Ather Farouqui

Dr Ather Farouqui at Rekhta Studio^[1]

Ather Farouqui is an Indian author, academic political analyst and present general secretary of Anjuman Tarraqui Urdu (Hind). He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2012 for his translation of Sons of Babur (Babur ki Aulad) into Urdu,^[2] and the 2016 Best Translator Award by the Delhi Urdu Academy.

Early life

Ather Farouqui was born on January 18, 1964, in the sleepy town of Sikandrabad, Bulandshahr, located in the Badlands of western Uttar Pradesh. His ancestral home town though is Aarha or Aadha, some five kilometres away. Dr Farouqui’s grandfather, who hailed from a Silsila of the Sufi order, was the Mukhia (headman) and the leading Qazi of the village, venerated enough to be given the onus of leading the Friday and special Eid prayers. After the abolition of the Zamindari or landowning aristocracy, his grandfather was shrewdly able to beat the system and save about 500 bighas of land dividing them under sundry categories, including “self-cultivation”. This was a legacy that his father let whittle away selling plots of land at random. Yet, what was left fetched a decent amount when sold off after his father’s death in 1981. This money was all that was left for the education of Dr Farouqui, his brother (who died at the young age of 18 in 1992), and his sister. To assuage the neglect inflicted by his father, his mother, upon his father’s death, took a bright but still rather green Farouqui to a distant relation who lived in Sainta in the same district. This was an old settlement of the Syeds and the head of the family in Sainta was the foremost Qazi who also had the privilege of leading Friday prayers.

Education

Hearkened back to the aristocratic past of his ancestors, Farouqui remained in Sainta for a few years and upon his return to native Sikanderabad, enrolled in Standard V in the lone school there, Nehru Bal Niketan—a school of highest nationalist leanings run by old Congress loyalists. As there were no private schools in the region, Dr Farouqui only acquired a smattering of English in the primary classes, a great feat considering all schools of Uttar Pradesh at that time introduced the English alphabet to pupils only in Standard VI. Dr Farouqui next enrolled in Standard VI at the MS Inter College, but he once again received a blow a few years later when his mother unceremoniously decided to migrate to Pakistan. He was then in Standard X. This was a dark period in his life as there he was, all of 15, uprooted and rudderless in an alien country where religious oppression was palpable in every breath he drew. Yet he did not prevail upon his mother to return to India. Instead, he joined Shri Patel Smarak Higher Secondary School in Dhaulana, in India’s Ghaziabad district, were his maternal aunt lived.

After high school, he re-joined MS Inter College and passed his Intermediate in Humanities. Still traumatized by the religious claustrophobia of his early teens, this time he rejected religion for political activism and joined the ranks of the Communist Party of India. He paid his dues to the Party dispensing a motley assortment of duties for it and organizing its literary and cultural events and bodies. Whatever little time he could spare, he devoted to pursuing his undergraduate degree as a private student in humanities. Later he completed MA in Urdu Literature, although his first love remained history. During 1987-88, Dr Farouqui gained admission into MPhil in Delhi University, the centre of all aspiration for students from the cramped, dusty towns of western UP. To his utter disillusionment, the atmosphere in the Urdu Department was abysmal. As he had already taken a part-time diploma of Mass-Media from JNU, he chose to enrol there to pursue MPhil rather than languish in DU.

Research and writings

Since taking the membership of the CPI, Farouqui had increasingly de-classed himself to the point that he became a Bohemian. By 1997, the earlier ennui set in again, this time with the Party and, finally in 2004, he withdrew his membership of the Party in the most amicable way by opting not to renew his Card.

During his stay at JNU, he came into close contact with noted political sociologist Imtiaz Ahmad under whose mentorship he acquainted himself with varied facets and nuances of the Urdu language and the embedded sensibilities and political, cultural, and socio-economic undercurrents, an area of research that had so far remained uncharted. As a matter of fact, Urdu continues to be glorified as an ornamental language and rendered as the exotified other, celebrated no doubt in Mushairas and “Urdu festivals” but not understood. This unfortunately persists with no scholar—before or after Dr Farouqui—opting to locate the language and its literature in its accurate political milieu and the socio-cultural repercussions of the carnage of Partition, unfortunately associated with it for posterity. On his part, Dr Farouqui turned his undivided attention to the problems besetting Urdu in all its complexities, particularly in the realm of Urdu–Hindi politics from the 18th century onwards, which became the crux of his PhD thesis. In fact, there was not a scrap of paper, article, journal, or book on the topic that he left unread, however obscure. In this obsessive literature review, he closely examined the debates of the Constituent Assembly, reports of the All-India Congress Committee, and the subcommittees constituted by the Congress Working Committee on the Urdu question prior to independence as also the proceedings of other sub-committees of the AICC. Consequently, both during his MPhil and PhD years, he fine-tooth-combed through the reports of a plethora of transient and ever-growing committees set up after independence.

