Volume 8, No. 6, June 2026
Editor: Rashed Rahman
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The interface between language and politics in South Asia has had a vibrant, and often times, controversial history in the region. From the linguistic reorganisation of India’s states to the creation of Bangladesh from Pakistan’s eastern wing, public discourse around language has been tied inextricably to regional political struggles vis-a-vis the Centre. Language politics in South Asia has thus been shaped by the issues of linguistic identity, ethnic assertion and regional autonomy, and academic studies on the subject have largely adopted the theoretical lens of nationalism to analyse such movements.
The Punjabi movement in Pakistan has been included within the same thematic. Kicking off in the 1960s and 70s in Pakistan, it has been written about as a movement for “cultural revival” (Ayers 2009: 12) and identity formation spearheaded by the Punjabi elite for gaining either “symbolic capital” (ibid.) or for participating in the “shadowy political movements of the period, aimed at securing greater political economy” (Shackle 1970: 266). However, recent work has highlighted the role of the Pakistani Left in mobilising around the language issue during this period (Butt & Kalra 2013), a narrative which complicates the linking of language politics with ethno-nationalism and identity formation. This article is concerned critically with that narrative. I argue that the Punjabi movement presented a synthesis of Marxist ideology with a historical argument about the colonial hierarchisation of South Asian languages, to link language with class instead of ethnicity.
As members and close associates of the Mazdoor Kissan (Workers and Peasants) Party, these Punjabi writers, intellectuals, poets and theatre activists saw their work as an alternative model of cultural politics within the Left, critiquing progressive writing in Urdu for ignoring the centrality of linguistic form to art and literature. Academic work has rarely combined progressive politics and language activism in a unitary field of analysis for studying literary and cultural movements in South Asia, largely because of the enduring influence of the colonial categorisation of languages. Using the historical case of Punjab and the Punjabi movement, the article will also attempt to unsettle these theoretical and historiographical biases.
Language, nation and ethnic identity
Defining nationalism as “the process through which ethnic groups are mobilised for political action” (Brass 1974: 11), Paul Brass sees language as crucial to nationality formation. His analysis of the language movements in Indian Punjab and Uttar Pradesh emphasises the role of regional political elites in promoting a standardised local dialect spoken by this class. Further, this political process seeks to transform a particular ethnic group with shared objective characteristics into a political community with a subjectively formed consciousness. For this, the political and intellectual elites choose the symbols upon which to base their group rights, a development which Brass terms “internal value creation” (ibid.). The creation of internal values involves cultural production in what is increasingly glorified as a ‘mother tongue’ featuring literature, music and art, which inculcate pride in a forgotten golden past.
For the most, the historiography on language movements in South Asia is grounded in this perspective. Sarangi asserts in her introduction to an important volume on language and politics in India, “[…] the language question is obviously related to group and community rights and identities” (Sarangi 2005: 5) and thus “linguistic politics has to be contextualised within the larger phenomenon of linguistic nationalism and its political economy” (ibid.: 21). Most scholars deem that language mobilisations find their basis in the ideology of modern nationalism introduced to India through colonial ideas and institutions. Thus, the vernacular literary movements of the 19th century are seen as the earliest manifestations of ethno-nationalist and communal sentiment.(1) In this regard, Anderson’s work on the creation of “imagined communities” through print capitalism and linguistic standardisation has provided the main conceptual apparatus in charting the consolidation of public spheres among urban, literate elites(2) that bring together language, region and often religion to forge new identities. Studies of the Punjabi movement in Pakistan have largely echoed this perspective.
The Punjabi movement in Pakistan
Studies of the Punjabi literary and cultural movement in Pakistan have reproduced the themes of regional assertion and ethno-nationalism. Shackle posits that the Punjabi movement corresponded closely with “the typical modern development of linguistically identified local nationalisms” (1970: 266), pointing out the role played by the weak central government of the 1960s in instigating inter-provincial rivalries. For him, this backdrop is critical to the emergence of a number of Punjabi literary societies in Lahore, aligning the surge of intellectual and cultural production in Punjab with “the shadowy political movements of the period, aimed at securing greater political autonomy” (ibid.: 245).
