by FARRUKH KHAN PITAFI
You just spoke to your child in Urdu, so how is it dying? Evidence lies in the e-book market
No year-enders this time. I have not recovered enough from what this year inflicted on me to write dispassionately about it. But as the name promises, I am writing the next worst thing: the decline and imminent fall of Urdu.
Recently, Hasan Minhaj and Kumail Nanjiani, two brown men at the top of their Hollywood game, struggled to explain a feeling to an English audience. In a viral video titled ‘A Deeply Unserious India-Pakistan Summit with Kumail Nanjiani’, they discussed how English lacks an equivalent to the Urdu concept of Ishq or to the specific pain of separation. As they briefly explained the idea of ‘yearning’, they too were yearning for a language that, for them, is already a ghost. A vibe without a vessel.
As you read this, the 18th Aalmi Urdu Conference is underway in Karachi. While the audience claps, the patient is dying in the cloud. The conference is a ventilator for a body that the digital world has already rejected.
Call this melodrama? You just spoke to your child in Urdu, so how is it dying? Look at the evidence. The murder is happening in the code.
Amazon’s Kindle treats Urdu like a contagion. It claims it cannot handle the script’s reflow, forcing authors to upload books as static images or PDFs. This technical barrier effectively kills the Urdu e-book market before it can be born. Try finding a native Urdu e-book on Kobo or Apple Books. You will find blank space.
Streaming giants are no better. Netflix and YouTube aggressively centre Hindi, serving Devanagari titles or Roman gibberish for Urdu content. Even when the audio is in Urdu, the platform categorises it as Hindi, subsuming it into the dataset of the majority. We are told that ligatures, the complex vertical connections of Nastaliq, are simply too hard for modern rendering engines.
I have told you before how I stumbled upon Mirza Ghalib’s hapless tomb in Nizamuddin Basti during my visit to Delhi. Seeing Urdu’s greatest poet lying abandoned in a cage of neglect, open to the harsh sky and the indifference of passing flies, broke something inside me. But it was just foreshadowing. He lies exposed in the soil of Nizamuddin, just as his script lies exposed and unsupported in the silicon bedrock of the internet.
We comfort ourselves with Hanlon’s Razor: ‘Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.’ We tell ourselves Big Tech’s failure is just a glitch.
This is a lie. When companies that have mapped the human genome and perfectly digitised Hebrew, a language revived from the dead, claim they cannot render a living font, it is not stupidity. It is malice.
And we must ask: Why? Consider the boardrooms making these decisions. With the ascent of Indian influencers in Silicon Valley, we see a systematic erosion of Urdu’s utility. Is it a coincidence? One concludes that Indian soft power is being used to deplatform a rival script. It is a calculation that we simply do not matter.
To understand this, look back. We are living in the aftershocks of the Hindi-Urdu controversy of 1867, the forgotten origin of the Batwara (partition). That movement was the beginning of erasure, framed as a Shuddhi, a purification. They disowned the organic, local-born Hindustani, whose urbane and official version was Urdu, for an artificial, Sanskritised Hindi constructed from imported dead roots. Ergo, this nativism is an illusion. India has a history of rejecting the truly local for imperial import, exiling indigenous Buddhism for Steppe-born Vedic Hinduism.
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