers in a cosmopolitan city or the challenges of raising a mentally and physically disabled child in the case of Krishan Chandar and Rajinder Singh Bedi. Of course, the later generation of writers who are still active, namely Deepak Budki, Renu Behl and Gulzar, pick up contemporary topics that are relevant and timely today.
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All collections are, by their very nature, selective. I make no claim to be objective; nor do I claim to be comprehensive. There are many non-Muslim Urdu writers I have perforce not been able to include. I wish I had the space to include Fikr Taunsvi (whose real name was Ram Lal Bhatia), Kashmiri Lal Zakir, Zafar Payami (Diwan Birender Nath), Shamsher Singh Narula, Prakash Pandit, Balraj Mainra, Balwant Singh and several others, By the same token, I have omitted some of the best known names of Urdu literature: Premchand, Upendranath Ashk, and Ram Lal. None of these omissions are oversights; mindful of the immense variety before me, I have perforce had to exercise an editorial discretion.
Sometimes, I have been swayed by the merit of a particular story rather than the name of the writer. Sometimes, I have been swayed by my concerns as an editor, for having donned this hat, one wishes to present as comprehensive a range of concerns, topics and voices as possible. In my defense, all I can say is that while this collection of 16 stories is by no means comprehensive, it hopes to be representative. What is more, I do hope this selection piques the curiosity of modern readers to read other works by some of these writers who were popular in their own day but have, inexplicably, been lost in the mists of times such as Kanhaiyalal Kapoor, Devinder Satyarthi and Balraj Komal. Or, others such as Ramanand Sagar or Gulzar who are better known for their work in cinema and their contribution as Urdu prose stylists is occasionally overlooked.
Coming now to the stories: Krishan Chandar’s ‘The Generous One’ (Dayalu) is entirely in keeping with the trend among ‘progressive’ writers to write stories about the marginalized and the impoverished. An influential member of the powerful literary grouping known as the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA), Krishan Chandar like several other writers of that period included here, wrote socially-purposive, socially-engaged stories about lives very different from his own in an effort to create empathy and awareness about the dispossessed.
Their hopes and dreams, the sheer impossibility of those dreams ever coming true because of the vicious cycle of poverty and the abysmal, relentless wretchedness of their circumstances – all of this brought to life with deft strokes. However, the modern reader will note the marked overlay of emotionalism and sentimentality about life on a Bombay footpath when the author is depicting this poverty and wretchedness, something that the readers of Krishan Chander’s time might not have taken note of.
Rajinder Singh Bedi, also a part of the PWA and along with Krishan Chandar, Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chughtai, popularly regarded as one of the four pillars of the modern Urdu short story, has written with great empathy about women and women’s sensibilities. Like Krishan Chandar, Bedi too is an instinctive progressive, that is, one by inclination rather than indoctrination and the predominant concern in much of his writings is humanism. We see that in ‘A Woman’ (Eik Aurat). We see a man, initially attracted to a woman only for her good looks, reacting to her situation at a purely human level. By the time the story ends, he ‘sees’ her for who she is: not just the object of a man’s lust but as a mother with a tender, loving heart that beats only for her specially-abled child.
Mahindar Nath, the younger brother of Krishan Chandar and an active member of the Bombay branch of the PWA, attempts to probe a woman’s heart in ‘A Cup of Tea’ (Chai ki Piyali). In this charming story, a good looking woman who has been the perfect partner, home-maker, mother, daughter-in-law with a man she has lived with in perfect harmony for 12 happy years, changes, subtly, the day the man decides to make her his lawfully-wedded wife. Instead of her getting up in the morning, lighting the stove and bringing the perfectly-made cup of tea to him in bed, this demure, beautiful, quiet woman expects, nay demands, the opposite: "I have been making tea for you for the past 12 years. For 12 years I have been your beloved; now I am your wife. Make tea for me now."
Devinder Satyarthi, a contemporary of Manto, toured the length and breadth of the country feeling the pulse of rural India, collecting folktales and taking the roads less travelled. Living the life of a vagabond, travelling through Ceylon, Burma, Nepal and different parts of the country, gathering folk songs, translating them and weaving stories around them, these songs which grew like wild flowers in deep dark forests told stories about real people and real lives and therefore deserve a special place in the history of Urdu literature.
