How many Pakistanis and Indians are fluent or comfortable in English. I am talking about the masses.
And even among those of us who are good in English, we still like to talk in Hindi / Urdu given a chance.
South of the Vindhyas upper-middle class educated Indians talk to their Southern counterparts only in English. At the rural level the people can't understand each other. Were a minimal educated laborer from Bihar knowing only Hindi were to be transplanted into rural Tamil Nadu it would be hard for that person to communicate.
Which is why the Indian parliament has translators and Indian lawmakers wear headphones ; often wrenched off their heads and hurled at one another when the arguments get too intense. Mercifully in Pakistan we don't have that problem though at our National Assembly our lawmakers do hurl insults.
So far as the masses of India and Pakistan are concerned, Northern India in a belt comprising Haryana, Himachal, Punjab, Jammu, Delhi, Western Uttar Pradesh, Western Rajasthan would be able to communicate with their counterparts in a belt ranging from Sialkot to Multan, and Tharparkar about 100 km deep.
The communication would be verbal, as no Indians ( discounting a tiny minority Muslim population ) can read the Urdu script, and no Pakistanis ( discounting a tiny minority Hindu population) can read the Hindi Devnagari script.
Even the conversation has to be small talk . There is no literary, academic or cultural exchange. The vocabulary has changed.
It wasn't always like that. Literary persons in pre-partition Pakistan and India like Jagan Nath "Azad" and Raghupati Sahay "Firaq" provided a cultural and linguistic bridge.
Political divisions do cause culture and language to change. Bangladesh for example is developing a different version of the Bengali language and even though the script is the same as the West Bengali version the vocabulary has changed somewhat. Still an average minimally literate West Bengali person can get around in Bangladesh very easily unhindered by script or language. A Bangladeshi professor of Bengali could teach a Bengali language class in Kolkata.
That is not the linguistic synergy today between India and Pakistan.
As a comparison: A Hindi educated upperclass person from Nainital Uttarakhand if stranded in Murree would be able to move around fairly easily, but would be unable to read the script and read road signs and be severely hindered otherwise . This would not have been the case 73 years back.
When Pakistan's National Poet wrote:
Naya Shivalaya calling for unity, at that time every one could understand what he wrote and what
Shivalaya meant . To most Pakistanis today, that word is unintelligible. Indian's would understand if some one read the poem to them, but they can't read the script. Indian Prime Minister Man Mohan Singh quoted a line from the poem in 1993 announcing a new economic policy and what he said was nonsense to all his fellow lawmakers in the Parliament.
Elsewhere I had discussed the need for at least a small portion of Pakistani linguists to study Hindi in the Devanagari script. The generation that could read Hindi in Pakistan has died off.
It is extremely important to keep our eyes and ears open on the enemy. Language resources are a vital tool to know what the enemy is thinking. Apart from the obvious intelligence requirements there is a long term strategic advantage in monitoring enemy mass media and internal propaganda which...
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