By TwoCircles.net staff reporter

New Delhi: Urdu is the language of masses and the language of history and culture, said I.K. Gujaral, former prime minister of India, in a seminar in New Delhi yesterday.

Inaugurating a three-day seminar organized by the Delhi Urdu Academy, the former prime minister said after the partition of India, Urdu had to suffer a lot, but now the situation has changed. He said India is a unique country where so many languages are spoken and given equal respect. He congratulated the organizer for holding the seminar on “Influence of Indian Philosophy and Mythology on Urdu Language and Literature.”

Presiding over the opening session of the seminar, well-known critic Shamsur Rahman Farooqui said when mythology becomes part of a language and its idiom, its speakers get attached in a relationship and these attributes are found in Urdu language also. Quoting couplets from Mir, Iqbal and Nasikh, Farooqui elaborated on the theme of the seminar. Khwaja Hasan Sani Nizami said ‘Asateer’ implies Indian tradition and I do not think that this word connotes mythology, quoting Imam Zainul Abideen in this context. Well-known Hindi writer and critic Ashok Vajpai said he could not understand why Urdu speakers felt the need to hold a seminar on this topic. He said Urdu itself is a very big invention of Indians.