Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [154]
One sign of Punjabi commitment to Pakistan, to the point in some cases almost of submersion in Pakistan, is that (in sharp contrast both to the other Pakistani provinces and to Indian Punjab), Pakistani Punjab has not been committed to the development of Punjabi as a provincial language. Instead, successive state governments have promoted the national language, Urdu, as the language of education and administration throughout Punjab. Urdu is also far more prevalent in society. Whereas Sindhis and Pathans almost always speak Sindhi and Pashto among themselves, educated Punjabis usually speak Urdu with each other, when they are not speaking English.
Sir Muhammad Iqbal, the great Urdu poet, philosopher and prophet of Indian Muslim nationhood, came from Sialkot in western Punjab. Pakistan’s two greatest writers, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Saadat Hasan Manto, were both Punjabis (albeit in Manto’s case from a Kashmiri family) but both wrote mainly in Urdu. Punjab’s finest writer of the present day, Daniyal Mueenuddin, writes in English.
So while Punjabi dialects continue to be spoken at home and there is a rich and living folklore in Punjabi, almost all public life is conducted in Urdu or English. The spread of Urdu is also encouraged by Pakistani television, by the Pakistani cinema (‘Lollywood’, because based in Lahore) and indeed by the passionately beloved Indian cinema from Bollywood, which uses Hindi – and despite assiduous nationalist efforts in both India and Pakistan to change the languages, spoken Hindi and Urdu remain basically the same language.
Much older influences than Pakistani nationalism are also at work here. Although quite distant from the Urdu-speaking heartland of the old Mughal empire, Punjab was still far more culturally affected by it than were Sindh or the Pathan areas. Equally importantly, Punjabi is not in fact the language of large parts of Punjab – or even of most of it, depending on how you define ‘Punjabi’.
According to a traditional Punjabi statement, ‘Language changes every 15 miles’ – just as it did in Europe until the rise of modern mass education and entertainment in the nineteenth century. So ‘Punjabi’ is itself broken up into numerous dialects. Meanwhile, people in most of the southern third of Punjab, from Multan down to the Sindh border, speak a completely different language, Seraiki, which while related to Punjabi is closer in some respects to Sindhi.
A movement for a separate Seraiki-speaking province has existed for many years, but has never got anywhere much. One reason for this is the entrenched opposition of the Punjab establishment, backed by the fear of national governments in Islamabad of the appalling can of worms which such a move might open (a new Mohajir demand for a separate province of Karachi leading to fresh Mohajir – Sindhi violence, for starters).
Probably even more important is the fact that the Seraiki-speaking area also contains numerous other dialects, or languages (like Haryani) which might be part of Punjabi, Seraiki, Urdu, Sindhi – all or none of them. Until 1955, much of southern Punjab was covered by the former autonomous princely state of Bahawalpur, many of whose inhabitants continue proudly to claim their own special identity, and even that they speak their own language separate from Seraiki. Other identities also cut across the Punjabi – Seraiki divide: these include religious affiliation (whether of the different Sunni sects,