Opinion: India and Pakistan Are Both Failing Urdu

India built Urdu a home in its constitution, then stopped visiting. Pakistan gave it a nation, then handed the keys to English.

In April 2025, the Supreme Court of India spent an afternoon deciding the fate of a signboard. The Municipal Council of Patur, a small town in Maharashtra's Akola district, had displayed its name in Marathi and Urdu since 1956. A former councillor, Varshatai Bagade, wanted the Urdu removed, arguing that Maharashtra's 2022 language law meant only Marathi belonged on a government building. The Bombay High Court disagreed. So Bagade went to the Supreme Court. It disagreed too, twice, since it was upholding a lower court that had already ruled against her.

Justices Sudhanshu Dhulia and K. Vinod Chandran didn't stop at dismissing the petition. They wrote that treating Urdu as a "Muslim language" was a misreading of both religion and history, that Marathi and Urdu hold equal constitutional standing, and that Urdu is nothing less than the finest specimen of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, the composite culture of the Hindustani plains. It is a remarkable thing for the country's highest court to have to say out loud in 2025. It is also worth noticing what the ruling didn't do. It didn't fund a single Urdu-medium classroom, train a single Urdu teacher, or reverse a single one of the decisions, made in statehouses and school boards over the previous decade, that have quietly done more damage to the language than one councillor in Akola ever could.

The paperwork says Urdu is thriving. The numbers say otherwise.

Urdu sits in the Eighth Schedule of India's constitution alongside 21 other languages, and is listed as an "additional official language" in Delhi, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Telangana, and Jammu & Kashmir. On paper, it is a fully credentialed Indian language. In practice, it is the only major scheduled language, apart from Konkani, whose absolute number of speakers fell between the 2001 and 2011 censuses: from 5.01% of the population to 4.19%, a drop that pushed it from sixth to seventh place among India's most-spoken mother tongues, even as the country's overall population grew by more than 180 million people.

Former Vice President Hamid Ansari flagged the strangest part of that number in 2022: Uttar Pradesh's Muslim population grew across that same decade, but its recorded Urdu-speaking population did not keep pace: barely 1.08 crore Urdu speakers among UP's 3.85 crore Muslims, meaning the majority of the state's largest Urdu-speaking community no longer records Urdu as its mother tongue. Ansari pointed to a specific mechanism: state governments declining to staff Urdu classrooms or hire Urdu teachers, so that a language stops being transmitted long before anyone announces a policy against it.

Where it is transmitted, the record is not encouraging. A 2019 report on Muslim education found that just 0.8% of Indian Muslim children attend Urdu-medium schools nationally, and that even in Maharashtra, the state with the country's highest concentration of Urdu-medium enrollment, under 2% of students are in a school that is fully Urdu-medium rather than partially so. The same report cites Bangalore, where Muslim-run English-medium schools grew from about a dozen in 1982 to 450 by 2016, as the elite and aspiring middle class abandoned the language their own community had once organized its educational identity around. Where Urdu-medium schooling survives, the outcomes are bleak enough that a 2025 Maharashtra State Minority Commission review, convened by the community's own minority-affairs body, not an outside critic, found students in some schools unable to write their own names correctly, and recommended converting all Urdu-medium schools in the state to semi-English instruction. In Delhi, an Old Seelampuri school's enrollment has fallen from 669 students in 2021-22 to roughly 300 today, with parents citing both crumbling infrastructure and a stigma now attached to the Urdu-medium label itself. Karnataka converted 400 Urdu-medium schools to bilingual instruction in a single year, 2020, citing collapsing admissions; a hundred more are slated to convert their kindergartens to full English medium.

When the state does intervene, it tends to intervene against Urdu, not for it.

In 2020, Indian Railways announced that station signboards in Uttarakhand would add Sanskrit alongside Hindi and English, on the grounds that Sanskrit had replaced Urdu as the state's constitutionally designated second language in 2010. Critics pointed out that the 2011 census recorded fewer than 400 Sanskrit speakers in the state against more than 425,000 Urdu speakers, a ratio of roughly one to a thousand. Railways later clarified that Urdu was not being removed, only that Sanskrit was being added. The clarification matters less than the instinct it followed: when a state language board needs a symbolically "native" alternative to Urdu, it will reach for one with a thousand times fewer speakers before it reaches for the one people actually use at the ticket counter. Rajasthan's education department made a version of the same trade in 2023, discontinuing Urdu as a third-language option in some government schools in favor of Sanskrit, after a state minister alleged, without an investigation, that many Urdu teachers held fake degrees. Uttar Pradesh, meanwhile, has moved to strip Persian and Urdu loanwords from a 1908-era property registration law, on the stated grounds that the vocabulary is too complex for ordinary Hindi speakers to understand, an argument that could equally justify simplifying the vocabulary rather than replacing its origin.

The cultural infrastructure built to hold the language up in the meantime is not holding. Old Delhi's Urdu Bazaar, the historic bookstore row that once served as Ghalib and Zauq's own literary marketplace, has lost most of its shops: Lajpat Khan & Sons, Kutubkhana Hameedia, Ilmi Kutubkhana, Kutubkhana Nazeeria, and Kutubkhana Rasheed are all gone, and the five that remain keep their shutters down as often as up, ceding their footpaths to fruit-chaat carts. Ather Farouqui, general secretary of the Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu Hind, an organization founded in 1903 specifically to shepherd the language, names shrinking readership as his hardest daily problem. The scale of that shrinkage is almost comic set against the writers involved: Ghalib's collected Divan, the single most canonical text in the language, has sold barely 100,000 copies in over a century of print, and no single Faiz Ahmed Faiz collection has ever exceeded a 5,000-copy run. These are not obscure poets. They are the two names most people, in either country, would offer first if asked to name an Urdu poet.

