NEWS: Internet gives Urdu fresh lease of life (New Delhi report)

["Frederick Noronha" <fred@bytesforall.org>]

Internet gives Urdu fresh lease of life  (repeating)

By Ehtashamuddin Khan, Indo-Asian News Service

New Delhi, Oct 12 (IANS) The elegant language Urdu, many say, is 
dying.  

But its protagonists Ghalib, Mir, Iqbal and Faiz are now much more 
accessible to the world than ever before, thanks to the Internet.  

And it is not only for those who know the script but for all those 
who love the language that evolved in the 13th century due to a 
strong Persian influence.  

Poems, novels and essays of many leading Urdu scholars are available 
on Internet sites that also have English translations.  

Urdu lovers in the U.S., Pakistan and India have hosted most of these 
Web sites with the intension of popularising the language across the 
globe.  

Ahmad Suhail, a U.S.-based scholar, has portrayed this whole new 
world of Urdu on the Internet in his essay in a Mumbai-based monthly 
magazine Shayar.  

He says people were sceptical when the Net became popular, thinking 
it would hardly be beneficial to Urdu as all its development would be 
in English.  

"But today one can use the Internet without using much of English. 
And researches are being conducted on how Urdu-knowing people can 
benefit. And there are so many Web sites in this language," writes 
Suhail.  

"There is a Web site called Langoo.com from where one can download an 
Urdu keyboard without paying anything. You can even e-mail in Urdu 
and post your own poems and write-ups."  

Most of the Web sites in Urdu have focussed on famous poets like 
Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz, whose works have been translated into many 
languages and are known the world over.  

Urdu became popular as a language during Mughal emperor Aurangzeb's 
reign in the 17th century. At its peak, Urdu was read and spoken 
widely across northern India.  

But Urdu fell from grace in the 19th century during British rule. 
After India's independence in 1947, Hindi became the national 
language, sidelining Urdu further.  

In 1947, millions of Urdu-speaking Muslims migrated to Pakistan, 
which made Urdu the new country's official language.  

In India, according to statistics, just 44 million of the country's 
one billion people speak Urdu.  

In the last decade, Urdu has slowly been expanding its base to 
southern Indian states like Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. People 
who migrated from the Indian subcontinent to other parts of the world 
have also tried to preserve the language. Many individuals and groups 
are doing so by capturing space on the Internet.  

Says Mohammad Ehsan, a research scholar at Aligarh Muslim University 
who earlier worked for the Web site urdustan.com: "Our effort was to 
give a brief introduction of Urdu to those who don't know it. Some of 
our contents were in the Roman script. The idea was to just represent 
the language in the cyber world.  

"The Web site has debates on different topics and poems and articles 
of individuals who contributed to the site. But it was difficult to 
manage because we could not find good writers due to lack of funds. 
There were not many visitors to our Web site because we could not 
advertise."  

Suhail says most of the Web sites do not have serious content and are 
mostly aimed at the layman.  

Arjumand Ara, assistant editor of monthly literary magazine Urdu 
Duniya, says: "People who know Urdu are not very technology savvy, at 
least in India. Though we also run short-term training courses of 
computer operation in Urdu, our students hardly know about Urdu Web 
sites. Even I don't know much about them."  

Adds Mohammad Zahid, a research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru 
University here: "I used to spend a lot of time on the Internet 
searching for research material. But most of the stuff there are 
works of famous scholars that are easily available in the market. I 
could not find any mature academic work."  

But he still feels the sites are good for the language.  

"These sites are good for beginners or those who want to know the 
language. Most people can speak and understand Urdu but they cannot 
read it. For them the Internet is really useful because there are 
many Web sites which have Urdu content written in the Roman script," 
says Zahid.  

--Indo-Asian News Service