“What, then, shall that language be? One-half
of the committee maintain that it should be the English. The other half
strongly recommend the Arabic and Sanscrit. The whole question seems to
me to be – which language is the best worth knowing?” So asked Lord
Macaulay of the British Parliament on February 2, 1835. He went on, of
course, to answer his own question; there was no way that the natives of
the subcontinent over which they now ruled could be “educated by means
of their mother-tongue”, in which “there are no books on any subject
that deserve to be compared to our own”. And even if there had been, it
did not matter, for English “was pre-eminent even among languages of the
West”. English, it was decided, would be the language that would be
taught to the natives. By 1837, English replaced Persian as the language
of courtrooms and official business in Muslim India and took with it
the cultural ascendancy of the Persian speakers.
This sordid story of tainted beginnings is aptly recounted in Muneeza Shamsie’s Hybrid Tapestries: The development of Pakistani literature in English,
which traces the history of an often vexed but always intriguing
literary lineage from the nineteenth century until today. It is a tricky
tale to tell, not least because the moment of origin is also the moment
of imposition and conquest. The development of Pakistani literature is
directly linked to those deposed Muslims and their cherished Persian,
which adds further flavours of resentment and betrayal to the mixture.
The Indian Muslims who had dominated cultural production until then felt
the demotion, and hence the inauthenticity and subjugation of adopting a
foreign language, more acutely; Hindus less so, perhaps because they
were merely exchanging one set of conquerors for another. The
bifurcation, with each group turning to a different vernacular language
to anchor their evolving identity, would have more than just linguistic
consequences: it would result in two separate nation states. ... [mehr] https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/perpetual-motion-pakistani-writing/
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