Colonialism, politics of language and partition of India
Colonialism, politics of language and partition of India
by Nurul Kabir
The Sanskrtisation of the Bangla language by the Christian missionaries like Carey, which found enthusiastic supporters among a section of the Kolkata-based Hindu elite, substantially contributed to the birth of linguistic communalism in Bengal, which, combined with other factors, eventually played a significant role in the political division of Bengal on religious communal lines in 1947. The empirical literary experience of Abul Mansur Ahmed (18981979), a famous Muslim politician and intellectual from East Bengal, provides a clue to the political consequence of divisive linguistic communalism.
In the mid-1920s, the Bhattachariya and Sons, a Kolkata-based famous publishing house of the time, refused to publish Abul Mansur Ahmed, one of the finest ever Bengali prose writers, as he had refused to add an index of the meanings of some widely used Bangla words of Arab and Persian origin like Allah (God) and roja (fasting in the month of Ramadan). Mansur Ahmeds argument was simple: through wide use by the Muslims of Bengal for several hundred of years, words like Allah (God) and roja, just as jangal (jungle) and janala (window) of Dutch origin, have naturally become part of the Bangla vocabulary. But the Hindu publisher refused to accept the logic and insisted on incorporating at the end of the book an index of meaning for words like Allah as Ishwar and roja as upabash, et cetera.
Angry at the request of the Hindu publisher for adding to the book an index of meanings of the Bangla words widely spoken by the Muslims of Bengal, Mansur Ahmed told the publisher that he would entertain the suggestion, provided the publisher asked his Hindu writers to provide an index of the meaning of the words like Ishwar as Allah and Upabash as roja. The condition angered the publisher and he finally refused to publish Mansur Ahmeds book, although he had unequivocally admitted that the stories and language of the manuscript were wonderful, and the book would definitely be a popular one. [Abul Mansur Ahmed, Atmakatha (Memoirs), Ahmed Publishing House, Dhaka, Second Printing, 2009, pp 205-206]
In another instance, the Textbook Committee of Bengal, comprising Hindu officials, rejected Abul Mansur Ahmeds book, Naya Para (New Reading), a wonderful storybook for children, to be a part of the primary school curriculum in 1937 for his use of certain Arabic and Persian words like Khoda (God) and pani (water). The officials of the committee argued that such words would hurt the religious sentiment of the Hindu students.
In reply to the contention, Ahmed told the textbook authorities that if the words like Ishwar (God) and jal (water) had not hurt the religious sentiment of Muslim students for more than past hundred years, then words like Khoda should not hurt the Hindu sentiments today. The argument did not help. Even the erstwhile Muslim premier of Bengal, AK FazlulHaque, who was also in charge of the ministry of education, failed to change the mind of the textbook authorities in question. [ibid, p 208] Ahmed ultimately had a new realisation that the most of the elite of the minority Hindu community refused to accept the spoken language of the majority Muslim community of Bengal.
Rabindranath Thakur, though himself did not use many Arabic and Persian words used by the Muslims of Bengal in their daily life, observed that powerful Muslim writers should adequately depict the lifestyle of the Muslims in their literary works. In response to a letter from Abul Fazal, a Muslim prose writer from East Bengal, Thakur wrote in September 1941 that Bangla literature would not be affected, if the words used in the day-to-day life of the Muslim society naturally enters the [written Bangla] language in depicting their lifestyle. It would rather enrich the literature. See, Bangla Bhashai Arbi-Farsi Shabda: Rabindranath- Abul Fazaler Patralap(Arabic and Persian words in the Bangla language: Exchange of letters between Rabindranath and Abul Fazal, in Mahbub Ullah (ed.), op-cit, p 1258.
In response to Rabindranath Thakurs letter, Abul Fazal politely complained that the lives of the Muslim tenants of his zamindari estate at Shilaidaha of East Bengal, where he wrote the wonderful short stories of the Galapaguccha, could not become any component of his literary exercise, although the Muslim tenants held Thakur in high esteem. Fazal also regretted in the letter, sent in September 1941, that the lack of the sense of responsibility of the politicians and the newspaper editors had been contributing to the widening of the gulf between Hindus and Muslims.] Mansur Ahmed told the annual conference of the Progressive Writers Association in 1943: I do not know whether or not a political Pakistan will emerge in India, but what I am sure about is, given the way writers of the Hindu community and the education department have been ignoring the use of the spoken language of the Muslim majority community of Bengal in their literary works and textbooks, a literary Pakistan will be created in Bengal. [ibid, pp 222-223]
Not surprisingly, a staunch secularist and Congressite for years, Abul Mansur Ahmed and the like eventually left Congress for the Muslim League via the Krishak-Praja Party. This was also not surprising that the Muslim majority East Bengal became part of Pakistan in 1947. The linguistic communalism, indeed, played a role in the political division of Bengal.
