olitics around language had started well before the creation of Pakistan. It was during the British Raj that identity politics had started around the appropriation of Urdu by the Muslims and Hindi by the Hindus out of the lingua franca Hindustani, understood by nearly all and inclusive of words from most Indian languages. Modern Urdu and Hindi were created not only by natural change but also through human agency. As the national language of Pakistan, Urdu presently enjoys the symbolic status of Muslim identity. It is widely spoken in South Asia as well as among the diaspora communities abroad.

About the pervasive use of Urdu, Dr Tariq Rahman argues in From Hindi to Urdu: A Social and Political History that it is the most preferred language of inscriptions since “75 percent of the inscriptions on Pakistani trucks, plying day and night all over the roads of Pakistan, from Karachi to Kabul, Quetta to Lahore and Gilgit to the Neelam Valley, are in Urdu.” Pashto, the language of most of the drivers of these trucks, is used only on 14 percent while Punjabi, the language of 44.15 percent of Pakistanis, is used only on 10 percent of trucks. Sindhi, with 14.10 percent mother-tongue speakers, has only a paltry share of 1 percent. Other languages are rarely portrayed as inscriptions on trucks.

The first challenge to the dominance of Urdu was provided by Bhasha Ondolan, the movement for the use of Bengali in the domain of power in East Bengal as one of the official languages of the state along with Urdu. It was political defiance of significant proportions for the newly formed state. The challengers were the modern, educated and mainly middle-class professionals and students, nearly all Bengali speaking people, challenging the Urdu speaking elite and the West Pakistani ruling class. Dr Tariq Rahman argues in Language and Politics in Pakistan that “even more significant, from the point of view of the rise of ethnicity, was the shift from the Islamic image of the Bengali identity to one based on language and culture,” the change that led to the articulation of Bengali ethno-nationalism that contributed to the emergence of Bangladesh.

Since Urdu had played a role in Muslim identity construction in colonial India, Muhammad Ali Jinnah declared Urdu as the only national language during his visit to Dhaka on March 21, 1948. Reacting to this declaration, a Bengali language movement was started. It culminated in the tragic incident of the shooting and killing of Bengali students on February 21, 1952 (February 21 is observed as the International Mother Language Day by UNESCO with reference to this incident). The East Bengal Assembly passed a resolution in the backdrop of a province-wide turmoil in intellectual and activist circles. Finally, the massive defeat of the ruling Muslim League party in 1954 by the United Front in East Bengal elections paved the way to Bengali attaining the status of the national language.

When the British annexed the Punjab in 1849, Urdu, not Punjabi, was declared as the language of administration and education in the province. Urdu thus became a language of literacy and printing but was never taught in schools, even at the primary levels. Moreover, the religious propinquity between the Sikh revivalist movements and Punjabi language kept the Punjabi Muslims at bay in the context of literary, scholarly, artistic and pedagogical engagement with their language. Mohammad Waseem writes in Political Conflict in Pakistan that, spread over a hundred years, this situation has converted Punjabis in Pakistan into “linguistic agnostics.”

By and large, any movement for the recognition or projection of a language other than Urdu, the national language, is considered heresy. This was particularly so in the context of Sindh, where the Mohajir elite in Karachi remained wedded with Urdu and formed an exclusive identity as Urdu speakers while simultaneously wishing for all Pakistanis to become Urdu speakers. In India, language was accepted as a legitimate source of identity in the early decades after independence; “in Pakistan, it was understood as the source of a centrifugal tendency that would cause the country to disintegrate,” argues Waseem.

Another challenge felt by the Mohajirs to the dominance of Urdu was the demand from Sindhis for the status of Sindhi as the official language of Sindh under the 1972 Pakistan Peoples Party government, as part of its cultural indigenisation and nativisation process. Nonetheless, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto shrewdly and skillfully postponed this issue to an unknown future date while simultaneously promoting Sindhi cultural idiom, symbols and goods, agitating the Mohajirs. The National Awami Party, the opposition to the then ruling PPP, was leading provincial governments in Peshawar and Quetta. The party declared Urdu as the official language in 1972, instead of Pashto and Balochi, respectively.

Other than the symbolic and cultural significance of language as an identity marker, the state in Pakistan faced a persistent, though low-intensity, demand for new provinces based on language. The state, on the other hand, manifested willingness to create new provinces on administrative basis but not on the basis of language. In response, the state encouraged Islamist parties and groups and instrumentalised Islamisation projects to diffuse linguistic identity politics. The administrative and financial empowerment of provinces resulting from the 18th Amendment also rekindled demands for new provinces from their minority communities such as Urdu-speaking, Seraiki-speaking, Hindko-speaking and Pashto-speaking people in Sindh, the Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, respectively.

The writer heads the History Department at University of Sargodha. He has worked as a research fellow at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He can be reached at abrar.zahoor@hotmail.com. His X handle: @AbrarZahoor1