Word: urdu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...light-skinned Punjabis, Pathans, Baluchis and Sindhis of West Pakistan are descendants of the Aryans who swept into the subcontinent in the second millennium B.C. East Pakistan's slight, dark Bengalis are more closely related to the Dravidian people they subjugated. The Westerners, who eat wheat and meat, speak Urdu, which is written in Arabic but is a synthesis of Persian and Hindi. The Easterners eat rice and fish, and speak Bengali, a singsong language of Indo-Aryan origin...
...West Pakistanis were also determined to "wear the pants" as far as running the country was concerned. Once, the Bengalis were proud to be long to Pakistan (an Urdu word meaning "land of the pure"). Like the Moslems from the West, they had been resentful of the dominance of the more numerous Hindus in India before partition. In 1940, Pakistan's founding fa ther, Mohammed AH Jinnah, called for a separate Islamic state. India hoped to prevent the split, but in self-determination elections in 1947, five predominantly Moslem provinces, including East Bengal, voted to break away. The result...
...corruption last year by summoning senior civil servants and telling them that they were all "a bunch of thieves." The bureaucracy ground to a halt in protest, and Yahya soon gave up the effort. But he shows no sign of yielding with the Bengalis, whom he reportedly calls macchar -Urdu for mosquitoes...
...armed with stones and bamboo sticks, tanks rolled through Dacca, the East's capital, blowing houses to bits. At the university, soldiers slaughtered students inside the British Council building. "It was like Genghis Khan," said a shocked Western official who witnessed the scene. Near Dacca's marketplace, Urdu-speaking government soldiers ordered Bengali-speaking townspeople to surrender, then gunned them down when they failed to comply. Bodies lay in mass graves at the university, in the Old City, and near the municipal dump...
...Bengali followers, "do you know that the streets of Karachi are lined with gold? Do you want to take back that gold? Then raise your hands and join me." He was first jailed in 1948, when he demonstrated against Pakistan Founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah for proclaiming Urdu the new nation's lingua franca...