However, despite the colonial missionaries bias against Muslims and their grammarians liking for Sanskritised vernaculars, the beginning of the missionary activism, which was aimed at proselytisation of Indians, hardly had anything to do with attaining any political objective. The politicking about the language began with John Borthwick Gilchrist, who first identified language with script and religion in the subcontinent.
Gilchrist identified three different styles of Hindustani: [F]irst a highly Persianised and urbane variety of Hindustani in Persian script practiced in the courtly centers with a large concentration of Muslims, which he associated with Muslims; second, a rustic and rural Hindi/Hindavi largely free of the influence of Persian and Arabic words, spoken largely in the countryside with a predominantly Hindu population, which he identified with Hindus; and a third, a middle style between the two which was neither heavily Persianised nor rustic, but was close to a polite speech with an admixture of Persian and Arabic words assimilated into it. [Sanjay Kumar, Fault lines of Hindi and Urdu, Frontline, Chennai, India, Volume 29, Number 15, July 28-August 10, 2012]
Sanjay Kumar argues that, during his stint at the Fort William College in Kolkata, Gilchrist actively promoted two different styles as two different languages Hindustanee in Persian script, which came to be associated with Urdu, and Hindavi/Hindui in Nagri script, from which all foreign (Arabic/Persian) words were purged. This differentiation and dichotomy were to prove providential and were to influence and shape subsequent colonial language policies. [ibid]
Alok Rai, on the other hand, describes the process through which the linguistic division came to take shape at the academic sphere of the Fort William College, which was set up at Kolkata in 1800 to teach the East India Companys newly appointed officers in the Hindustani.
Head of the department of Hindustani at the Fort William, Gilchrist supervised a team of local scholars who included Inshaallah Khan and Laloji Lal. Inshaallah Khans aspiration was to write an authentic Hindavi, abjuring both Perso-Arabic and Sanskritic excess. Lalloji Lal, on the other hand, was for Sanskritised Hindi by excising alien words from the mixed Urdu language of [Mughal Emperor] Akbars camp-followers.
Meanwhile, as Alok Rai argues, [T]he pandits and munshis who were appointed found themselves coerced into developing two gradually divergent registers, one leaning towards the Sanskrit end of the lexical spectrum, the other towards the perso-Arabic. [Alok Rai, op-cit, p 22] Thus, the Fort William College gave the institutional recognition of the notion that there were in fact two ways of doing Hindustani one which used the available and mixed language, and another from which the Arabic-Persian words (i.e. words of Muslim origin) had been removed in order to produce a language more suitable to Hindus. [ibid]
Then, after the Hindustani language was linguistically divided on religious communal lines, the British colonial regime decided, in 1837, to replace Persian with Hindustanee in Persian script in the North-Western Province, Bihar and Central India. The policy in effect resulted in the use of heavily Persianised Urdu, which was, as Sanjay Kumar observes, hardly distinguishable from Persian since Perso-Arabic terminology of Persian remained intact with only Hindustanee verbs substituting for Persian verbs. But the government continued to patronise the heavily Persianised Urdu as the language of administration.
Sanjay Kumar argues that the policy had a threefold consequence: One, the majority of people who were familiar with Hindi in Nagri script were denied the opportunity of government employment. Two, the whole purpose of introducing the vernacular as the language of the lower court and the administration so as to comprehensible to people was defeated, since a heavily Persianised Urdu continued to be used. Three, this led to further dichotomisation between Urdu and Hindi. [Sanjay Kumar, op-cit]
The social implication of the linguistic consequence in question was obvious: The official patronage of Urdu created a sense of discontent among the emerging Hindi vernacular elite and middle classes, which led to a demand for introducing Nagri script as the court character (language). This demand was to develop into a full-scale agitation in the 1860s and onwards in which supporters of both Urdu and Hindi were to be aligned on opposite sides, making claims and counterclaims in support of their respective language. [ibid]
The newly created social dynamics centring the scripts brought in a new political equation in the colonial India. Sanjya Kumar rightly points out: [T]wo scripts came to be associated not only with Urdu and Hindi respectively but also with two religious communities, Muslims and Hindus. A new equation emerged: Persian/Nashtalikh-Urdu-Muslim and Nagri-Hindi-Hindu. [ibid]
In order to communalise Indian politics on religious lines, the British colonial regimes had Hundustani in Persian script in some regions, while Hindustani in Devanagri script in others. For example, in April 1900, the lieutenant governor of North Western Frontier Province & Oudh, Sir Anthony MacDonnell, issued an order allowing the use of Devanagri in the courts of the province, sharpened the communal conflict artificially crafted over linguistic controversy into a large-scale political confrontation between the Hindu and Muslim populations of India.
