[Reader-list] Subject: Second Posting. Locally Produced Media in Jamia Nagar and Satellite Colonies. SCIENCE, an Urdu monthly journal brought out from Zakir Nagar.

[shakeb ahmed]

SCIENCE, an Urdu monthly journal brought out from
Zakir Nagar.
Excerpts from a conversation with Dr. Mohammad Aslam
Parvaiz (Editor and Publisher).

Parvaiz Aslam as a child went to schools in Ballimaran
area of the old city of Delhi. The medium for
instruction was Urdu exclusively. These patti-wallah
(mat-and-rug) schools were the only accessible ones to
him and many others who would be curious enough to
learn formally about the world around them. As he was
growing up and moving from one institution to another
where the instruction-medium remained Urdu, he started
his very personal and willful efforts to learn English
while it became apparent to him that though other
subjects still got a presence in Urdu, Science as a
discipline was very meagerly represented in his
madri-zubaan (mother-tongue). So scant and sparse was
the Urdu writing in science that anyone educated
through institutions of this language was bound to be
left in limbo regarding knowledge of western, or for
that matter eastern science as a way and skill for
life. From these thoughts Pervaiz sahib derived
impetus to first write popular-science prose in Urdu
based journals, dailies and weeklies. Then in 1994 he
took the big leap culminating his interest of
popularizing science in Urdu by formally launching
Science, a monthly science journal in Urdu at the 11th
World Book Fair, Delhi. The journal remains in steady
publication since last ten years and is still a
personal passion that Parvaiz sahib never tires of
cultivating and shaping further besides his
occupational duties of teaching botany at Zakir
Hussain College. He brings out this journal from Zakir
Nagar while also being involving himself in a range of
other social welfare activities in the area which he
regards as a social responsibly towards the place and
community he is living amidst.

Till now 121 issues each of 56 pages of Science have
been published. Pervaiz sahib tells as how his
initiative is one of its kind because of being the
only monthly journal of science in Urdu language:
‘even Baba-e-Urdu (Father of Urdu) Abdul Haque used to
bring out a science journal by the same name but even
that was quarterly and not monthly.  The journal
carries out articles, opinions and expert writing on
subjects as diverse as cloning and genetic
engineering, greenhouse effects and other
environmental perils, semiconductors and leaps in
information technology, nutrition and chemical nature
of proteins and vitamins and many more diverse
scientific phenomenon that need to be known to
appreciate better the life around us.  Pervaiz sahib
proudly lets you know that not even a single article
of their journal is a straight translation of an
article published in English or other language that
would have appeared first in some other magazine or
digest. All the contributors to the journal are
scientists themselves - Urdu knowing biologists,
physicists, geologists etc who for the first time
found a platform to work out and disseminate
scientific information and ideas in a language they
knew but never used for the purposes of this kind of
knowledge exchange. Now the journal is in such a good
stead, Pervaiz sahib tells that at times there can be
a shortage of money creating a worry about whether the
issue would come out in time but never a shortage of
textual contribution which is always there in plenty. 

Parvaiz sahib funds the journal largely on his own
while subscription takes care of the rest of the
monetary needs of the production. He has kept the
journal out of the ambit of loans and donations which
he states has always helped him play out his very own
policies and not budge to external pressures. This
definitely can be an example of how a small
publication can actually speak in a language that
escapes the clutches of staple and homogenized
publication discourse of the highly concentrated and
corporatised mainstream media. It also needs to be
mentioned how dependent our media is on the
advertisement revenue, and how the advertisers are
attracted to and defining of the content of a media
text. Parvaiz sahib carefully chooses the
advertisements that would appear in his journal: these
might be from small business houses but never from
corporate giants like Pepsi etc though he did had
offers for that. He believes that smaller media by
virtue of their small organizational size do enjoy a
good leverage in reflecting on the degrees to which
consumerist trends should be supported or resisted,
and they have a responsibility towards critically
cultivating this faculty.

I asked Pervaiz sahib that since many of us think that
Urdu is a dying language why is it that that he still
chooses to print in this language particularly when
one often hears from a section of Urdu speaking people
themselves that even if the language completely dies
out it would hardly be a loss to anyone. In response
he recalls one of his experiences while attending a
conference in Turkey. Ataturk Kamal Pasha when making
sweeping reforms in Turkish polity changes the
official Turkish script from Persian-Arabic to Roman,
everything went fine for a while. But in recent years
as the newer Turkish generations felt the need to make
sense of their historical records they found that
beyond last fifty years it became very difficult for a
common man to make sense of the historical
documentation at hand because most of it survives in
Ottoman Turkish a script the use of which they are
gradually becoming incompetent to make. Thus according
to Pervaiz sahib when a language is allowed to die
because of indifference much of the knowledge of human
historical condition, the sum total of its lived
culture, is eventually lost. And according to Parvaiz
sahib a race that that looses its competence in being
custodians of its past also looses its stake in the
futures to come. He is thus of the opinion that
allowing Urdu to be lost is like loosening ones
bearing in the future. He thinks it more apt that not
just Urdu but the root languages from which it stemmed
as like Persian and Arabic also one can and should get
interested in. One can reflect if it is not just an
initiative that needs to be taken up by Indian Muslims
alone but also by Indians of other sects as well as it
can help fostering a more complex and sophisticated
understanding of India as a heterogeneous
collectivity. This method of recalling the story of
Indian past that goes long back in time can engineer a
social discourse that can shape a more tolerant
contemporary India while pointing to the perils and
dubious heritage-talk of fundamentalist nationalism.
Pervaiz sahib also think that also by taking up new
subjects in a language you are helping it to evolve
and become more accessible for a common mans needs a
process which in turn ensures its future survival and
currency. The question of Urdus death otherwise is
also not that apocalyptic for him as he cites new
pockets of interests emerging in places like western
and southern India that are showing a new sustainable
interest in the language which has the potential to
reverse the tide of its slow erosion in Northern
territories. 

SHAKEB AHMED
SARAI Independent Research Fellow 2004.


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want.
http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools