Kolachi Punjabi
FULL MEMBER
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2015
- Messages
- 323
- Reaction score
- 1
- Country
- Location
A moving essay
Omar Mahmood: I am Urdu - The Michigan Daily
“The yoke of arms is shaken off more readily by subject peoples than the yoke of language.” — Lorenzo Valla
Four years ago, when my grandfather was hospitalized in the days leading up to his passing, he under went surgery. Part of the procedure involved having a tube put down his throat. When he woke up, two of my older cousins, both of whom had grown up in Pakistan and both of whom were doctors, asked him how he was doing. He opened his mouth but pain forced it to close, and he resorted to the pen and paper he was handed. His trembling, bony fingers, stained with the liver spots of old age, spelled out as elegant a note as he could and handed it to his grandchildren. “My throat hurts.” My cousins looked twice at the Urdu letters, suddenly so foreign, and shrugged. They asked my grandpa to write down his message again in English. It might really have been the last thing he ever wrote.
Once upon a time, if you hailed a rickshaw in Lucknow, India, your driver would welcome you with a couplet in Urdu, a gem for you to behold on your ride. But no more.
I have always been unable, for some reason, to behold my language without mourning inside. I feel Urdu is dying. I’m part of the Linguistics Club here at the University. In February, I came across a link posted on the group’s Facebook page around St. Patrick’s Day. A man named Manchán Magan had created a TV series out of a social experiment in which he refused to speak anything but Irish in Ireland. For me, this was confirmation that I was not the only crazy person yelling about the death of his native language.
The most poignant scene for me was one of desperation. Manchán decided to stand up in the center of a town square, surrounded by throngs of busy shoppers in open sunshine, and literally beg the people of Dublin to produce a single person who could speak Irish with him. A crowd of about 20 people gathered loosely around, keeping a safe distance. They considered him from afar with disapproving looks, as if he were crazy for speaking Irish in Ireland. There were the tourists who had no idea that there was even a language called Irish, and Irish to them had always been a drunken kind of British accent. Indeed, not a single person among all the hundreds could come forward even when Manchán begged anyone for even a single word in Irish, even when he pulled out money, a fistful of notes for a word of Irish in the heart of Dublin. No one. Not a word. Manchán bowed his head in defeat and walked away. In a comment beneath the video of this first episode, someone had voiced this almost unique judgment of mine:
I don’t consider people who don’t speak Irish to be Irish. They are victims of colonialism and nothing else.
The same way, I have said for the longest time that ‘Urdu-speakers’ who speak only English are nothing but English. In this way, the question of why I am so attached to Urdu is answered with a more perplexing question. I see language as identity. I am Urdu.
And I am, neurologically. As we grow up in a language, it is hardly too poetic to imagine that as our brains grow and neurons form new connections, that these connections develop along the grammar and logic of our native tongues. What if every native Urdu speaker has an indelible fingerprint of sorts of neural connections that he shares with other Urdu speakers? This fingerprint cannot be taught. It must come from being a true part of a community, a legacy that is its native language.
Here in America, we no longer hear the tongues that once echoed in the Appalachians and the Rockies, which rippled across the waters of Michigan. I once met with the Ojibwa teacher here, an aged gentleman named Alphonse Pitawanakwat. I asked him to say something in his language for me, and he obliged. I reveled in the words I heard. Those words belonged here, and I felt I was privy to an ancient secret. I wonder how many more will ever know it.
Our Spirits Don’t Speak English is a 2008 documentary that shares the story of those whose native tongues were metaphorically ripped out of their mouths. One elderly man with silver pigtails and a hardened, proud face gives his name as Andrew Windyboy. When he was younger, he was sent to two boarding schools where he was punished for speaking his native language.
“It was my first language. I didn’t know any other language. So whenever I talked, it came out. Cree would come out, and whenever I talked I’d get hit. I got hit so much … I lost my tongue … I lost my native tongue.”
He twists his neck in the suffering that he could not escape, his soul torn, his words falling from his lips. His words hate themselves, touched so cruelly by the accent of his forefathers. I watch a proud Chippewa Cree break down in tears before me, and I have to fight back my own.
“The only thing I remember is my Indian name. It means Old Man Eagle. It’s the only Cree I know.”
My grandpa was Urdu. He was the true inheritor of a vast treasure. A language that has its roots in the mother of all Europe’s languages, Sanskrit. A language that carried on the shoulders of great caravans the stories of so many pilgrims and empires. It carries yet the Vedic tradition, the Hebrew tradition, the Persian tradition. It’s an orchard whose pomegranates and guavas ripened over thousands of years, a winery whose stores were as aged as the Himalayas.
I write this essay in English. But my spirit will never speak English. My grandpa was Urdu. My father is Urdu. I will be Urdu.