However, West Punjab cannot be easily filed away as a typical case of a “linguistically identified local nationalism” for “greater political autonomy” (ibid.). Since its creation, the Pakistani state has developed as a distinctly Punjabi institution with Punjabi elites dominating the powerful army and bureaucracy. Post-1972, with the independence of Bangladesh, Punjab acquired absolute population majority, and through this domination it has since secured for itself the lion’s share of the budget and seats in the legislative assembly. Pakistan is increasingly decried as ‘Punjabistan’ by the provinces of Balochistan, Sindh and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, who have claimed time and again and sometimes through militant insurgencies that Punjab oppresses all other regions in the name of national interest. As Ayers points out, given Punjab’s well-noted dominance in Pakistan, [the Punjabi movement] is hard to explain as an effort by political entrepreneurs seeking advantage through incorporation with, or resistance to, the ‘Centre’, as is the case with classic models of language revivalism and language nationalism (2009: 69).
Thus the instrumentalist paradigm presents a ‘confusing paradox’ when faced with the Punjabi literary movement in Lahore. Tariq Rahman identifies the same problem in his work on the Punjabi movement concluding that: Punjabis already have power which ethnicity would only threaten. This is why the Punjabi movement mobilises people not for instrumentalist but for sentimental reasons. The pre-modern sentimental attachment to a distinctive way of life, conveniently symbolised by Punjabi, is really what is at stake (1996: 209). Thus Rahman sees the Punjabi literary sphere as an expression of primordial rather than instrumental nationalism. Ayers on the other hand, pushes the reductionism of the instrumentalist-primordialist framework by positing the relevance of ‘symbolic capital’, […] for we see in the case examined here precisely what Bourdieu understood as a struggle for recognition – a struggle for a particular language tradition to gain acceptance as a legitimate language – in a context completely without the analytic interference(3) of economic, political or even demographic distractions (Ayers 2008:935).
According to her, the Punjabi language movement is a struggle for winning Punjabi prominence, justified entirely on aesthetic grounds and pursued by the active creation of a well-respected Punjabi literary sphere (Ayers 2009: 69). Ayers’ argument in Speaking like a state relies heavily on two Punjabi intellectuals, Hanif Ramay and Fakhar Zaman. Ramay and Zaman were both prominent leaders of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). Ramay served as governor and chief minister of the Punjab in the 1970s before developing differences with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and Fakhar Zaman served as president of the party’s cultural wing before going on to become chairman of the Pakistan Academy of Letters in Islamabad. Much like the populist ideology of the party they were aligned with, Ramay and Zaman’s language activism represented a blend of centrist Pakistani nationalism with regional pride and socialist rhetoric.
Ayesha Jalal demonstrates the coalescence of Pakistani statehood with Punjabi nationalism in Hanif Ramay’s Punjab ka muqaddima, in which he describes the loss of Punjabi language and identity as a sacrifice rendered for the cause of Pakistan (Jalal 1995). The implied suggestion for the Baloch, Sindhi and Pashtun is to follow suit – and we are brought back to an assertion of Pakistani nationhood through the circuitous path of a statist Punjabi regionalism. While this kind of discourse continues to range across organisations involved in Punjabi language activism and “cultural revival” as Ayers terms it, recent work by Virinder Kalra and Waqas Butt addresses what they have identified as two main gaps in the literature on the Punjabi movement in West Punjab (2013).
The first is the absence of an account of the role of the Left in mobilising around the language issue in Pakistan, and second, a neglect of places other than Lahore as the focus of Punjabi language and literary activism (ibid.). The Punjabi movement at its inception in the early 1960s was shaped critically by radical Left-wing intellectuals, a strand that remains considerably influential in Punjabi literary circles. Kalra and Butt highlight in particular the role of the Mazdoor Kissan Party and the Left-leaning National Students Federation, emphasising the connections between party activists and Punjabi literary figures and the need to re-read Punjabi literature with an eye to “the literary method rooted in Marxist methodologies that [these] language activists deployed” (ibid.). Such an approach offers a fundamentally different reading of the Punjabi movement in Pakistan painting a complex picture of the ideological currents that have clashed, converged and co-existed in the movement’s history.
Sarangi points out the importance of paying attention to the “alternative, non-conventional and at times radical social and political histories underneath (my emphasis) the discourses of community, culture, region, nation, and state” (Sarangi 2005: 2). My contention is that as the case of Punjabi language activism by certain sections of the Pakistani Left indicates, these discourses often become grafted onto radical cultural or linguistic politics due to the fundamental linking of language politics with nationalism in theory.
So, what stoked the interest of the Pakistani Left in language politics? The following section offers a longer historical view of language in South Asia, underscoring the colonial processes that shaped language as a marker of class, power and status along with ethnicity. The marginalised position of Punjabi under colonialism and its postcolonial continuities were central to its appeal for the Left.
