The 9th Islamabad Literature Festival (ILF) held from 3-5 November 2023, had just ended when the BBC had a ‘Hardtalk’ interview with a theoretical physicist, Carlo Rovelli (67), who sounded more like a philosopher belonging to the humanities than a natural scientist. He would have made a good speaker at the ILF, asking more questions than giving accurate answers, drawing attention to the fact that even the natural sciences are not as accurate and absolute as we often think. When he was asked about military research and production, he said he wasn’t entirely against it. In future, there will be less heavy machinery and equipment as we move towards lighter drones, IT infiltration and such things that can put an enemy out of business in no time. Hopefully, it will lead to fewer direct casualties of soldier and civilians. It seemed that Rovelli was on the optimistic side as human beings can always find solutions to issues if we really want to do that – and again, it is not accurate science, it is much broader than that.
Rovelli, Italian by birth, now professor in France, after many years in the USA, has written books about the concept of time, relativity of information, and also more specific topics in physics. He has spent time studying the history of science and philosophy. He is that kind of mega-academic that could have worked in many fields and made contributions. Also, he doesn’t believe that one subject or field, or all for that matter, can answer all questions that human beings struggle with, either it has to do with building skyscrapers, bridges or driverless cars, or it has to do with deep thinking and questioning of ethical or moral issues. We know that the latter is the more difficult, and we must admit that we cannot quite find the final and everlasting truths to questions in many fields. Some would say that God is truth, but then not everyone can find that truth and interpret it in the right ways. The least we can do is to search for it.
As a social scientist, I remind myself and others of the fact that we can never know and understand everything about an issue or situation; there will always be aspects that we overlook, deliberately or by mistake. In our time, when we have easier access to information than before, this is particularly important to remember. Schools need to be aware of this because much of what children and youth learn and school, college and university will actually be outdated in their life-time. Hence, it is also important that educational institutions emphasise and teach methods of learning, encourage endless questioning and evaluation knowledge and facts, because things will keep changing. The ILF shed light over many such issues, related to history, peace and conflict, and more.
There is a famous Norwegian poet, Olav H. Hauge (1908-1994), who has drawn attention to some aspects of relevance to this. He says (in translation from New Norwegian to English): “Don’t give me the whole truth, don’t give me the ocean for my thirst, don’t give me the heaven why I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewdrop, a speck, just as the birds carry droplets of water from their bathing or the wind a grain of salt.”
In a way, Hauge says that we should not overburden our listener or reader with what we think and know; we should be modest and careful, knowing, too, that we don’t really know it all, and it is in the end the one who receives the information that must make sense of it all, combined with what he or she already knows. Hauge’s deep insights did not come from long schooling and education. He had only the 7-year compulsory school, and was all his life horticultural former, and poet, and autodidact studies in foreign languages and philosophy. Perhaps many years of formal, regimental education would have made him less creative, shallower thinker? It is not always that schooling makes us wiser and more capable of understanding the world around us, but it may also help, yet, in our time, education is sometimes more about passing exams than learning to think.
That brings me back to this year’s ILF, where several topics were related to exams and testing at educational institutions. The main organiser was Oxford University Press, and the advertised something called Oxford AQA International Qualifications, a British exams and testing service. It can be important to test and certify candidates, but I believe we are overdoing it. Again, the most important we learn at school, to think and be creative, and how to seek information and solve problems, cannot easily be tested in a multiple choice paper. Hence, I believe we should be careful with foreign organisations like Oxford AQA, which are also instruments of keeping the UK and the English language up, even now three-quarters of a century after Pakistan’s independence.
That brings me to have a few remarks on the importance of language in society. This year’s literature festival used Urdu much more than at earlier festivals when English was more frequently used. It is important in our time that we know English, but it should not take the place of Urdu and local vernaculars. We should be aware that when we use a language that is not our mother tongue, we may not get all the concepts right and things may become slightly distorted and inaccurate. In Pakistan, I believe Urdu should be used more in education even at university, including for dissertations. English should be given more attention, too, but as a subject rather than a medium of instruction.
Now then, since I am a Norwegian, and English is also not my mother tongue, I shouldn’t be too categorical about how deep we can think in a language which wasn’t our mother tongue. I have had the opportunity to work in English most of my life, so I have begun learning things. Also, I had the opportunity to use English at an early age, and we know that children are capable of handling several languages from a young age; it is we adults who are slower in picking up new languages – and my Urdu is still poor even after many years being exposed to it.
This year’s Nobel Laureate in Literature, Jon Fosse (64), is a Norwegian, which I am proud of mentioning. But what I really want to draw attention to is the language he has used in his some 70 books of drama and prose, notably the minority version of the Norwegian language, called New Norwegian, or Rural Norwegian, as it was called when the language was constructed in the 1850s, after Norway had become free from the 400-year Danish rule. During that time, the Danish language had become the only official, written language. New Norwegian was created based on dialects in remote areas of the country where the Danish influence had been less than in the cities. My point here is to say that New Norwegian is good enough even to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. That could indeed also give encouragement to people elsewhere in the world who speak minority languages; we probably think deepest and best in our mother tongue, not in languages learnt at school and later in life, prestigious as they may be. That means that Urdu is indeed important to Pakistanis and also the many local languages in the country – which people should indeed be proud of.