What Happened to Urdu Literature’s Revolutionary Muscle

Urdu Literature’s Revolutionary: Across history, literature has not merely mirrored societies — it has ignited revolutions, carried resistance, and shaped entire ideologies. In South Asia, no language embodied this spirit more fiercely than Urdu.

In the history of South Asia, numerous literary traditions have embodied the spirit of resistance and rebellion against oppressive forces driven by injustice, and Urdu is one of them. Once a sword against oppression and injustice, it galvanised revolution. Urdu assumed the role of the voiceless. It wasn’t a mere language reduced to the aesthetics but rather a call, a promise to revolution. From Allama Iqbal, a philosopher-poet who stirred the idea of selfhood and dignity of Muslims living in the subcontinent, to the rebellious writers like Saadat Hasan Manto, who exposed the ugly truths of the society and the tales of partition. These people chose Urdu as a medium of revolution, but this legacy turned into a tragedy. 

The massacre of the legacy once proudly held by Urdu started during the regime of General Zia-ul-Haq, under his martial law, journalists, writers, and poets found themselves caged in an apparatus of state censorship made to limit the expression of opinion and opposition by the masses and to create a state ideology that conformed to the regime’s dogma. It was a systematic design to weaken the revolutionary muscle of Urdu. It wasn’t animosity towards the language itself but the role it played in politics, creating resistance.

What Happened to Urdu Literature’s Revolutionary Muscle

In this era, the language that was bold enough to challenge the oppressor was repressed and watered down. No longer a vessel of democratic dialogue, it was confined to spaces of elite entertainment, reducing its political potency and rendering it palatable for polite consumption. 

As a result, many voices were muffled and silenced. Poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Habib Jalib, or female poets like Fehmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed, had to face resistance by the state’s machinery, their works dulled and removed from the pages. Their impassioned voices were sanitised and replaced by digestible poetry and prose that were easily accepted by the people. Narratives changed from revolution to redemption and romance — narratives that didn’t change or threaten the status quo or challenge the privileged. Thus, Urdu’s revolutionary muscle was methodically and systematically disabled.

This era of censorship gave birth to market sanitisation. Literature became a commodity, an adornment, not a force of resistance. Revolutionary poetry lost its place on the shelves, and publishers chose to publish romance tales, sufi that would not threaten their business, and would not ruffle the feathers of the powerful. 

Once alive and fierce, literature became a memory; places like old book bazaars were bulldozed by the reign of commerce and estate. The literature became a heritage to be remembered. The same poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz that brought change to the world of suffocation is now recited as an aesthetic in festivals; the central idea that Faiz promoted is ignored or overlooked. 

These aspects added to the weakening of the Urdu language. Now remembered as the language of lovers rather than a language that brought change in South Asia, the power it held has been driven underground and silenced. 

Though censored, commodified, and diluted, Urdu’s revolutionary muscle has not vanished. In the whispers of bazaars and in the verses of poets long gone, its flame endures — waiting for the moment it will once again become a sword against silence.