A Year-long Series on Education, Sponsored by The Aligarh Forum : – A Mirror on our Efforts, our Successes & our Shortcomings ; Stories of triumphs, tribulations and struggles of the Indian Muslims in improving their educational status, in illiteracy alleviation, and in their professional and social uplift.
By Kashif-ul-Huda, TwoCircles.net
Urdu, correctly or incorrectly has become a Muslim language. In last century and a half so much of Muslim history, culture, and religious literature have been in Urdu that Muslims of India have become emotionally attached to this language. Urdu is the mother tongue of millions of Muslims of India but right after independence there has been systematic efforts to kill this language in its own home land. Numbers of students enrolled in Urdu schools will provide some idea as to what is the future of Urdu in India.
All over India there are 3,523,243 students enrolled in Classes I to VIII in Urdu medium schools. Girls constitute 55% (1,932,116 girls) while boys (1591127) are 45% of this student population. On a ranking list of medium of instructions sorted by total enrollment, Urdu-enrollment ranks eleventh. This according to the latest data released under District Information System for Education (DISE) for the year 2010-11 by New Delhi-based National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA).
Girls form majority of the student population of Urdu-medium schools. Students at Hajjan Begum Sughra Hasan Memorial Urdu Girls School, Darbhanga [Photo by Mudassir Rizwan, TwoCircles.net]
But before you say “Subhanallah” and click away to your favorite Urdu website, consider this – Urdu enrollment is merely 1.89% of total student enrollment (2.15% for girls and 1.66% for boys). However, we can take some comfort in the fact that Urdu-medium education spans 21 states including some states not usually associated with this language. So we find over 15 thousand students in Orissa taking their instructions in Urdu and Kerala’s 1,254 Urdu-school students easily beat Urdu-official-language-state Jammu & Kashmir where only 638 are in Urdu schools. In Kashmir, preference is clearly for English-medium schools.
Then where are the Urdu-medium students? Though they span 21 of the 28 states of India but about 79% of those students are in just four states- Maharashtra, Bihar, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. Or if we narrow it down further then only Maharashtra and Bihar account for 58% of Urdu students.
This is consistent with what late Dr. Omar Khalidi found in his research “A Report on Urdu Literacy in India, 2010.” Commenting on UP’s finishing fifth in his analysis, Dr. Khalidi wrote, “ In the post-colonial state-sponsored culturecide, Urdu literacy is nearly wiped out in UP. Ideological opposition to the teaching of Urdu is harshest in Uttar Pradesh, regardless of political parties in power.”
Look at the chart for bars representing enrollment numbers for boys and girls and we will find that in almost all states the enrollment favors girls over boys. We may be tempted to exclaim “mashallah” at this point and start congratulating one another but let’s look closely and see what may be the cause of this phenomenon. I would like to draw your attention to the table which splits the all-India enrollment data for Urdu by each grade. Here again we find that in all grades from I to VIII girls are over 50% reaching as much as 58% for grade VII.
If we look at loss of students at each grade level we see that we lose 29% of students between grade V and VI. Is it because there are fewer number of schools offering classes beyond grade V? Or is it because families are sending their boys to English-medium schools while girls have no option but to go to neighborhood Urdu schools? Is it a preferential treatment for boys or security fear that makes Muslim families hesitant in sending their girls outside the mohallas.
A quarter of grade VII students fail to reach the next grade. We can just hope that they have changed their medium of instructions rather than dropping out altogether.
Urdu Speaking Population and Enrolment in Urdu Medium Schools, 2004[Sachar Report]
One thing is clear that Urdu literacy is south of what is considered Urdu’s heartland – UP, Delhi, and Bihar. But as Dr. Khalidi noted this is not surprising, “the combined literacy figures of the three states of AP, Karnataka and Maharashtra conclusively establish that Urdu literacy is now highest in the Deccan states. It is hardly a coincidence. Literary Urdu in the form of Deccani or pre (or proto)-Urdu began fully two centuries before Urdu literacy began in the plains of northern India.”
The Urdu-medium enrollment figures give us one side of the Urdu literacy picture. There are many schools even in UP that offer Urdu as a subject and then we also have madrasas producing graduates well-versed in Urdu ensuring that Urdu as a language will continue to exist in India.
Links:
http://www.dise.in/
http://omarkhalidi.com/
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