Hyderabad: Despite Urdu being one of the official languages of Telangana and the state being home to one of the largest Urdu-speaking populations in India, academic interest in the subject is on a downward spiral here.
A proof of this is the recently conducted Osmania University Common Entrance Test for admissions to various PG programmes. For MA in Urdu, a meagre 69 applications were received against the 180 seats available. Compared to this, Hindi received 389 applications and Telugu, the other official language of the state, received 3,290 applications.
Mr Syed Jawed Mohiuddin, Urdu teacher at a government high school in Hyderabad, said, “Many school-going and intermediate students, especially Muslim students, consider Arabic as a scoring subject and prefer it over Urdu.
Scoring 90 per cent in Arabic is not an uphill task. Urdu teachers, meanwhile, are very conservative in giving marks. Moreover, the syllabus of Urdu at Intermediate level has been made really tough by including concepts which we studied during under-graduation. For the same reasons many Intermediate colleges also do not teach Urdu, lest the aggregate percentage of the students is affected.”
He added, “The blame also lies on senior Urdu academics in Hyderabad who have not bothered to spread the love for Urdu among the new generation by conducting Urdu literary or cultural events.”
A senior professor from the OU Urdu department said, :At the Intermediate level itself students are being cut off from Urdu. In many private schools, even if some students are interested in learning Urdu, teachers are not available. How can it be expected that there will be many applicants at the Post Graduation level.”
In 2004, Osmania University had scrapped Urdu from PG College Secunderabad, and Urdu academics fear that the same fate might befall the Arts College in OU — which was started by the Nizam VII Mir Osman Ali Khan, and which will celebrate its centenary in 1918.