Colonial knowledge and linguistic hierarchy
Mitchell has demonstrated how colonial forms of knowledge caused transformations in language that led to its objectification (Mitchell 2009). The manner of the colonial study of grammar, vocabulary and literature led to a move away from complementarity between languages towards a parallelism: literary production, educational practice, the writing of history, the imagination of genres, and eventually the assertion of sociopolitical identity and geographical divisions have all been reorganised in relation to vernacular languages in India during the past 150 years […] by the end of the 19th century, practices that once moved across multiple languages began to be governed by the logic of parallel mother tongues (Mitchell 2005: 445).
Prior to this development it was usual to sing in Telegu, study philosophy in Sanskrit and speak Tamil in the marketplace. This was because languages were not conceived of as bounded, total entities containing genres within themselves. For example, ‘Tamil’ for us contains Tamil music, Tamil literature, Tamil theatre, etc. (ibid.). For Mitchell, the emergence of parallel mother tongues encouraged and made possible the consolidation of a linguistic politics that stressed ethnic identity, affective attachment to local culture and regional nationalism in India. The historiographical link between nationalism and language can thus be traced to colonial processes of linguistic objectification.
However, colonial knowledge did not just make languages parallel, it also placed them in a hierarchical relationship to each other. As Cohn reveals, colonial knowledge about languages institutionalised the so- called distinction between ‘classical’ and ‘vulgar’ tongues (Cohn 1996: 33). For example, the Persian Department was the most prestigious at Fort William College, as Persian, Sanskrit and Arabic were considered comparable to the classical European languages of Greek and Latin (ibid.: 24f.). On the other hand, commonly spoken languages were understood to be “fallen, broken, or corrupt versions of some pure, authentic, coherent, logically formed prior language” (ibid.: 33).
Despite the contempt for the spoken languages of India, the instrumentalities of rule dictated that the regime train its officers in certain vernaculars, the prime example being Hindustani. This was developed especially as a “language of command” (ibid.) to marshal the lowly servant and sepoy. In this way, Persian along with Arabic and Sanskrit retained its scholarly and literary status as a ‘classical tongue’, and languages like Urdu, Tamil and Bengali became the languages of colonial government as the Raj sought to vernacularise its administration. The reasons for this were both ideological and practical. More and more officials deemed that justice was “best delivered in the native’s own tongue” (Mir 2005: 397), doing away with elaborate requirements for translation and interpretation as well.
Thus, when the British finally annexed the Punjab in 1849, imperial policy dictated that Punjabi would be the language of administration. However, this did not happen. Instead, the colonial regime went against its own language policy to institute Urdu as the language of government in Punjab. As Mir points out, this was due to both political and logistical reasons. Punjabi was the colloquial as well as the sacred language of the Sikhs, thus relegating it to a “rural patois”, “inferior” and “inadequate” for the purposes of British government was important for suppressing Sikh symbolic power (ibid.: 412). Second, by the mid-1830s, the British had already developed a large network of native administrators, termed the ‘salariat’ by Hamza Alavi (Alavi 1988), who were readily absorbed into the bureaucratic structure constructed for colonial Punjab. The salariat was the class of urban-based professionals whose distinct identity and culture as the governing class came to be cemented through Urdu, the language of their employment.
This colonial language policy had lasting effects for Punjab’s culture and society. As Rahman points out, it turned Urdu into a desirable commodity on account of the prospects of government employment it brought (Rahman 2011). By its association with the affluent urban Punjabi middle class, Urdu also became a prestige symbol. In colonial Punjab, “upper classes and educated people spoke Hindustani”, while Punjabi was the language of the “peasantry and lower classes in town only” (ibid.: 216). Thus, colonial policy reorganised the relationship between language and society in South Asia, forging strong links between class, status and language. While ethnic identity strongly informed the politics of language, class and collaboration with the colonial state were equally inscribed in the linguistic landscape.
Endnotes:
1. See Stephen King: One language, two scripts: the Hindi movement in 19th century North India (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995).
2. See for instance, Francesca Orsini: The Hindi public sphere (1920-1940): language and literature in the age of nationalism (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009).
3. Ayers, Alyssa: “Language, the nation and symbolic capital: the case of Punjab” (The Journal of Asian Studies, 67 (3), pp. 917-86, 2008).
Courtesy South Asia Chronicle
(To be continued)