MacDonnell was said to be have earned the reputation of something of a folk-hero in Naggar/Hindi circle much before he had ordered the use of Devanagri in the courts of NWFP and Oudh in 1900. Earlier, as officiating secretary to the lieutenant governor of Bengal, MacDonnell had been actively involved with the introduction of Devanagri script in the courts and administration of Bihar. The National Muhammadan Association of Calcutta submitted a memorandum to the governor general of Bengal in 1882 against the backdrop of the generally miserable condition of the Muslims of India, which pointed out that Urdu was popular with the educated classes, Hindu and Muslim alike, of Bihar and therefore urged him to retain Persian/Urdu script in Bihar. The petition was rejected. Christopher R King, a historian of Indian linguistic politics, notes, MacDonnell was instrumental in the dismissive rejection of this petition. [Christopher R King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India, Oxford University Press, Bombay, 1994, p 75]
MacDonnells deliberate use of script to sustain the colonial tactic of divide and rule got evident in the text of a recommendation that he had sent to the governor general of the NWFP & Oudh in favour of the Devanagri script. When his order regarding the use of Devanagri script in the courts of the province was awaiting ratification by the higher authorities, MacDonnell wrote to the governor general, Lord Curzon, on May 18, 1900: We are far more interested in [encouraging] a Hindu predominance than in [encouraging] a Mahomedan predominance, which, in the nature of things, must be hostile to us. [Alok Rai, op-cit, p 19]
Clearly, the colonial historiographers, linguists and administrators used the Indian languages and scripts as political tools to socially and culturally divide the Hindus and Muslims in India by way of putting in concerted efforts for a century. Then, in the midst of emotionally charged social and cultural debates among Hindus and Muslims over language and script, the colonial rulers successfully managed, as we have already seen, to get floated two acrimonious political parties the Indian National Congress and the All India Muslim League. The Congress, dominated by the Hindus, and the League, exclusively for the Muslims, failed to take the contemporary politics out of the linguistic equation, Persian-Urdu-Muslim and Nagri-Hindi-Hindu, which would eventually seal the fate of the people of the subcontinent, as Sanjay Kumar observes, dividing it into a Muslim Pakistan and a largely Hindu India in the twentieth century. Instead, the leaders of both the Congress and the League rather took active parts in facilitating the process.
While presenting his political programme for the attainment of Sawraj by the people of India by all legitimate and peaceful means at the Nagpur session of the Congress in 1920, Gandhi advocated for conducting all the meeting of the party in Indias national language, which to him, by then, was Hindi in Devanagri script. He presented before the session his political thesis on Hind Sawraj, Indian Home Rule in other words, in the Hindi language. Later, while attending the Congress session held at Lucknow, Gandhi argued that unless the business of the Congress was conducted in Hindi, instead of English, Swaraj was not possible. In provincial matters, the provincial languages may be used, but national question ought to be deliberated in the national language only.
The Muslim League followed suit. During the Lucknow session of the All India Muslim League held in 1936, a delegate from the UP moved a resolution, seeking Urdu to be the language of Muslim India. The proposed resolution, however, was strongly opposed by the delegates from Bengal. Justice Muhammad Habibur Rahman writes that the controversial question was eventually resolved, for the time being, by Jinnahs intervention, and a compromise resolution was adopted, saying: [W]herever Urdu language is the language of the area its unhampered development and use should be upheld, and where it is not the predominant language, adequate arrangements should be made for teaching it as an optional subject. [Muhammad Habibur Rahman, Tagore, Jinnah, Gandhi and Bose on Language Question, Tagore, Ibsen and Other Essays, Adorn Publications, Dhaka, 2008, p 58]
To be continued
Colonialism, politics of language and partition of India
by Nurul Kabir
The Sanskrtisation of the Bangla language by the Christian missionaries like Carey, which found enthusiastic supporters among a section of the Kolkata-based Hindu elite, substantially contributed to the birth of linguistic communalism in Bengal, which, combined with other factors, eventually played a significant role in the political division of Bengal on religious communal lines in 1947. The empirical literary experience of Abul Mansur Ahmed (18981979), a famous Muslim politician and intellectual from East Bengal, provides a clue to the political consequence of divisive linguistic communalism.
