I have often wondered how a language can be wonderfully expressive and yet strangely evasive. Urdu can give us a thousand ways to describe longing. Vasl. Qurbat. Lams. In its classical poetry, the Ghazal and Nazm seamlessly blend the spiritual, the romantic, and the deeply erotic; suggestively charting the beloved’s eyes, lips, absence, and the unbearable sweetness of waiting. Yet, a stark hypocrisy emerges when we test these boundaries.
A language that feels entirely comfortable being intensely sensual is suddenly paralyzed when asked to name structural violence. Ask this same vocabulary to describe crimes against women, girls, and children plainly, and something breaks. It retreats into formal caution, wrapping itself in bureaucratic euphemisms as if the sentence itself actively wants to protect someone’s "honor" instead of naming the violence.
Where did the artistic nakedness of poetry go? For decades, I have worked on gender-based violence, and in that time I encountered several modern Pakistanis, educated, many even Ivy League-trained who resisted even naming violence. Senior officials became angry when I suggested it was not some abstract concept imported from elsewhere. I was told, more than once: this does not happen here.
Once, I asked a high-ranking police officer what the Pashto equivalent of “incest” was. “Dr Sahiba, incest doesn't happen here, so there is no word for it in Pashto.” I tried to explain that the absence of a single, precise word is not evidence of the absence of a crime. And, to be fair, Pashto is not uniquely placed here: incest does not necessarily have a single, sharp everyday equivalent in Urdu or other Pakistani languages either. I say this with affection for Pashto. I have worked for decades in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Ghani Khan is part of why I love the language's music.
Some of those same men later claimed expertise in gender and even earned degrees in the discipline they had once dismissed. The irony was not lost on me. That encounter taught me something I have never forgotten: the absence of a word does not prove the absence of the human experience. We use that same faulty logic across Pakistan's languages, no recognised term, therefore no indigenous problem and difficult subjects get surrounded by euphemism, mismatched substitutes, or silence.
Incest is revealing because naming it means acknowledging violence within the family, the very institution we are trained to idealise. Rape is another example. Urdu has terms for it, including ismatdari. The problem is not that the dictionary is empty; it is what happens when those terms enter public discourse. Ismatdari can shift attention towards the woman's “honour” rather than keeping the violence and perpetrator at the centre; the victim disappears behind the vocabulary.
A language can say ‘beloved’ beautifully and still struggle to say ‘rape’ plainly, not because it lacks the capacity for truth, but because generations of speakers gave desire poetry and violence euphemism.
This is where I become uneasy with the argument that “our language has no word for it.” The problem is social refusal, not linguistic absence which is why I hesitate when people call Urdu too conservative to express certain realities. The same language that describes desire with such richness can be startlingly direct about bodily intimacy within poetry. The issue is permission.
What are we willing to name, hear, and teach our young people? What are we willing to put into a textbook, police report, medical form, court judgment, or newspaper headline? Words become socially powerful when people can say them without shame, ridicule, or fear. To me, vocabulary is also infrastructure: we build hospitals for conditions we decide deserve treatment, and standardise terminology when we decide a subject must be discussed precisely. Language is no different.
In 1999, I created a nineteen-episode PTV series, Gender Watch. “Gender” had no settled public presence in Urdu then, so I deliberately used sinf. A word does not enter public life because one person announces it but through repetition, in social development work, journalism, and television, sinf became familiar. That taught me vocabulary can be constructed and reclaimed.
Perhaps this is why I resist blaming the language itself. A language can say “beloved” beautifully and still struggle to say “rape” plainly not because it lacks the capacity for truth, but because generations of speakers gave desire poetry and violence euphemism. We let one be romantic and the other respectable.
That distinction matters. Because when a survivor needs to describe what happened to them, “respectable” language may be the very thing standing between them and the truth. I know this from more than theory. Recently, I penned a disclosure in Urdu on HumSub, an Urdu-language digital forum. For years, I alluded to it in my writing, on my podcast, between the lines. What came back was not solidarity. Attention gathered around the sensational particulars only. Many whom I rated as people with balanced EQ, while empathising, focused on paranoia and medicalisation, and decided to withdraw.
Only a few stood with me and said, “You are — you are. You are that same person who writes, works, and endures.” Imagine some simple sentences, said in Urdu: “Single mother”, “abandoned wife”, “survivor of child sexual abuse”. In English, these are descriptions; in Urdu, they carry a different weight. I was an intersectional feminist long before it became a fashionable, “delicious” self-introduction in Pakistan yet even today, I blush to introduce myself that way in Urdu.
Picture it: a woman like me, standing at a podium, solemnly declaring herself a نقطہِ اتصال (nuqta-e-ittisaal), a point of convergence. The Supreme Court did, after all, order us to conduct business in Urdu. But try saying that phrase in a courtroom, a police station, or a FOSPAH complaint, and you will find it sounds far too sensuous for its intended purpose. After all, nobody actually speaks like a nineteenth-century poet when navigating corporate consulting or workplace harassment. Instead, it feels closer to the flowery jargon used by some corporate consultants, the glorified mazdoors of our time to seduce audiences over PowerPoint, completely mismatched with the rigid, stark prose required by the institutions I am forced to petition. It is as if the sentence itself blushes before the bureaucracy even can.
This linguistic comedy reveals a deeper, more frustrating paradox. Polished classical Urdu remains beautifully intimate to those raised on its orthodox register, yet completely alienating to everyone else. Elevated language, even when backed by the state's best intentions, quietly hardens into structural gatekeeping, a door that swings open easily for a privileged few, while leaving the rest stranded outside.
The difficulty is not grammar but the weight attached to the words. It is what the listener hears beyond them. It is the judgement that can arrive before the sentence has even finished. So perhaps the question is not why our language lacks the word, but why we have not allowed the word to live.
PS. I am writing this in English. That is not an accident. It is part of the problem. And perhaps, also, part of the answer.