Like his fellow-progressives, he retained a life-long interest in the “small person” who lived on the margins of public consciousness, often barely eking out a living despite putting in long and hard hours of physical labour. ‘The Tonga Driver’ (Tangeywala) is one such story and as is the case with other progressive writers, references to Soviet Russia, the Motherland of organized Communism, are woven into the narrative: how the people of Russia take in the might of Hitler’s army and halt its progress, how no one goes hungry, how it offers an idealistic haven.
Kanhaiyalal Kapoor had the special knack of writing about topical events with his tongue firmly in his cheek. While the story is located in the early years after independence when a new kind of ‘nativism’ is being talked about, when the government is giving a special thrust to Hindi and a fledgling nation is grappling with issues of identity and nationhood, it reminds us starkly of the present times when a similar surge of hyper-nationalism is being witnessed.
In the New India that is Bharat ‘I have Done My Bhartiya-karan’ (Maine Apna Bhartiya-Karan Kara Liya Hai) asks important and extremely topical questions: What does it mean to be an Indian, that too, 100 per cent Indian?
Is the criteria governed solely by what one wears, or eats or how one dresses or where one studies or, for that matter, how one looks? Is Bhartiyata, being Indian, not a state of mind and heart?
What is more, must it be worn on one’s sleeve and displayed at all times for the viewing pleasure of an increasingly muscular majority that decides whether one is sufficiently Bhartiya, or not?
Ramanand Sagar belonged to a group of young writers who were deeply influenced by the partition and yet wanted to keep alive the spirit of secularism along with writers such as Ibrahim Jalees, Shamsher Singh Narula and others. In ‘Run from these Slave-Traders’ (Inn Jism-Faroshon Se Bhaag) he picks up the important issue of abducted women, an issue dealt with in different ways by different writers such as Bedi in the eponymous novel ‘Lajwanti’ and Amrita Pritam in the Punjabi novel Pinjar meaning ‘skeleton’.
With women being the worst victims of the worst excesses of bigotry, during communally-charged times they end up paying the worst price too; during the communal carnage of 1947 large numbers of women – from Hindu, Sikh and Muslim communities – were raped, tortured, killed and abducted by the ‘other’ community as an act of vengeance. In many instances, these abducted women ended up living with their abductor’s as sex slaves and unpaid labour; sometimes, they married their abductors, converted and raised children.
In Sagar’s story, there is no happy ending, not even a reconciliation with her family. This latter-day Sita who was abducted and kept in bondage by her kidnappers, shows amazing courage by swimming across a river to return to the sanctity of her home and hearth only to be rejected by the upholders of patriarchy, namely her husband and father-in-law, who have, in place of one they lost, ‘kept’ two women from the other community in their home.
The story makes telling comments about bravery and cowardice, chastity and impurity, honour and dishonor and how women – and by extension their bodies – become casualties of wars waged by men. The story also talks of the immense human tragedy of the Punjab where neighbours turned on each other, villages -- separated by a river – became divided and overnight a chasm opened up where once there was proximity.
I must confess I had to look very hard to find a non-Muslim woman Urdu writer. Knowing full well that boys in non-Muslim families were taught Urdu and Persian whereas the girls were mostly taught Hindi, I was still hoping to find at least a few names who might have bucked the trend and proved to be in the same league as an Ismat Chughtai or a Hajra Masroor, or any of the other male writers in this collection; regrettably, it took a great deal of diligent digging to find a lone Sarla Devi. Having found her, I was hard pressed to make a choice from her work spread across two collections of short fiction and numerous stories scattered in the literary magazines of her time, some even edited by her, such as Shahrah, along with Prakash Pandit.
I eventually chose ‘Sharda’ for its bold theme: a relationship between a Hindu woman and a Muslim man, both belonging to the Communist Party, both dreaming of a Red Revolution that would usher in a new world yet both victims of long-held misconceptions against each others’ community. I must also confess that reading, and later translating, this story proved to be extremely challenging: echoes of communal biases and prejudices, stereotypes and misconceptions that persist to this day make this a difficult story to read.