In the mid-1920s, the Bhattachariya and Sons, a Kolkata-based famous publishing house of the time, refused to publish Abul Mansur Ahmed, one of the finest ever Bengali prose writers, as he had refused to add an index of the meanings of some widely used Bangla words of Arab and Persian origin like Allah (God) and roja (fasting in the month of Ramadan). Mansur Ahmeds argument was simple: through wide use by the Muslims of Bengal for several hundred of years, words like Allah (God) and roja, just as jangal (jungle) and janala (window) of Dutch origin, have naturally become part of the Bangla vocabulary. But the Hindu publisher refused to accept the logic and insisted on incorporating at the end of the book an index of meaning for words like Allah as Ishwar and roja as upabash, et cetera.
Angry at the request of the Hindu publisher for adding to the book an index of meanings of the Bangla words widely spoken by the Muslims of Bengal, Mansur Ahmed told the publisher that he would entertain the suggestion, provided the publisher asked his Hindu writers to provide an index of the meaning of the words like Ishwar as Allah and Upabash as roja. The condition angered the publisher and he finally refused to publish Mansur Ahmeds book, although he had unequivocally admitted that the stories and language of the manuscript were wonderful, and the book would definitely be a popular one. [Abul Mansur Ahmed, Atmakatha (Memoirs), Ahmed Publishing House, Dhaka, Second Printing, 2009, pp 205-206]
In another instance, the Textbook Committee of Bengal, comprising Hindu officials, rejected Abul Mansur Ahmeds book, Naya Para (New Reading), a wonderful storybook for children, to be a part of the primary school curriculum in 1937 for his use of certain Arabic and Persian words like Khoda (God) and pani (water). The officials of the committee argued that such words would hurt the religious sentiment of the Hindu students.
In reply to the contention, Ahmed told the textbook authorities that if the words like Ishwar (God) and jal (water) had not hurt the religious sentiment of Muslim students for more than past hundred years, then words like Khoda should not hurt the Hindu sentiments today. The argument did not help. Even the erstwhile Muslim premier of Bengal, AK FazlulHaque, who was also in charge of the ministry of education, failed to change the mind of the textbook authorities in question. [ibid, p 208] Ahmed ultimately had a new realisation that the most of the elite of the minority Hindu community refused to accept the spoken language of the majority Muslim community of Bengal.
Rabindranath Thakur, though himself did not use many Arabic and Persian words used by the Muslims of Bengal in their daily life, observed that powerful Muslim writers should adequately depict the lifestyle of the Muslims in their literary works. In response to a letter from Abul Fazal, a Muslim prose writer from East Bengal, Thakur wrote in September 1941 that Bangla literature would not be affected, if the words used in the day-to-day life of the Muslim society naturally enters the [written Bangla] language in depicting their lifestyle. It would rather enrich the literature. See, Bangla Bhashai Arbi-Farsi Shabda: Rabindranath- Abul Fazaler Patralap(Arabic and Persian words in the Bangla language: Exchange of letters between Rabindranath and Abul Fazal, in Mahbub Ullah (ed.), op-cit, p 1258.
In response to Rabindranath Thakurs letter, Abul Fazal politely complained that the lives of the Muslim tenants of his zamindari estate at Shilaidaha of East Bengal, where he wrote the wonderful short stories of the Galapaguccha, could not become any component of his literary exercise, although the Muslim tenants held Thakur in high esteem. Fazal also regretted in the letter, sent in September 1941, that the lack of the sense of responsibility of the politicians and the newspaper editors had been contributing to the widening of the gulf between Hindus and Muslims.] Mansur Ahmed told the annual conference of the Progressive Writers Association in 1943: I do not know whether or not a political Pakistan will emerge in India, but what I am sure about is, given the way writers of the Hindu community and the education department have been ignoring the use of the spoken language of the Muslim majority community of Bengal in their literary works and textbooks, a literary Pakistan will be created in Bengal. [ibid, pp 222-223]
Not surprisingly, a staunch secularist and Congressite for years, Abul Mansur Ahmed and the like eventually left Congress for the Muslim League via the Krishak-Praja Party. This was also not surprising that the Muslim majority East Bengal became part of Pakistan in 1947. The linguistic communalism, indeed, played a role in the political division of Bengal.