Omar Mahmood can be reached at syedom@umich.edu.
Omar Mahmood: I am Urdu - The Michigan Daily
“The yoke of arms is shaken off more readily by subject peoples than the yoke of language.” — Lorenzo Valla
Four years ago, when my grandfather was hospitalized in the days leading up to his passing, he under went surgery. Part of the procedure involved having a tube put down his throat. When he woke up, two of my older cousins, both of whom had grown up in Pakistan and both of whom were doctors, asked him how he was doing. He opened his mouth but pain forced it to close, and he resorted to the pen and paper he was handed. His trembling, bony fingers, stained with the liver spots of old age, spelled out as elegant a note as he could and handed it to his grandchildren. “My throat hurts.” My cousins looked twice at the Urdu letters, suddenly so foreign, and shrugged. They asked my grandpa to write down his message again in English. It might really have been the last thing he ever wrote.
Once upon a time, if you hailed a rickshaw in Lucknow, India, your driver would welcome you with a couplet in Urdu, a gem for you to behold on your ride. But no more.
I have always been unable, for some reason, to behold my language without mourning inside. I feel Urdu is dying. I’m part of the Linguistics Club here at the University. In February, I came across a link posted on the group’s Facebook page around St. Patrick’s Day. A man named Manchán Magan had created a TV series out of a social experiment in which he refused to speak anything but Irish in Ireland. For me, this was confirmation that I was not the only crazy person yelling about the death of his native language.
The most poignant scene for me was one of desperation. Manchán decided to stand up in the center of a town square, surrounded by throngs of busy shoppers in open sunshine, and literally beg the people of Dublin to produce a single person who could speak Irish with him. A crowd of about 20 people gathered loosely around, keeping a safe distance. They considered him from afar with disapproving looks, as if he were crazy for speaking Irish in Ireland. There were the tourists who had no idea that there was even a language called Irish, and Irish to them had always been a drunken kind of British accent. Indeed, not a single person among all the hundreds could come forward even when Manchán begged anyone for even a single word in Irish, even when he pulled out money, a fistful of notes for a word of Irish in the heart of Dublin. No one. Not a word. Manchán bowed his head in defeat and walked away. In a comment beneath the video of this first episode, someone had voiced this almost unique judgment of mine:
I don’t consider people who don’t speak Irish to be Irish. They are victims of colonialism and nothing else.
The same way, I have said for the longest time that ‘Urdu-speakers’ who speak only English are nothing but English. In this way, the question of why I am so attached to Urdu is answered with a more perplexing question. I see language as identity. I am Urdu.
And I am, neurologically. As we grow up in a language, it is hardly too poetic to imagine that as our brains grow and neurons form new connections, that these connections develop along the grammar and logic of our native tongues. What if every native Urdu speaker has an indelible fingerprint of sorts of neural connections that he shares with other Urdu speakers? This fingerprint cannot be taught. It must come from being a true part of a community, a legacy that is its native language.
Here in America, we no longer hear the tongues that once echoed in the Appalachians and the Rockies, which rippled across the waters of Michigan. I once met with the Ojibwa teacher here, an aged gentleman named Alphonse Pitawanakwat. I asked him to say something in his language for me, and he obliged. I reveled in the words I heard. Those words belonged here, and I felt I was privy to an ancient secret. I wonder how many more will ever know it.
Our Spirits Don’t Speak English is a 2008 documentary that shares the story of those whose native tongues were metaphorically ripped out of their mouths. One elderly man with silver pigtails and a hardened, proud face gives his name as Andrew Windyboy. When he was younger, he was sent to two boarding schools where he was punished for speaking his native language.
“It was my first language. I didn’t know any other language. So whenever I talked, it came out. Cree would come out, and whenever I talked I’d get hit. I got hit so much … I lost my tongue … I lost my native tongue.”
He twists his neck in the suffering that he could not escape, his soul torn, his words falling from his lips. His words hate themselves, touched so cruelly by the accent of his forefathers. I watch a proud Chippewa Cree break down in tears before me, and I have to fight back my own.
“The only thing I remember is my Indian name. It means Old Man Eagle. It’s the only Cree I know.”
My grandpa was Urdu. He was the true inheritor of a vast treasure. A language that has its roots in the mother of all Europe’s languages, Sanskrit. A language that carried on the shoulders of great caravans the stories of so many pilgrims and empires. It carries yet the Vedic tradition, the Hebrew tradition, the Persian tradition. It’s an orchard whose pomegranates and guavas ripened over thousands of years, a winery whose stores were as aged as the Himalayas.
I write this essay in English. But my spirit will never speak English. My grandpa was Urdu. My father is Urdu. I will be Urdu.
Omar Mahmood can be reached at syedom@umich.edu.
Last edited:
