Close to my neighbourhood is the Geneva Camp, where a huge chunk of people from the Urdu-speaking community reside. The cramped, squalid quarters of the camp accommodate more than 40,000 people.
Pakistan, however, couldn't pay much attention to accepting the remaining Biharis. One reason, as per Karachi based analyst Abdus Sattar, could be that by 1979 Islamabad had to bear the burden of over a million Afghan refugees. And secondly, theheld massive demonstrations against the repartition of Urdu-speaking people of Bangladesh, forcing the government to put the matter on the back burner.
During the Liberation war, some Urdu-speakers had to indirectly bear the brunt of the West Pakistani military’s actions. They had to live in constant fear of backlash, as one can find in Archer Blood’s memoir, The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh, and Aquila Ismaeel’s family’s story. I remember my grandmother narrating the story of how their Urdu-speaking neighbours suddenly, without any notice, fled one night in the thick of the war.
Stigmatisation is rooted in the faulty, problematic spirit of ‘othering’. This ignorant act seeks to brush aside facts and rest in distorted fiction. As such, it might come as a surprise to those who stigmatise an entire community based on the actions of a few, that the Urdu poet Naushad Noori staunchly opposed Jinnah’s decision to make Urdu the lingua franca of Pakistan in 1952. He even lost his government job due to the poem — Mohenjo Daro — he published in protest.
One reference of this fact can be found in the case of Aliya Madrasah, which opened in 1780 in Calcutta and embraced Urdu as its medium. He maintains that Urdu flourished alongside Persian in places like Murshedabad and Dhaka during the rule of Nawab Murshid Quli Khan, Shujauddin Khan, and Alivardi Khan.
The question of language was one of the crucial points of contention. According to the Muslim League, Urdu was to be state language of Pakistan alongside English, although East Pakistanis were allowed to practice Bangla as their mother tongue. Noori championed the minority rights instead of being subsumed by the powerful state machinery. That he was an Urdu-speaker and yet supported the Bangla-speakers against West Pakistan’s decision came as a huge blow. He had to resign from his government job due to the onslaught of backlash he was receiving after publicising his support for Bangla language. He continued supporting the East Pakistani Bangla-speakers well beyond the 1952 episode.
tazrian1234 Its fading away in Pakistan even. Our native language has become English now lol
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