by Arwin Rahi 25 December 2021
In the 1930s no foreign language was more dominant in Afghanistan than Urdu. After Persian, Urdu was also the most widely spoken language by Afghan government officials. As such, neither Bollywood introduced Afghans to Urdu (a widely held misconception), nor did Afghans initially learn Urdu after immigrating to Pakistan in the 1970s and 1980s. Afghans have a long history of utilizing the Urdu language.
To begin with, the Afghan King Mohammad Nadir Khan (r. 1929-1933) was a fluent Urdu speaker. Nadir Khan had been born in 1883 in Dehradun and had spent the first 18 years of his life in India. Amir Abdur Rahman Khan (r. 1880-1901) had exiled Nadir Khan’s family from Afghanistan to India, where the exiled family lived until after Abdur Rahman Khan’s death in 1901.
When the Indian religious scholar Maulana Syed Sulaiman Nadvi visited King Nadir Khan in Kabul in October 1933, they initially greeted each other and exchanged pleasantries in Persian. Afterward, their conversation automatically switched from Persian to Urdu and remained so until the end of their meeting.
Like King Nadir Khan, his brothers were also fluent Urdu speakers. For instance, King Nadir Khan’s younger brother Sardar Shah Wali Khan, who had been born in 1888 in Dehradun and educated there, spoke Urdu as fluently as King Nadir Khan himself. Sardar Shah Wali Khan would arrive in Pakistan in April 1948 as Afghanistan’s first ambassador to Pakistan.
While serving as Afghan ambassador to Pakistan, Sardar Shah Wali Khan was invited to a gathering by the Aligarh Muslim University’s Old Boys’ Association in Karachi in June 1948. Sardar Shah Wali Khan not only accepted the invitation but also addressed the attendees of the gathering in Urdu.
Similarly, King Nadir Khan’s youngest brother Sardar Shah Mahmud Khan also spoke Urdu fluently. Shah Mahmud Khan had also been born in Dehradun in 1890 and was a student of Maulvi Najaf Ali Khan of Punjab. Maulvi Najaf Ali Khan’s brother Dr. Abdul Ghani Jalalpuri, the principal of Islamia College Lahore, had served as principal of the Habibia School (Afghanistan’s first modern school) in Kabul, and as a member of the Afghan delegation to Rawalpindi in July-August 1919 to negotiate the terms of the Afghan independence with British authorities.
In those days, King Nadir Khan & his family ran Afghanistan like a family business, whereby most positions of power were occupied by King Nadir Khan’s immediate family members, who all one way or another had spent time in India and learned Urdu there. The next generation of the Afghan royal family, however, would learn European languages instead of Urdu. The process to learn European languages had begun under King Amanullah Khan in the 1920s and would reach relative maturity some years later.
In Kabul, the elder members of the Afghan royal family, such as King Nadir Khan and his brothers, were believed to even speak Urdu at home. It would not have been surprising as the elder members of the Afghan royal family had learned Urdu at a young age while living and studying in India. As such, King Nadir Khan’s attachment with the Urdu language continued throughout his life. Even as King, Nadir Khan used to receive on a regular basis Urdu journals and newspapers from India.
In addition to the Afghan royal family’s attachment with and utilization of Urdu, the Afghan government-employed Indian citizens to teach in Afghan schools and to undertake technical assignments such as operating machines in factories. When the Habibia School was founded in 1903 by Amir Habibullah Khan, the majority of its teachers were Indians, who taught in Urdu and Persian.
Urdu was also desirable for the fact that Afghan students who wished to continue further studies in India needed to know Urdu. From a traditional Afghan perspective, traveling to non-Muslim Europe, for education or otherwise, was frowned upon and unwelcome. India was the nearest, most economical, and culturally best option. King Amanullah Khan, however, in the 1920s replaced Urdu as a medium of education with Turkish and European languages such as French and German.
In the early 1930s, there were nearly 200 Indian teachers and skilled workers in Kabul. Maqbool-ul-Haq Ghazipuri, who initially taught at the Habibia School and then took up an assignment at the government-run sewing factory, and Sayed Abdullah (originally from Peshawar), who served as vice chief of the Afghan army, were two—out of scores of—prominent examples of Urdu speakers of Indian origin who were employed by the Afghan government.
