Pakistan‘s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah‘s mother tongue Gujarati is facing an uncertain future in his country and at least its written form is in danger of a slow death although over 50 million people speak it worldwide.
“Although a living and vibrant language in India, Gujarati is suffering from an apparent indifference from the very people who speak it as their native language in Pakistan,” Dawn reported today. Even Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) has recently omitted Gujarati from the column asking the applicant about his mother tongue, it said.
“The number of Gujarati speakers in Pakistan is declining fast and one of the reasons is that the new generation of Gujarati-speaking does not use it. The few who do so speak it strictly within the family or community. Since most of the youth, the descendants of Gujarati-speaking communities, cannot read the script, Gujarati-language publications in Pakistan face an imminent death,” the paper said.
Gujarati is spoken in Pakistan by those who migrated from India after the partition. Some of the communities that had settled in Pakistan before 1947 and did not migrate to India after Partition, still speak Gujarati.
The communities that still speak Gujarati are the Bohras, Parsis, Hindus, Ismailis, Kutchi Memon and Kathiawari Memon. They are mainly settled in Karachi, adding colour to the city’s multi-lingual, multi-ethnic scene, the paper said.
Senior citizens would recall that there used to be Gujarati-medium schools and students were allowed to use it as the medium of answer in secondary and higher secondary examinations. This was in vogue from independence till the early 1970s, when schools were nationalised, the paper said.
“In those days Gujarati journalism in Karachi was doing well. At least two daily news papers, Millat and Dawn Gujarati, were brought out from this city. In addition, there used to be an evening newspaper, Vatan,” it said.
Daily Millat and Vatan are still alive, but face a bleak future as the number of readers is falling steadily, it added. ‘Millat’, launched by Fakhr Matri in 1948, added a few pages in Urdu about 20 years ago to win over younger readers, but the experiment does not seem to have paid off.
A few Gujarati magazines, too, appeared from Karachi till the 1990s. Newspapers, magazines and books were imported from India and some of them enjoyed immense popularity. Chakram and Chitralekha, magazines imported form India, were very popular and N J Golibar, the editor of Chakram, was a well-known figure among Gujaratis of Karachi back in the 1960s.
Gujarati ‘mushaeras’ were a regular feature in Karachi. And attendance at such events used to be good. But with the passage of time, all this seems a distant memory.
The second generation of Gujarati-speaking migrants from India, who settled in Karachi, knew Gujarati. The later generations, however, lost interest in this language as they did not see any prospect while the Urdu and English offered lucrative jobs and were useful for everyday communication. Nowadays only the elderly read and write Gujarati while most of the younger ones cannot even speak it fluently.