On May 17, the Prime Minister tweeted Ramazan greetings to the country, accompanied by a short recorded message. The greetings were conveyed in the Urdu language using the Nastaliq script. A furore arose amongst some of the more passionate followers of the Prime Minister, accusing him of minority appeasement, not to mention betrayal. A simple tweet generated considerable digital outrage.

It also brought out the curious position the Urdu language occupies in India today.

“I was invited to deliver a talk once, after which a girl came to me and said, ‘Your Urdu is so good. Are you from Pakistan?’ I was taken aback at first,” says Delhi-based visual artist Shiraz Husain. “If my Bengali was good, would I be considered from Bangladesh? What Lincoln had said regarding democracy, the same can be said of Urdu in India. A language by the people, of the people, for the people.”

Shiraz Husain is the founder of the popular Facebook art page, Khwaab Tanha Collective. Formerly an assistant professor of Fine Arts at Jamia Millia Islamia, he is now an independent artist and art educator. His work on Urdu literature has found a large and eager audience across the Internet. Husain’s posters employ a rich mix of arresting portraits combined with the text of poems, using both the Nastaliq and the Devanagari scripts.

Image Credits-Khwaab Tanha Collective 

The Urdu script has been a point of both fascination and phobia. Is it central to the language, and if so, is there a hurdle in engaging with it? “Not necessarily”, says lyricist Varun Grover. “Even in Urdu, there are unlettered poets like Rafiq Shadani all through history. They didn’t need letters and text to flourish as poets or to engage with the language.”

An increasing number of people are engaging with the written language by enrolling in Urdu classes. One popular place of repute in the National Capital Region is the Zabaan Institute, started by Ali Taqi in 2009. He initially began with Hindi classes for expats but soon started receiving requests from local people to teach them Urdu. Over the past eight years, he has taught over 2,000 people the language. Most of the students were in the age group 18 to 27.

“Maybe this current generation realised that Urdu is a part of their heritage too,” Taqi says. “Maybe because they grew up with their parents and grandparents talking about it, and it stayed in their minds. They might have decided to learn it since they interact with it daily, through conversations, because they love the poetry, maybe they watch Urdu TV serials. Also, if you live in a place like Delhi, you see it in the public space; it’s written on signboards. Anyone living here would realise it’s a language that is a part of their heritage. I think learning the language is probably a reclamation of that heritage.”

An oft-repeated lament is that the usage of Urdu is declining. Yet, if the numbers of the Indian Readership Survey are anything to go by, the readership of Urdu is rising. “People love romanticising things, and death or prospects of death are the easiest way to evoke romance,” says Grover. “Urdu is very much alive and will remain a strong language, sometimes hidden between primarily Hindustani Bollywood or most of North India’s love letters, now circulating on WhatsApp.”

Mahtab Alam is the executive editor of The Wire Urdu. He thinks journalism in Urdu needs to evolve its own, distinct language, separating the pursuit of the literary from the task of communicating news effectively. He also dismisses reports of Urdu being in peril, and the urgent pleas to revive and conserve it. “We don’t need to conserve Urdu,” he says. “We need to develop Urdu.”

The latter is perhaps the most pressing task, not uncommon to Indian languages in general. “Unless you make new things available to people, why will they read it?” Mahtab Alam says. “We need to move beyond literature. We have to produce material for social sciences and sciences; in that script and language, we need to develop new phrases, new terminologies. Without it, the language won’t develop in a manner that makes it a language of communication. We have to focus on content generation.”

A larger question surrounding the debate is the space and priority given to Indian languages and literature. “It’s important that you read Indian writers,” Husain says. “There has been a tremendous amount of work in literature and culture in Indian languages. We need to give back the space to our own languages. The many languages of India, they’re the different tastes of India. My attempt is that these tastes, without being tampered with, are presented in front of you. So you can have sewai from Moradabad and payasam from Kerala in front of you. Instead of rejecting them outright—you may like it or not—you should have the chance to savour it.”

A most appropriate piece of advice in the month of Ramazan.