Myths about Urdu by Dr Tariq Rahman (Dawn (Pakistan))
"[On the myth that Urdu is a Muslim language:] For about 500 years of its existence nobody called it Urdu. It was called Hindi and had many words of Sanskrit origin as do other texts—until the 18th century.
"Then a language reform movement initiated by Muslim poets (Hatim, Mirza Mazhar, Nasikh’s students, etc.) threw out certain words from the corpus of the language. Among them were words like chinta (worry), prem (love), sundar (beautiful), etc. The movement was actually an attempt to create a linguistic marker for the cultural elite which was mostly Muslim. However, instead of being merely a class movement it became a religious one. Thus, Urdu was imbued with distinctive Perso-Arabic cultural content and served as an identity symbol for the Muslims of India.
"In the same way, after 1802, modern Hindi was created by weeding out Persian and Arabic words and using only the Devanagari script for writing. These new languages—Sanskritised Hindi and Persianised Urdu—drifted apart from each other and still serve as identity markers for Hindu and Muslim nationalism in South Asia.
"During the Pakistan Movement, Urdu became a symbol of the identity of South Asia’s Muslims. It was invested with emotional force and Maulvi Abdul Haq, who used to term it a composite language while in India, started calling it the mainstay of Muslim separatism.
"Similarly, Sanskritised Hindi became the symbol of the attempt to eliminate the share of Muslims in Indian culture. This political gulf between the two sister languages remains to this day—although at the spoken level, Urdu and Hindi remain the same language as all Indians who watch Pakistani dramas and all Pakistanis who watch Hindi movies will testify."
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