However, despite the colonial missionaries bias against Muslims and their grammarians liking for Sanskritised vernaculars, the beginning of the missionary activism, which was aimed at proselytisation of Indians, hardly had anything to do with attaining any political objective. The politicking about the language began with John Borthwick Gilchrist, who first identified language with script and religion in the subcontinent.
Gilchrist identified three different styles of Hindustani: [F]irst a highly Persianised and urbane variety of Hindustani in Persian script practiced in the courtly centers with a large concentration of Muslims, which he associated with Muslims; second, a rustic and rural Hindi/Hindavi largely free of the influence of Persian and Arabic words, spoken largely in the countryside with a predominantly Hindu population, which he identified with Hindus; and a third, a middle style between the two which was neither heavily Persianised nor rustic, but was close to a polite speech with an admixture of Persian and Arabic words assimilated into it. [Sanjay Kumar, Fault lines of Hindi and Urdu, Frontline, Chennai, India, Volume 29, Number 15, July 28-August 10, 2012]
Sanjay Kumar argues that, during his stint at the Fort William College in Kolkata, Gilchrist actively promoted two different styles as two different languages Hindustanee in Persian script, which came to be associated with Urdu, and Hindavi/Hindui in Nagri script, from which all foreign (Arabic/Persian) words were purged. This differentiation and dichotomy were to prove providential and were to influence and shape subsequent colonial language policies. [ibid]
Alok Rai, on the other hand, describes the process through which the linguistic division came to take shape at the academic sphere of the Fort William College, which was set up at Kolkata in 1800 to teach the East India Companys newly appointed officers in the Hindustani.
Head of the department of Hindustani at the Fort William, Gilchrist supervised a team of local scholars who included Inshaallah Khan and Laloji Lal. Inshaallah Khans aspiration was to write an authentic Hindavi, abjuring both Perso-Arabic and Sanskritic excess. Lalloji Lal, on the other hand, was for Sanskritised Hindi by excising alien words from the mixed Urdu language of [Mughal Emperor] Akbars camp-followers.
Meanwhile, as Alok Rai argues, [T]he pandits and munshis who were appointed found themselves coerced into developing two gradually divergent registers, one leaning towards the Sanskrit end of the lexical spectrum, the other towards the perso-Arabic. [Alok Rai, op-cit, p 22] Thus, the Fort William College gave the institutional recognition of the notion that there were in fact two ways of doing Hindustani one which used the available and mixed language, and another from which the Arabic-Persian words (i.e. words of Muslim origin) had been removed in order to produce a language more suitable to Hindus. [ibid]
Then, after the Hindustani language was linguistically divided on religious communal lines, the British colonial regime decided, in 1837, to replace Persian with Hindustanee in Persian script in the North-Western Province, Bihar and Central India. The policy in effect resulted in the use of heavily Persianised Urdu, which was, as Sanjay Kumar observes, hardly distinguishable from Persian since Perso-Arabic terminology of Persian remained intact with only Hindustanee verbs substituting for Persian verbs. But the government continued to patronise the heavily Persianised Urdu as the language of administration.
Sanjay Kumar argues that the policy had a threefold consequence: One, the majority of people who were familiar with Hindi in Nagri script were denied the opportunity of government employment. Two, the whole purpose of introducing the vernacular as the language of the lower court and the administration so as to comprehensible to people was defeated, since a heavily Persianised Urdu continued to be used. Three, this led to further dichotomisation between Urdu and Hindi. [Sanjay Kumar, op-cit]
The social implication of the linguistic consequence in question was obvious: The official patronage of Urdu created a sense of discontent among the emerging Hindi vernacular elite and middle classes, which led to a demand for introducing Nagri script as the court character (language). This demand was to develop into a full-scale agitation in the 1860s and onwards in which supporters of both Urdu and Hindi were to be aligned on opposite sides, making claims and counterclaims in support of their respective language. [ibid]
The newly created social dynamics centring the scripts brought in a new political equation in the colonial India. Sanjya Kumar rightly points out: [T]wo scripts came to be associated not only with Urdu and Hindi respectively but also with two religious communities, Muslims and Hindus. A new equation emerged: Persian/Nashtalikh-Urdu-Muslim and Nagri-Hindi-Hindu. [ibid]
In order to communalise Indian politics on religious lines, the British colonial regimes had Hundustani in Persian script in some regions, while Hindustani in Devanagri script in others. For example, in April 1900, the lieutenant governor of North Western Frontier Province & Oudh, Sir Anthony MacDonnell, issued an order allowing the use of Devanagri in the courts of the province, sharpened the communal conflict artificially crafted over linguistic controversy into a large-scale political confrontation between the Hindu and Muslim populations of India.
