Learning Urdu

by Hannah Green

Everything starts to look like Urdu if you spend enough time staring at Urdu words trying to get them into your head. The script is fluid. Some letters can squiggle tightly or stretch long, sometimes letters stack on top of one another and sometimes they go side by side. It is this fluidity that makes Urdu so enthralling to look at, but also very difficult to learn to read. I’ll find myself squinting at a word in one of the more artistic fonts, wondering if a dot should attach to the loop on its right or the notch on its left.

Of course, the reason that I have these difficulties is that, for me, the language learning process is backward. Someone whose mother tongue is Urdu would have learned the vocabulary before trying to learn to read it, so they’ll know which interpretation of a dot makes a real word and which makes one that doesn’t exist or doesn’t make sense. Urdu writing also only includes about half of vowel sounds, and I ache for the native speaker’s instinct to know what these missing sounds are just by looking at the text.

At the same time, Urdu’s capacity for multiple interpretations, visually as well as semantically, makes it all the more compelling to me. I sometimes wonder at my motivation for learning this language. I had been interested in Urdu since I started to learn about the history of Islam in South Asia, and I also started to learn Hindi while studying abroad in India. (In everyday speech, Hindi and Urdu are nearly the same. The main difference is the script.) However, I don’t think I picked up an Urdu textbook until I saw the movie Dil Se and heard the following lines in a song. I would try to translate them, but I couldn’t do it succinctly and keep the ambiguity that they contain about an unidentified beloved.

Yaar hai jo khushbu ki taruh
Jis kii zubaan Urdu ki taruh
Meri shaamraat, meri kaynaat
Voh yaar hai mera sayyaa sayyaa

The song is Chaiyyaa Chaiyyaa, with lyrics by Gulzar and music by A.R. Rahman. It was a career maker for both artists, and is one of the most popular songs ever written, although I didn’t know this when I first saw the video. The video is a dance sequence shot on top of a real moving train in Tamil Nadu, India. The rhythm of the train gives a soulfulness to the dancers’ movements like nothing I’d ever seen. I still love this song and associate it with Urdu, but I sometimes think that I’m over-romanticizing the language.

I had this thought again last week when I took the long train and bus ride from Northwestern campus to the University of Chicago’s library, in search of the original text of the following Urdu poem by Azra Abbas. (Translation by C.M. Naim)

A dot might appear

A dot might appear from somewhere That could not be put
on any word
and the dot

alone
off by itself
would stand there
sustained by some illusion
waiting
for a word to come
on which it could be put

It could also happen
that after centuries had passed
all the words would decay
and rot away
and be absorbed
and nothing would be left

Only the dot
would be left

Before I could find the book I was looking for, I wandered through many shelves of books in scripts familiar and unfamiliar. Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati. No one else was around. The florescent lights directly above the Urdu shelves had blown out, so I had to use the light of my phone to look at the titles, standing on a stool to get my eyes right level with the books. All of this only intensified the mystique that I associate with Urdu. There was even something cryptic in the binding of the poetry books. The pages moved away from one another with difficulty. The writing sometimes threatened to run all the way off the page.

Some people study languages so that they’ll be able to study history. Sometimes I think I study history because it gives me a concrete reason why I study language. When I started to learn Hindi/Urdu beyond the basics, I was compelled by the symmetry of many of the grammatical structures, and by the ability of one word to color another by sacrificing its own meaning, a trait that has no parallel in English. (I’m talking about the word baithe in the sentence “Yeh tum kya kar baithe ho”, for example. Again, I would try to translate the effect of this word, but to do it properly would require a somewhat technical and graceless paragraph.) I can go on and on about qualities like these in Urdu, but have nothing to say about the quality of English. I don’t think I could describe it if I tried. It seems neutral to me, and I wonder if other people have this sense of neutrality about their mother tongue.

The desire to really own a foreign language the way you own your mother tongue might be impossible to fulfill. Before I could understand it at all, I would listen to Urdu speech or look at the writing and wonder what meaning could belong to such pretty sounds and letters. But native speakers probably wouldn’t think about this unless they were reciting poetry. The beauty of the language might have some effect on them, but it would usually be subconscious. That deep incorporation of the language into the psyche is the unattainable wish, but it makes the pursuit all the more alluring.

Hannah Green is from Madison, Wisconsin. She studies the history, literature and languages of South Asia, with a particular interest in Urdu and Pakistan. She is currently an undergraduate at Northwestern University, but not for long. As she waits in suspense to find out what will happen after graduation, she likes to do things like listen to podcasts about Pakistan and find pictures of graffiti in Iran.