Saturday, October 15, 2016

Disowning Punjabi Language?


I am from Chitral and I don't have a direct connection with Punjabi as part of my identity, so don't take this post as an identity offended post.

It is extremely sad to see such notification coming from one of the leading elite school system of Pakistan, Beaconhouse school system. How can a local language be degraded to this level that it is used as a synonym for cursing? I am very grateful that I have been taking Punjabi language as my local language requirement in Habib University and I can't explain how beautiful the language is and it has such a rich literature that I am totally amazed by it. Learning Punjabi and reading poets like Bulleh Shah, Baba Fareed, Shah Hussain, Gholam Fareed, etc. has opened up a new horizon for my intellectual growth and the knowledge of Sufism.
Such elite schools would never know about the real taste of the language and instead of teaching the students the real sense of Punjabi, they ban it? What would you call it if they prefer English and marginalize a local language? We are still immensely stuck in the colonial acts and such elite schools which lead the educational system produce leaders who end up hating their language and no wonder their people because they were taught to do so and were never exposed to the beauty of such languages.
I don't know what the solution to this issue is, because it is not just a notification, it is the general mind set of people for every other local language as well. Parents start saying "Mom and Dad" while teaching their kids about them rather than the beautiful words used in their own language. In such a circumstance, I would again like to thank Habib University to make it compulsory for Social Development and Policy Program students to learn one of the local languages, and it is important because we have to do development for people by involving them and not by looking down at them and their languages.
Thank you Inaam Nadeem , Asif Aslam, Shahram Azhar for putting this sense into us and for enriching our language experience.

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