Mazhar Imam, a government employee and ardent reader of Urdu magazines in Patna’s Moghalpura area, is a worried man these days. He is afraid his daughter Aiman, a 11th-grader in Science at the Mohammedan Anglo-Arabic Senior Secondary School may ditch Urdu altogether to study English at her school because of the new syllabus in the state.
“She will lose touch with her polished mother tongue. That would be bad for her and for our culture, our entire Indian culture. Urdu should have been made compulsory along with the other languages like it was earlier,” he said, voicing the concerns of thousands of Muslim parents and intellectuals across Bihar, following a change of syllabus in the state’s intermediate education system.
The Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB)’s decision to remove Urdu as one of the compulsory languages in the syllabus of intermediate classes from this academic session has come under fire from Muslim politicians, religious organisations, intellectuals and ordinary Muslims. Bihar has almost two crore Urdu speakers. With the Muslim-Urdu link in Bihar being the strongest in India next to Jammu and Kashmir, the BSEB’s decision has spread fears that it would hasten the already rapid decline of Urdu in the state and contribute further to the illiteracy and backwardness of Bihar’s Muslim community.
Many Muslims are fearful that fewer intermediate students from Muslim families would now choose to study their already endangered mother tongue, which is written in the old Arabic-based Persian script that is now fast disappearing from popular mass communication avenues countrywide.
Parents like Irfan-ul- Haque, the owner of a newspaper agency in Patna’s Sultanganj, fear that their children would also start neglecting Urdu in the under-matriculation classes. “I doubt if my son who is in the ninth class would be serious about Urdu after its loss of compulsory status in the intermediate classes. I would like him to be a journalist in the Urdu press, but like most other fellow students he may opt for English and Hindi. The BSEB decision would cause a big fall in the number of Urdu lovers over the next few years in Bihar,” he said.
“The BSEB move would eventually prove to be one of the final nails on Urdu’s coffin in Bihar. After being neglected by successive state governments, Urdu is being virtually driven out of the intermediate syllabus in the name of adopting CBSE pattern and its two-language framework. This would adversely affect the state’s Muslims socioeconomically in the long run,” said M.S Rahman, a scholar of Urdu, Arabic and Persian who also teaches English at the MAA Senior Secondary School. Muslim politicians and intellectuals suspect a quiet rise in Bihar of a Hindu revivalism that has traditionally given Urdu a communal colour, much like Muslim revivalists and politicians of the Muslim League had done in the 1940s. “The Nitish Kumar led government is covertly furthering the RSS agenda in Bihar in the unfair belief that Urdu is the language of Muslims alone. The state government’s anti-Urdu designs became clear when education minister Harinarayan Singh strongly supported the BSEB’s move despite Nitish Kumar maintaining that the issue is yet to be finalised,” said Tanvir Hasan, an MLC who raised the issue in the Bihar Legislative Council on July 28.
Trouble erupted when the BSEB redistributed the languages in the intermediate syllabus following its adoption of the CBSE pattern in the state’s intermediate courses last year. The 500-mark syllabus erased the compulsory mother tongue status of Urdu for Muslim students and made it one of the 12 languages to be chosen for the main language paper. It kept Hindi and English as compulsory composition languages of 50 marks each. In the system followed by the now-defunct Bihar Intermediate Council, which merged with the BSEB in 2006, intermediate students had to appear in examinations for a total of 900 marks, of which 300 were for languages, one language of 200 marks to be chosen from a list of 12 that included English, Hindi and Urdu, and 50 marks each for the mother tongue (Urdu for Muslim students) and the national language.
Educationist, Dr Abuzar Kamaluddin, a former vice-chairman of the Bihar Intermediate Council, says making Urdu optional would prove fatal for the growth of both Urdu and Muslims in Bihar. “Making Urdu optional would erase whatever chances it had for growth in higher studies as students are more likely to go for Hindi and English in the present environment due to peer pressure and the growing invisibility of Urdu in public life today. It would hasten Urdu’s disappearance. Urdu should have been made one of the compulsory languages with at least 50 marks”. Bihar Anjuman Tarraqui Urdu chairman, Dr M.O Siddiqui accused the BSEB of disrespecting the national agenda of education laid down to suit India’s pluralist society.
The time-tested three-language formula has been playing a critical role in maintaining India’s linguistic diversity and protecting the languages of minorities.
The change is a misconceived step that would cause long-term harm to Urdu and Muslims”, said Siddiqui. But BSEB chairman, Dr A.K.P Yadav strongly advocates the case for a CBSE pattern of education along with its two-language system. “The CBSE pattern is the need of the hour when the world has truly turned into a huge knowledge factory in a tiny global village with English as its main fuel. This is why we removed the mother tongue to make English compulsory and promote it among students. Urdu can be chosen by students as the main language paper out of the 12 languages,” he said. A quiet pro-Urdu movement is building fast within the Muslim community against the new pattern adopted by BSEB. Dr Imtiyaz Ahmed, director of Khuda Baksh Library, said Yadav’s argument on promotion of English were misplaced in Bihar’s current education system.
“English is undoubtedly the need of the hour, but it has to be promoted from the primary classes and not in the higher secondary classes with such zeal. Even today, in Class 10 board examinations in Bihar, English remains just a 100-mark paper for which appearing in the examination is necessary for students, but passing in it is unnecessary in the Class 10 board examinations,” said Dr Ahmed. Marks obtained in English are not added in the aggregate of Class 10 board examinations and so have no impact on a student’s division. This is why thousands of students pass in their Class 10 board examinations without having secured the 30 percent pass marks in English. This system, initiated by Karpuri Thakur in 1971, still prevails unquestioned and is often held responsible for the poor proficiency in English of the state’s students. However, in Class 10 board examinations, students have to pass in the compulsory 100 marks paper of Hindi (national language) and Urdu (mother tongue) Despite the government’s initiatives towards the welfare of Muslims, the community increasingly believes the state government is against Urdu. The Urdu language controversy has all the ingredients of emerging as a major issue for minorities during the campaign for the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls in Bihar.
( Source: Tehelka)