While students in the metropolitan cities seek to learn French, Spanish, and Japanese, young boys and girls in Aligarh aspire to tell their seen apart from sheen and qaaf from kaaf. In Aligarh, the city of locks, Urdu is an aspirational language that opens doors to affordable, quality education at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), whose minority status was challenged in the Supreme Court earlier this year. The hearings concluded on February 1, following which the court reserved its verdict.
Established in 1920, the university has around 40,000 students, of which 30% are non-Muslims. According to sources, the number goes up to 40% in professional courses, particularly medicine and law. Urdu is a compulsory subject for all students till senior secondary. They have to pick between the combination of Advanced Hindi-Elementary Urdu and Advanced Urdu-Elementary Hindi.
At AMU’s Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh Senior Secondary School, Deepanshu Singh (name changed on request), a sixth-standard student, writes a sentence in Urdu to show his proficiency in the language. Deepanshu comes from a modest semi-urban household where nobody knows how to write Urdu in the Nastaliq script. He says he could not secure admission to the English-medium section, so he opted for the Urdu-medium section because his father wanted him to become an internal student of AMU.