I could have chosen another story by Sarla Devi, one that was more politically correct, less galling but I chose ‘Sharda’ precisely because it ticked every box in the communal arsenal and sometimes, as an editor in search of diverse voices, one must choose something that one personally finds problematic.
Devindar Issar, a writer with a distinctly modern sensibility, spins a dark tale set in a mortuary. A dead body lying in a mortuary has a monologue with its self: ‘In the inky black sea of Time, my corpse has been sailing for centuries, having unfurled a white mast. It has neither a destination, nor a shore.’
This surreal story is free of all markers of class, caste and religion because Death, after all, is the great leveler and it matters little if the corpse is to be buried or burnt, or if the dead person was rich or poor, privileged or unprivileged, for the past and the future have ceased to matter and the present is dead. What is more, there are no answers and no escape from the present: "Where should I go? I can’t think straight in this dense, impenetrable darkness. Dear God, give me light! But where is God? His corpse, too, is lying in the mortuary."
The past and the present meet in the next story. Hori, the hardworking farmer and central character in Munshi Premchand’s iconic novel Godan reappears in Surendra Prakash’s ‘Scarecrow’ (Bajooka) nearly 50 years later. Sadly, the years have not been kind to him: "The Hori of Premchand’s story had become so old that even the hair on his eyebrows and eyelashes had turned white. His back was bent, and the veins stood out on his dark, calloused hands."
While the world has moved on and the country has made giant leaps towards progress in the decades since Hori was a young man in Premchand’s novel, little has changed for Hori and countless others like him who bring food to our table through dint of sheer hard work. Old themes of exploitation of the rural poor and their socio-economic deprivation are now compounded by new issues of ecological degradation.
MK Mehtab too takes us to the Indian countryside but one that is stifling under a blanket of terror and violence during the high noon of militancy in Punjab. Despite its setting, ‘Flowers of Mustard’ (Sarson ke Phool) is a sunny story about hope and resilience amidst fear and despondency. Touring the troubled state wracked by insurgency, a journalist from Delhi meets a beautiful young woman on a bus to Moga. Guileless and hospitable, she offers him shelter for the night and in the process, shows him the real Punjab: a state dealt a body blow by misconceptions and misleading stereotypes but undaunted and willing to show the world that the human spirit survives intact and unharmed in the midst of darkness.
What is more, the famous Punjabiyat, the spirit of Punjab, shines bright and happy like the golden-yellow flowers of mustard in the fields of Punjab.
Ratan Singh’s ‘The Refuge’ (Panah-gah) revolves around a person who, despite being in India after the Partition, considers himself safe only in the confines of his room in his old home located in what is now Pakistan. In his mind, through an act of will power, he has sought refuge in that room from all the difficulties that have come his way in the course of his life so far. And now, even though he is in India, he has once again taken refuge in that room. And he wishes that if only somehow his refuge could become big enough to accommodate anyone who is in dire straits and everyone who is troubled can find some peace here.
Balraj Komal’s ‘Well’ (Kuan) begins on a light-hearted note but ends in a most macabre manner. Once taps start bringing water to every part of a city, an enterprising citizen acquires a new hobby: jumping over disused wells! Soon, he has jumped across all the wells in the city. An unexpected challenge makes him set out in search of a well outside the city limits. Here, an encounter takes place that changes the easy tempo of this so-far whimsical story irrevocably and with unexpectedly tragic consequences.
Joginder Paul, best known for his afsanche or haiku-like short stories, blurs the distinction between the living and the dead when poverty is the arbiter of fate. An American doctor arrives in Calcutta (which has not yet been re-christened Kolkata) in June 1957 to buy 50 dead bodies to take back home for the purpose of medical research. Instead, he is faced with a sea of the living dead, bodies emaciated by decades of hunger, any signs of life long snuffed out by acute grinding poverty; yet the hundreds, nay thousands of walking corpses he sees are not fit for transportation as cargo for they are not ‘really’ dead.
Begor (‘Those without Graves’) asks painful questions about life and death and who, or what, decides whether a persona is well and truly dead.
