Doyen of Urdu literature Shamsur Faruqi passes away

In the 1950s, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi appeared for the Civil Services interview, a few days before the Republic Day. It was the young man’s first visit to Delhi. One of the distinguished persons in the interview panel asked him whether he would stay back to watch the parade. “No…I don’t like such tamasha,” he replied.

Faruqi, who died on Friday, was among the finest literary brains in Urdu literature, who redefined Urdu criticism. His greatest feat, perhaps, was his mammoth novel Kai Chaand The Sare Asmaan (The Mirror of Beauty), a work that he began writing at the age of 70. There aren’t many instances in world literature of a novelist publishing a thick masterpiece in their twilight years.

He was born in 1935, in what was perhaps the golden age of Urdu translations. Between 1910 and 1940, several classics were translated into Urdu, including Madame Bovary, The Red and the Black, and even many versions of the Gita. Faruqi’s favourite was rendered by Khwaja Dil Mohammad as Dil Ki Gita. In such an atmosphere, the young boy took early to literature and brought out his first journal, Gulistan, on sheets pulled out of notebooks when just in Class VIII, that had some of his fiction, translations and his sister’s writings.