Annie Zaidi: Language of choice

The hall darkened. The screen lit up and I read the title in both English and Devnagri, feeling the different shapes of the alphabets on my tongue. This is a tangible pleasure for me and I kept staring until I realised that there was a third script on the screen. Nastalik.

I was so surprised that I forgot to focus on the next few frames, although it wasn’t so remarkable after all. Even until the 1990s, film titles routinely appeared in three scripts to cater to those educated in any of three languages — English, Hindi, Urdu. Yet, I’d forgotten that Urdu also belongs up there on the screen.

And now I’m thinking about it, I can’t remember the last time I noticed film credits roll in Devnagri. In fact, I too have switched to the Roman script when writing in Hindustani. And perhaps it’s better this way. Perhaps it doesn’t matter because all civilisations move from one script to another, one dialect to another. That’s how Urdu got made, a language that came striding in from the battlefield into bazaars, used first by rough-tongued soldiers and then by ferociously refined writers.

But film writers no longer write in Urdu. Film posters no longer advertise themselves in Urdu. Credits certainly do not roll in either Devnagri or Nastalik.

But what of audiences who have not made a smooth transition to Romanised Hindustani? Is there an automatic assumption that these people are illiterate — and therefore cannot read the credits anyway — or that they are uninterested in films?

Watching Paromita Vohra’s Partners in Crime, the English title also appearing in Nastalik, I was briefly distracted by thoughts of my grandmother. I remember watching films with her, late at night on TV. She wasn’t illiterate. But if she sat down to watch one now, she wouldn’t be able to read a single word on the screen — not even the title.

Then I began to think of an afternoon in Old Delhi, me distributing pamphlets to strangers, trying to create awareness about street sexual harassment. Those young (and old) men wanted to read the pamphlets, wanted to engage in conversation. But they wanted Urdu pamphlets. And I had forgotten that translations would be necessary.

And then I thought: this is how communication breaks down. We forget that Urdu readers also want to understand their environment. And they want to be entertained. But that would mean an acknowledgement of their language, even of their limitations.

Which made me think of Sahir Ludhianvi, who declared: “Ye jashn ye hungame dilchasp khilone hain/ Kuch logon ki koshish hai kuch log bahal jaayein.” He was saying that state sponsorship for Urdu literary events was like a lollipop for people who were promised non-discrimination (and not just in the context of language). A language is killed in many ways — by not teaching it in schools as a second or even third language; by not having any facility for legal or infrastructure-related documents being translated; by putting it in a box labelled ‘things that must be preserved’.

It was Shab-e-baraat recently, a day to remember your ancestors. I was thinking of Grandma. In my imagination, she’s waiting for me at some airport, totally bewildered since she can’t read the names of the airlines, whether the flight is delayed, or how much a cup of coffee costs. Or, she’s staring at a letter sent by the municipality, helpless. In my imagination, she’s allowing herself to be treated as illiterate and irrelevant, and yet, she’s smiling, clapping as I dance to a song from the latest Hindi film, the title of which she cannot read.

— Annie Zaidi writes poetry, stories, essays, scripts (and in a dark, distant past, recipes she never actually tried)annie zaidi