Javed Akhtar busts myths about Urdu being a Muslim language: ‘If Hindi belongs to Hindus, try telling that to Tamilians and see what happens’

Also read – Success of films like Animal is ‘dangerous’, says Javed Akhtar as he urges viewers to be more discerning: ‘If a man asks a woman to lick his shoe…’

He continued, “They say that Urdu is a Muslim language. Really? What about the 10 crore Bengalis in the erstwhile East Pakistan? Malayalam giants like Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, were they writing in Urdu? All the Arabs in the Middle East, do they speak Urdu? In Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan… Where do they speak Urdu? Only in the Indian subcontinent. True, we were split 70 years ago, but it was all Hindustan, was it not?”

He said that it is equally incorrect to say that Hindi is the language of Hindus. “They say Hindi is the language of Hindus. Why don’t you go and tell that to the people in Tamil Nadu? Let’s see what happens. All this is nonsense. Languages cannot belong to a religion. They belong to regions. Can English be the language of Christians? No. Do Christians in France and Italy speak English?” He said that Urdu is a north Indian language, but while land can be divided, language cannot. “You can’t say we’ll have the nouns, you can have the verbs, can you?”

Javed Akhtar has always been an outspoken cultural commentator, and he said that many of the words that are used now were adopted because there was no logical substitute for them. “I will die before making a character say, ‘Tumne mere saare hukook le liye’. I will always write, ‘Tumne mere saare adhikaar le liye’. Similarly, I won’t have one friend tell another, ‘Mujhe tumhari avashyakta hai’, because, ‘Mujhe tumhari zaroorat hai’ sounds better,” he said. “Why am I writing in Hindustani? Because I am writing for Hindustan. I’m not writing for Urdu speakers or Hindi speakers.”