None of this happened because Pakistan did anything better. Pakistan's failure just runs in the opposite direction, it never stopped claiming Urdu. It only kept the claim and let the substance go.

Article 251 of Pakistan's 1973 constitution names Urdu the national language and gives the state fifteen years to fully replace English with it in official business. That window has now passed nearly three times over. In 2015, the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Jawwad S. Khawaja, finally ordered federal and provincial governments to comply: translate laws and judgments, post signage in Urdu at courts, hospitals, and banks, run competitive exams in the language…all within three months. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's cabinet pre-empted the ruling with its own memo. Six years later, in 2021, a different bench, under acting Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial, heard a contempt petition and stated plainly that the federal government still had not complied. The court that constitutionally owns Urdu's national status has now spent over a decade ordering a government that constitutionally answers to it to actually use the language.

The institution built to make that transition possible has itself been quietly demoted. The National Language Authority founded in 1979, the same year General Zia-ul-Haq launched his Islamization campaign, was tasked with building Urdu's technical, legal, and scientific vocabulary so English could eventually be retired. It has since been renamed the National Language Promotion Department and its administrative status downgraded from an autonomous authority to an attached department of a ministry. In 47 years of operation, it has published roughly 800 books and 125 glossaries and reference booklets, the entire physical output of the state's official language-building arm, for a language that, per Pakistan's own 2023 census, is the mother tongue of only about 9.3% of the country it administers.

That last figure is the quiet joke underneath Pakistan's Urdu politics: the national language was never anyone's majority mother tongue. It was, as linguist Tariq Rahman and others have documented, the language of a specific migrating elite after Partition, and its promotion through the mid-twentieth century functioned less as language policy than as class formation…what Rahman's collaborators call "ashrafization," the process of making Urdu the language of cosmopolitanism and distinction against Sindhi, Bengali, and the country's other mother tongues. That project succeeded almost too well: today, the same English-medium school system that once served only the colonial-era Anglicized elite still gatekeeps the officer corps, the higher bureaucracy, and university admission, while Urdu-medium schooling has been demoted to serve the middle and lower classes it was originally invented to distinguish itself from. Urdu was never given room to be a working national language. It was given a rung on the class ladder, and English has since climbed above it.

The vocabulary itself has been renovated twice: once by the state, once by everyone else.

In 1985, a state television host on PTV closed a broadcast with "Allah Hafiz" instead of the centuries-old Persian-rooted farewell "Khuda Hafiz," part of Zia's broader Islamization drive, which ran alongside Pakistan's role in the US- and Saudi-backed Afghan jihad. The swap was framed as scrubbing a supposedly un-Islamic word for God from everyday speech. It is also, on its own terms, an invention: Arabic speakers don't use "Allah Hafiz" as a farewell at all, they say "ma'a as-salama,” which makes the phrase a uniquely South Asian coinage dressed up as a return to Arabic purity. It is the same move as Uttarakhand's Sanskrit signboards, run in the opposite direction: swap the vocabulary for a symbolically purer alternative, keep everything else about how the sentence is built.

Everything else about how the sentence is built has, in the meantime, been getting less and less Urdu. Academic studies of Pakistani television, ad billboards, news talk shows, and dramas including the recent "Chaudhary and Sons,” consistently find English words and phrases inserted mid-sentence into Urdu dialogue, not as occasional flourish but as routine practice. One analysis of newsroom talk shows found hosts reaching for English vocabulary specifically to assert authority or emphasis that they apparently didn't trust Urdu words to carry on their own…in the very medium meant to model the national language for the public.

The script itself is fraying at the same time as the vocabulary. Nastaliq, the calligraphic hand Urdu is written in, is unusually difficult to render digitally because each letter's shape depends on the one that follows it; Pakistani newspapers ran Urdu text as image files for years rather than typed text, simply because the technology lagged. Roman Urdu, Urdu vocabulary spelled out in Latin letters, filled the gap and never left: a study of Pakistani university students' phone messages, drawing on 116 users and more than 346,000 text messages, found Roman Urdu to be the default script for informal writing, not a workaround reserved for when Nastaliq wasn't available. A generation is growing up that speaks the language fluently and, in some cases, cannot easily read it in its own alphabet.

India's failure is communal: Urdu was recoded after Partition as a marker of Muslim identity rather than a shared regional inheritance, which means every classroom, teacher post, and signboard involving it becomes a flashpoint rather than neutral state property. A court can rule in the language's favor without that ruling translating into a single functioning institution on the ground. Pakistan's failure is classist: Urdu was made the marker of national identity by the state and the marker of elite status by the class that ran it, and once English took over that second job, Urdu was left to do the paperwork of nationhood: the constitution, the courtroom, the school curriculum, all without the institutional muscle that paperwork actually requires. Neither government set out to kill the language. Both simply asked it to symbolize something, over and over, without ever finishing the more boring work of building the dictionaries, training the teachers, or paying the printers that would let it also function as one.

Published For © Kosh-E-Lughat 2026