Moreover, in the 1930s, there was a group of Indian Muslim religious scholars who resided in Kabul. Chief amongst them were Maulana Saif-ur-Rahman—a former teacher at Delhi’s Fatehpuri Madrassa—and Maulana Mansoor Ansari—former director of the religious studies department at the Aligarh Muslim University. In addition to the Indian scholars, at the time there were also tens of Afghan graduates from Darul Uloom-e-Deoband and other institutions in India that lived in Kabul. All of these Afghan and Indian gentlemen understood and spoke Urdu fluently.
Furthermore, Afghan businessmen—especially Afghanistan’s Hindus and Sikhs—who used to go back and forth between India and Afghanistan were another groups of Urdu speakers in Kabul. At the time, India was Afghanistan’s largest trading partner, and Afghanistan relied on Indian seaports for trade and commerce.
Finally, Afghan government officials and employees, as well as their families, who were posted to India used to come back with fluent Urdu skills. Afghanistan at the time had trade offices and commercial representations across north India. A large number of Afghan government employees, government-affiliated individuals, and their families lived in India. For instance, the popular Afghan singer Ustad Mohammad Sadeq Fetrat Nashenas spent about seven years as a child and a teenager in different Indian cities in the 1940s.
Nashenas’s father worked as a Bank-i-Milli Afghan (an Afghan public-private bank) representative in India in the 1940s. Nashenas and his mother had gone to India with his father. At Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia, Dr. Zakir Husain, who would later become India’s first Muslim president, taught the young Nashenas Urdu and Persian. In the 1950s, long before Nashenas became a popular singer, Radio Afghanistan’s Urdu program organizer, Amir Jan Gran, who himself had spent time in India and learned Urdu there, recruited Nashenas as an Urdu language presenter. Nashenas’s Urdu skills would also come in handy several years later.
When Pakistan and India reached an agreement in Tashkent in January 1966 to end the 1965 Indo-Pak war, Radio Moscow asked Nashenas, who at the time was pursuing his postgraduate studies in the Soviet Union, to commemorate the occasion with music. Nashenas responded positively. He composed and sang two Urdu songs to commemorate the occasion. Nashenas’s first Urdu song was based on one of Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poems, whose opening verses are:
گلوں میں رنگ بھرے باد نوبہار چلے
چلے بھی آؤ کہ گلشن کا کاروبار چلے
Nashenas’s second Urdu song was based on one of Ali Sardar Jafri’s poems, which started as follows:
یہ روز وصال یاراں ہے
یہ جشن بادہ گساراں ہے
Faiz Ahmad Faiz was accompanying the Pakistan President Mohammad Ayub Khan, and Ali Sardar Jafri was accompanying the Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri to the Soviet Union. It was remarkable that Radio Moscow would ask an Afghan singer to commemorate the India-Pakistan agreement. Nashenas’s command of both the Urdu language and music was the decisive factor in Radio Moscow’s decision to ask him for the favor.
With the passage of time, due to Afghans’ familiarity with Urdu, many Urdu terms and phrases have either replaced their Persian counterparts or are used in tandem with Persian in Afghanistan. Below are some examples. Afghans have abandoned the Persian term khiaban (خیابان) in favor of its Urdu counterpart sarak (سڑک). For money, Afghans use the Urdu term paisa (پیسہ) more than the Persian term pool (پول). Afghans use gadi (گادی), derived from the Urdu term gari (گاڑی), for horse-drawn two-wheeled carts, or tangas.
Afghans, across Afghanistan, also use the Urdu suffix wala commonly in combination with hundreds of terms. For instance, terms such as akhbarwala, chaiwala, khanawala, and motorwala have been in use for decades. Before the Afghan government ordered in the 1930s that all shop signs must be in Pashto alone, shops in Qandahar, based on the business they did, were specified by a Persian or Urdu term and the suffix wala such as goshtwala, naanwala, and qaleenwala.
It is common knowledge that Persian has heavily influenced Urdu, but in Afghanistan’s case Urdu has also influenced both Persian and (especially) Pashto. At no time in Afghanistan’s history did Urdu have more influence in the corridors of power in Kabul than in the 1930s. As the most widely spoken foreign language, Urdu’s influence in Afghanistan back then was more pronounced than at any time in Afghanistan’s history.
Arwin Rahi is a former adviser to the Parwan governor in Afghanistan. He can be reached at rahiarwin@gmail.com.