Insurgency raises its ugly head again, this time in Kashmir. Deepak Budki, the Kashmiri Pandit writer, writes with heart-wrenching pathos about the plight of the Hindus who had to leave their home for fear of death.
‘The Rape of an Abandoned House’ (the author admits that the title struck him in English even when he was writing the original in Urdu) tells the story of the systematic, ceaseless pillaging of an abandoned house, belonging to a Pandit family in Kashmir. Bit by bit everything is stolen and carted away and eventually the stripped and bare house is set on fire: "Though there was nothing left in the house, a neighbour’s covetous glance fell on the windows and doors made from expensive deodar wood. All night long the father and son worked on removing the doors and windows so stealthily that no one heard or saw a thing. By the time the first rays of the sun fell, they had set the house on fire so that no one would suspect that the doors and windows had been removed. Criminals know that they are better off after disposing the bodies of those they have raped."
Renu Behl reminds us that Urdu was and continues to be the language of the Punjab. In ‘Draupadi has Woken Up’ (Draupadi Jaag Utthi), she talks about the skewed gender ratio in this land of the five rivers as a consequence of sex determination and selective abortions causing a strange situation: "It seems there is a famine of girls. Everywhere you look there are only boys. And if perchance you find a girl, then her family has such airs... they seem to want nothing short of a big landlord!"
Shopping for brides from other states, addictions to alcohol, opium and cannabis that are common among boys and men and, most shameful of all, incest with sisters-in-law – all this and more surfaces in this searing short story.
And finally, Gulzar, poet, lyricist, filmmaker and creative writer, brings this sweeping volume to a tumultuous close with his nuanced look at contemporary life and communal politics. He reminds us how festivals once used to be a joyous time of celebrations; now they serve the purpose of providing a fuse to a communal tinderbox: "It was Muharrum. And Dussehra also fell at the same time. There was every likelihood of communal riots breaking out in the city. There were many reasons to exercise self control. But only one excuse is enough to abandon restraint."
In ‘The Crocodile’ (Magarmachh) an India where Muslim artisans have been making the effigy of Ravan during Dusshera for generations, are under assault by the forces of a new, more assertive communalism.
Read this book, maybe not from cover from cover, but dip into it in no particular order, perusing the stories included here one at a time at your leisure allowing their full import to sink in. Read it for its affirmation of the ‘idea’ of India that is under threat, yes, but is not fully effaced. Read it also for its robust assertion that the Urdu language is alive and well and yes, in reply to the question posed at the very beginning: Urdu is not the language of the Indian Muslims, alone. It is not confined to any state or region. It belongs to whoever is willing to embrace it and in their capable hands it is willing to be moulded like pliable clay.
Whose Urdu Is It Anyway, 16 stories by Non-Muslim Urdu Writers, Edited and Translated by Rakhshanda Jalil, Simon & Schuster, August 2025.
Poster of Ek Chadar Maili Si and book cover of Pinjar (Tara Press) courtesy wikipedia.
Dr Rakhshanda Jalil is a multi-award-winning translator, writer, and literary his
torian, based in Delhi. She has published close to 50 books and has written over 50 academic papers and essays. Some of her books include: Liking Progress, Loving Change: A Literary History of the Progressive Writers Movement in Urdu (OUP, 2014); a biography of Urdu feminist writer Dr Rashid Jahan: A Rebel and her Cause (Women Unlimited, 2014); a translation of The Sea Lies Ahead, Intizar Husain’s seminal novel on Karachi (Harper Collins, 2015), and Krishan Chandar’s Partition novel, Ghaddaar (Westland, 2017), and recently two collections of essays entitled But You Don’t Look Like a Muslim (Harper Collins, 2019) and Love in the Time of Hate: In the Mirror of Urdu (Simon & Schuster, 2024), among others. She runs an organization called Hindustani Awaaz, devoted to the popularization of Hindi-Urdu literature and culture.
Also read: 'I am not a doomsdayer'. Rakhshanda Jalil in conversation with Amit Sengupta.
Also read: Passion, Places, People, Politics, Poetry by Amit Sengupta in thecitizen.in