Aslam Hayat on the Urdu Language: A Reflection

Throughout his life, Aslam Hayat maintained a conviction that would surprise those who assumed Urdu was merely a regional language of diminishing relevance: he believed that Urdu was one of the most sophisticated literary languages in the world, and that its apparent decline was the result not of any intrinsic limitation but of neglect, indifference, and a colonial hangover that valued English over everything else.

"The Language of the Heart"

In one of his most widely shared Facebook posts — written, characteristically, in the early hours of a Lahore morning — he wrote:

"اردو صرف زبان نہیں، یہ ایک پوری تہذیب کا آئینہ ہے۔ جب ہم اردو کو بھولتے ہیں تو ہم اپنے آپ کو بھولتے ہیں۔"

"Urdu is not merely a language — it is the mirror of an entire civilisation. When we forget Urdu, we forget ourselves."

This was not romanticism. It was a carefully considered intellectual position. He understood that language carries culture in its grammar, its idiom, its poetry, and its prose — and that to abandon a language is to lose access to the particular way of seeing the world that it embodies.

The Mushaira Tradition

As a young man at the University of the Punjab, he immersed himself in the mushaira tradition — the classical Urdu poetry gathering — and emerged with a lifelong love of the formal constraints and expressive freedom that Urdu verse allows.

He could recite Ghalib at length from memory. He admired Faiz Ahmed Faiz's capacity to marry political urgency with lyrical beauty. He treasured the classical ghazals of Mir Taqi Mir for their emotional precision and the way a single misra could hold an entire philosophy.

On Writing in Urdu Today

In later years, he became increasingly concerned about what he called "the self-colonisation of the Pakistani mind" — the phenomenon of educated Pakistanis who spoke English at home, sent their children to English-medium schools, and regarded Urdu as a lesser tongue suitable for servants and sentimentality.

He wrote and spoke about this with characteristic gentleness but also with unmistakable firmness. He did not oppose English. He was an excellent reader of English himself, and recognised its practical importance. What he opposed was the hierarchy — the assumption that thinking in Urdu was somehow less rigorous or less modern than thinking in English.

His Legacy in the Language

All of Aslam Hayat's major essays were written first in Urdu, then translated into English. He never reversed the order. The Urdu was always the original; the English was always a rendering. This was not a technical constraint but a statement of values.

He wanted his deepest thoughts to live in the language of his mother and his tradition. He wanted Urdu readers to encounter them without the mediation of translation. And he wanted future generations of his family — even those growing up in the diaspora — to have a reason to return to the language and find something there worth returning for.

This archive honours that intention.