Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

This fascinating book presents a disheartening account of the current status of Urdu in India as well as  many positive suggestions on how to remedy the situation. Urdu arose as a standardized (and highly literary) variety of Hindustani and has flourished in various regions since the eighteenth century. Although Hindi and Urdu are grammatically similar and differ only in script and vocabulary, as Ather Farouqui explains, in the twentieth century, the difference between the two languages has become political.

After India and Pakistan became independent from Great Britain in 1947, Urdu became associated with the Muslim identity. Because Urdu was not incorporated successfully into the mainstream schools, it now survives only as the language of the madrasas (i.e. the religious schools), which mainly educate a poor, underprivileged—but not so small (50 million)—section of the Muslim community (27). Here, F presents the case for integrating Urdu in secular schools. Currently, in many northern traditionally Urdu speaking areas, students receive no training in Urdu, even as an elective. Instead they take many hours of Sanskrit, Hindi, and English (xvi): ‘Hindi has been imposed on non-Hindi speaking people in place of their mother tongue. Urdu is not included even as a third language […] Instead, Sanskrit is claimed to be a modern Indian language and is thus invariably taught in this category’ (8).

The book consists of a preface by the politician Slaman Khurshid, an introduction by the editor, and seventeen chapters by sociologists, lawyers, Urdu-specialists, political scientists, historians, and others. The volume is divided into four parts. Part 1, ‘Contextualizing Urdu’, examines the historical and social situation after 1947 and how Urdu came to be a Muslim language abandoned by the Muslim elite. Part 2, ‘Urdu and identity politics’, presents chapters on Muslim religious and cultural identity. Part 3, ‘Civic space, education and Urdu’, raises questions about the role of Urdu in contemporary India. Part 4, ‘Minority language and community: Legal concerns’, deals with constitutional and legal issues.

Some statistics are interesting and revealing: although ‘Muslims form 12% of the population of India’ (40), only two percent of engineers and two and a half percent of doctors are Muslim. If Urdu is an important aspect of the Muslim identity, it may help to strengthen the language in the secular domain, which may in turn strengthen economic prospects as well. According to the 2001 census, Urdu is the mother tongue of over sixty million Indians (1)—about half of all Muslims in India.

In addition to making the case for preserving Urdu in India by incorporating it as a language taught in secular schools, this book has wider implications for language planning and the treatment of language minorities.