‘What kind of question is this?’: Exasparated Javed Akhtar on Sanskrit, Urdu, Tamil and the politics of language

Learning words as a game

Earlier, asked about his mother, Javed Akhtar had begun with a soft deflection. “At this age I should be speaking about my granddaughter,” he said, before yielding. He spoke of a loss that shaped him: his mother died the day after his eighth birthday. His clearest memories were of the five years preceding her death, a period he called “very formative.”

He described a mother who made language a game, teaching him small words and meanings. “That is where my interest in language was created,” he said. She was a “ferocious” chain-reader of novels. I would come home excited, sure my mother would have devoured another chapter or two, and would narrate what she had read while I was away. “I am sure she edited the romantic parts,” he said, invoking titters. “Even today when I write a script,” he noted, “something comes to my mind which I had when I was six or seven … from her, from some novel.”

This reverence for linguistic heritage informed his wider philosophy. Born into a family of progressive writers, including his uncle, the poet Majaz Lucknawi, Javed Akhtar dismissed the idea that such a legacy was intimidating. “You should appreciate people for their talent,” he stated. “Getting intimidated means you are comparing yourself.”

“It is the way of life, someone will always be better than you, and you will always be better than someone. Your competition should be with yourself,” he told an audience member, who was worrying about her board results and the comparison of scores with cousins and friends that would surely follow. Akhtar, who is always happy to interact with youngsters, was quick to counsel the young girl. He also dismisse the idea of there being “a golden era,” observing that even before the birth of Christ Greek philosophers had been bemoaning about how lazy the next generation was, but there was no basis for this nostalgia.

Secularism is a way of life

His view on secularism extended naturally from this ethos. He called it a “way of life,” not a political lesson. “If one day you are given a lecture and you remember points A, B and C, that is artificial,” he said. “But if it is your way of life—the way you have seen your elders live—then it comes within you.”

He illustrated this with a story about his illiterate grandmother, who once stopped his grandfather from offering him 50 paise to memorise religious verses. “That was the end of my religious education,” Akhtar recalled. “She was a woman who could not write her name, yet she had this sensibility.”

Turning to the film industry, Akhtar contrasted the Bollywood of his youth with today’s. He recalled starting as an assistant director tasked with fetching an actor’s shoes or coat. “Today’s assistants are on first-name terms with stars,” he observed. “The assistant director calls the hero by his name—we could never have imagined that.” He added that it was a good thing.

He analysed Hindi cinema as a mirror of society’s changing morals and aspirations, pinpointing the 1980s rise of a new middle class as a shift towards “lower middle-class aesthetics” in art and politics.

His session ended with the flabbergasted rebuttal still lingering and a refusal to pit one language against another, and a lifetime’s work built on the simple, radical idea that words, whether Sanskrit, Urdu, or Tamil, are not weapons, but bridges.