How India is erasing Urdu
From Kashmir to Bollywood, Urdu, a language of love and resistance endures India's campaign of cultural erasure
By MNTV Staff Writer
NEW DELHI, India (MNTV) — As India marks Urdu Day on November 9, the birth anniversary of poet-philosopher Allama Iqbal, literary circles will gather for mushairas and readings to celebrate the language’s legacy.
Yet outside those auditoriums, fading signboards and silenced scripts tell a different story.
For generations, Urdu shaped India’s emotional vocabulary. It was the language of Bollywood dialogues and songs that filled cinema halls. It appeared in police reports, on signboards, in newspapers. A child could hear Urdu everywhere—from radio announcers to courtrooms, from film posters to street poets.
Today, that same language stands on the margins of public life, surviving more in nostalgia than in policy
Until a few decades ago, Urdu words were woven into everyday conversation even among those who couldn’t read the script.
Everyday Hindi carried its rhythm—words like intezaar (wait), mohabbat (love), and zindagi (life) belonged to everyone.
But a language once celebrated as India’s shared tongue is now narrowly branded as the language of Muslims.
A colonial division, a national wound
Journalist and Urdu columnist Afroz Alam Sahil traces this transformation to the colonial and post-colonial eras.
“Urdu originated in India and served as the common language of all Indians until the mid-nineteenth century,” he says. “After the 1857 War of Independence, the British institutionalized a divide between Hindi and Urdu under their ‘divide-and-rule’ policy. The Hindi movement in Banaras soon demanded Urdu’s removal from government offices, and groups like the Nagri Pracharini Sabha began describing Hindi as the language of Hindus and Urdu as the language of Muslims.”
That division deepened after independence, when Hindi was promoted as the national language and Urdu relegated to a minority identity.
“Even leaders like Bhagat Singh and Manmohan Singh read and wrote Urdu fluently,” Sahil notes. “Yet today, the number of such people has declined sharply.”
Fading from public memory
Faint traces of Urdu still linger in Old Delhi and Lucknow—fading letters on shopfronts, worn-out signboards written in elegant nastaliq.
Words once common in police vocabulary, like roznamcha (daily register) or maal muqaddama (case property), have nearly vanished.
Bollywood, too, has drifted from its Urdu soul.
“The Hindi we hear today on television still carries traces of Urdu, but the spiritual richness of the past has faded,” Sahil says.
“Anchors often mispronounce Urdu words, stripping them of meaning. In earlier times, Hindi and Urdu flowed together effortlessly—in newspapers, poetry, and film songs. Today, that connection is gone.”
He believes the marginalization of Urdu was never accidental.
“It has been sidelined by labeling it the language of Muslims,” he explains.
“At the same time, English words have replaced it. On television, mushairas have been replaced by kavi sammelans. Politicians are sometimes prevented from taking oaths in Urdu; artists face restrictions on Urdu graffiti; and city names with Urdu roots are being changed. Petitions even demand the removal of Urdu words from textbooks.”
Kashmir: erasure becomes policy
This cultural erasure is especially visible in Indian-administered Kashmir, where Urdu was the language of administration and education for over a century.
Kashmiri journalist Raqib Hameed Naik calls the replacement of Urdu with Hindi “a state-driven effort to homogenize the region’s identity and disconnect it from its cultural continuum.”
He explains that while Kashmiri is the native language, Urdu functioned for generations as a bridge between the administrative, literary, and social worlds.
“The privileging of Hindi, which has no organic roots in the region, symbolically erases Kashmir’s linguistic heritage,” he says.
“The trend has accelerated since the abrogation of Article 370.”
Naik sees the sidelining of Urdu in Kashmir as part of a wider ideological project.
“Under BJP rule, Urdu is being systematically removed from public visibility and bureaucratic life,” he says.
“In Kashmir, this erasure is particularly stark as signboards increasingly appear only in Hindi. It reflects an attempt to impose a Hindu–Hindi version of national identity on a region with its own distinct linguistic and cultural traditions.”
He argues that this effort fits within the broader Hindutva project—one that seeks to define India’s cultural identity in Hindu and Hindi terms.
“After Partition, the Indian state gradually conflated Urdu with Muslim identity and Pakistan, despite its deep roots in India’s composite culture,” Naik adds.
“In Kashmir, this has taken the form of displacing both Urdu and Kashmiri written in the Perso-Arabic script, replacing them with Hindi and Devanagari—effectively rewriting the cultural grammar of the region.”
The language that won’t die
Back in mainland India, Sahil insists that Urdu cannot be erased so easily.
“No one can abandon Urdu completely,” he says. “Even today, Urdu words appear in Hindi media, whether consciously or unconsciously. Heavily Sanskritized Hindi is often difficult for ordinary people to understand. Urdu lives on, quietly woven into our culture. It cannot be erased linguistically.”
That endurance now finds expression online.
“Digital education and social media have opened new doors for Urdu,” Sahil says. “More young people are learning and writing Urdu on their own terms. Instagram pages, online classes, and translation projects are giving the language a new life.”
Institutions like the Rekhta Foundation have digitized thousands of poems, while podcasts and collectives bring classical Urdu literature to global audiences. For many young Indians, Urdu has re-emerged as a cultural inheritance—something beautiful, not sectarian.
Census data underscores both resilience and decline. The number of Urdu speakers in India rose from about 28 million in 1971 to 51 million in 2001, before dipping slightly in 2011.
“That decline of about 800,000 speakers came mostly from North India,” Sahil explains.
“It reflects a growing preference for English and the shrinking value attached to Urdu in education.”
Yet globally, Urdu now ranks among the ten most-spoken languages in the world—its speaker base more than doubling over the last fifty years.
A call to action
For both Naik and Sahil, Urdu’s revival requires conscious participation, not nostalgia.
“We need a campaign to revive Urdu,” Sahil urges. “Teach it to your children. Declare it as your language in the next census, even if you write it in Roman script. Buy Urdu books instead of asking for free copies. Subscribe to Urdu newspapers. Share Urdu articles instead of only English ones.”
Urdu’s survival will depend on whether India can once again see it as part of itself—not as the language of the “other,” but as a mirror of its plural soul.
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