MacDonnell was said to be have earned the reputation of something of a folk-hero in Naggar/Hindi circle much before he had ordered the use of Devanagri in the courts of NWFP and Oudh in 1900. Earlier, as officiating secretary to the lieutenant governor of Bengal, MacDonnell had been actively involved with the introduction of Devanagri script in the courts and administration of Bihar. The National Muhammadan Association of Calcutta submitted a memorandum to the governor general of Bengal in 1882 against the backdrop of the generally miserable condition of the Muslims of India, which pointed out that Urdu was popular with the educated classes, Hindu and Muslim alike, of Bihar and therefore urged him to retain Persian/Urdu script in Bihar. The petition was rejected. Christopher R King, a historian of Indian linguistic politics, notes, MacDonnell was instrumental in the dismissive rejection of this petition. [Christopher R King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India, Oxford University Press, Bombay, 1994, p 75]
MacDonnells deliberate use of script to sustain the colonial tactic of divide and rule got evident in the text of a recommendation that he had sent to the governor general of the NWFP & Oudh in favour of the Devanagri script. When his order regarding the use of Devanagri script in the courts of the province was awaiting ratification by the higher authorities, MacDonnell wrote to the governor general, Lord Curzon, on May 18, 1900: We are far more interested in [encouraging] a Hindu predominance than in [encouraging] a Mahomedan predominance, which, in the nature of things, must be hostile to us. [Alok Rai, op-cit, p 19]
Clearly, the colonial historiographers, linguists and administrators used the Indian languages and scripts as political tools to socially and culturally divide the Hindus and Muslims in India by way of putting in concerted efforts for a century. Then, in the midst of emotionally charged social and cultural debates among Hindus and Muslims over language and script, the colonial rulers successfully managed, as we have already seen, to get floated two acrimonious political parties the Indian National Congress and the All India Muslim League. The Congress, dominated by the Hindus, and the League, exclusively for the Muslims, failed to take the contemporary politics out of the linguistic equation, Persian-Urdu-Muslim and Nagri-Hindi-Hindu, which would eventually seal the fate of the people of the subcontinent, as Sanjay Kumar observes, dividing it into a Muslim Pakistan and a largely Hindu India in the twentieth century. Instead, the leaders of both the Congress and the League rather took active parts in facilitating the process.
While presenting his political programme for the attainment of Sawraj by the people of India by all legitimate and peaceful means at the Nagpur session of the Congress in 1920, Gandhi advocated for conducting all the meeting of the party in Indias national language, which to him, by then, was Hindi in Devanagri script. He presented before the session his political thesis on Hind Sawraj, Indian Home Rule in other words, in the Hindi language. Later, while attending the Congress session held at Lucknow, Gandhi argued that unless the business of the Congress was conducted in Hindi, instead of English, Swaraj was not possible. In provincial matters, the provincial languages may be used, but national question ought to be deliberated in the national language only.
The Muslim League followed suit. During the Lucknow session of the All India Muslim League held in 1936, a delegate from the UP moved a resolution, seeking Urdu to be the language of Muslim India. The proposed resolution, however, was strongly opposed by the delegates from Bengal. Justice Muhammad Habibur Rahman writes that the controversial question was eventually resolved, for the time being, by Jinnahs intervention, and a compromise resolution was adopted, saying: [W]herever Urdu language is the language of the area its unhampered development and use should be upheld, and where it is not the predominant language, adequate arrangements should be made for teaching it as an optional subject. [Muhammad Habibur Rahman, Tagore, Jinnah, Gandhi and Bose on Language Question, Tagore, Ibsen and Other Essays, Adorn Publications, Dhaka, 2008, p 58]
To be continued
