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T.S. Eliot
Urdu is the traditional language of Delhi’s high culture, Muslim rulers, and literary and political elite. While it remains an official language in India today, it is on the decline because most of its speakers fled to Pakistan after the Partition. It is very similar to Hindi—and indistinguishable in most everyday conversation—except that it takes its specialized vocabulary from Persian instead of Sanskrit and uses the Perso-Arabic script instead of the Devanagari script.
Urdu Quotes in Clear Light of Day
The Clear Light of Day quotes below are all either spoken by Urdu or refer to Urdu. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Part 2
Quotes
Raja had studied Urdu in school in those days before the Partition when students had a choice between Hindi and Urdu. It was a natural enough choice to make for the son of a Delhi family: Urdu had been the court language in the days of the Muslim and Moghul rulers and had persisted as the language of the learned and the cultivated. Hindi was not then considered a language of great pedigree; it had little to show for itself in its modern, clipped, workaday form, and its literature was all in ancient, extinct dialects. Raja, who read much and had a good ear, was aware of such differences.
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“This is no college for you. It is a Jamia Millia form.”
“That is where I want to study. I went there to get a form.”
“You can’t study there,” his father said, taking the cigar out of his mouth and spitting out a shred of tobacco. “It is a college for Muslim boys.”
“No, anyone can go there who wants to specialise in Islamic studies.”
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Urdu Term Timeline in Clear Light of Day
The timeline below shows where the term Urdu appears in Clear Light of Day. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part 1
...stacks of paper. She pulls out Raja’s poems, but Tara realizes that they are in Urdu, which she can’t read. Bim finds an English letter from Raja and hands it to...
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Part 2
...Tennyson, and Swinburne, but he invariably gets tired of them and starts quoting couplets in Urdu instead. But Bim doesn’t know Urdu, the language of Delhi’s literature and Muslim rulers, which...
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...They spend their time reading and writing poetry, but Bim eventually gets tired of Raja’s Urdu verses. She invites Dr. Biswas to play his violin for them, but he awkwardly declines...
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Part 4
...away with this stupendous caravan of sin!” She looks through her old translations of Raja’s Urdu poems—which are well-crafted but unoriginal emulations of his favorite writers—and wonders how he would feel...
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