While bringing into focus the report of the much touted Gujral Committee he observed disdainfully that it was little more than vacuous garbage because, right from inception to the final findings, there was nothing in the report to suggest that it had sincerely or even honestly scrutinised the uphill challenges facing Urdu—rather, he suspected, quite vocally at that, that the researcher and his team comprising so-called literary stalwarts of Urdu, all sitting in their ivory towers, did not have even the remotest inkling of the real problems on the ground that threatened Urdu’s survival as a modern language. He conscientiously went through the relevant papers of the Muslim League too and, while still at the JNU, visited Pakistan twice—in 1990 and 1991.

In 1992, he finally made a breakthrough with the publication of his article, “Future Prospects of Urdu in India”, in the annual issue of the prestigious weekly, Mainstream. So momentous was this work to the situation of Urdu and in fact language politics that the weekly’s celebrated editor Nikhil Chakravarty put an annotation on the article describing the author as a “pioneer scholar”. And this was no undeserved, effusive praise. Back in 1989, Dr Farouqui, for the first time went around the country collecting data on Urdu education which he updated until 1993, and on the basis of which he wrote his first scholarly article that appeared in the Economic & Political Weekly in its April 2, 1994 issue, entitled “Urdu Education in Four Representative States”.^[3] He expounded that if Urdu was to survive as a living and breathing language in India then it had to be located in the secular framework of education and not interred in the theological graveyard of madrassas. Again, Dr Farouqui was the first to apply the expression “functional language” to Urdu; in fact, the expressions used by him became part of the lexicon of Urdu linguistically as well as in journalism. First published as “Emerging Dilemma of Urdu Press in India” in South Asia, the peer-reviewed journal of the department of History, University of New England (Australia), and reprinted several times since,^[4] this seminal article is still deemed a source of reference on all matters Urdu.

A PhD examiner commented that Dr Farouqui’s thesis was one of the best doctoral dissertations emerging from any Indian university and JNU should award him DLitt instead of PhD on this seminal work. In fact, he developed an intense dislike, even extreme contempt, for the cliché of the teaching fraternity of Urdu that was interested in all except academic enquiry—obsessed as it was with money-making regardless of the limited scholarly capabilities of these worthies, most of whom had emerged from a theological rather than academic background. He chose the work pressures of the private sector instead, while continuing to write and research on Urdu. Besides his countless English articles, the Oxford University Press published two major edited books of his—Muslims & Media Images: News vs Views (2009)^[5] and Redefining Urdu Politics in India (2006).^[6] He did several translations and in 2012 won the Sahitya Akademi Award for this. He wrote six books in Urdu, most of them published by the legendary Anjuman Tarraqui Urdu (Hind).

He continues to write prolifically on multiple aspects of Urdu and perceptions of and about Muslim as well as on myriad topics. His English play Marx My Word (2015) was well received by connoisseurs of English theater.

Anjuman Tarraqui Urdu (Hind)

The post of the Anjuman’s general secretary was offered to him in 2012, when the institution was in crisis. By then, and despite its glorious past, the emaciated organization was ready to sing its swansong. On taking over as general secretary, Dr Farouqui immediately put the Anjuman’s set-up back on the administrative rails, with his efforts gaining international acclaim having turned the Anjuman into a dynamic and vibrant organisation once again.

ATUH is at once a literary institution, publisher and repository of countless and priceless Urdu texts, letters and other archived material. Choosing to act as a social unifier, it has, over the years, played a major role in defusing tensions borne out of identity politics. In the current state of complex geopolitics and suspicion, it is imperative that an organization such as the Anjuman, whose integrity remains unscathed, resumes a leadership role in promoting Urdu’s secular and universal character. The Anjuman’s lustre is even more incandescent owing to the fact that several non-Muslim writers and thinkers have been traditionally associated with it, a fact which debunks the whole myth of Urdu’s affiliation with Muslims alone and in a time when Urdu and Pakistan have become synonymous thanks to the efforts of certain atavistic forces. The involvement of non-Muslims goes back to the early days of the Anjuman. For example, the Urdu scholar Pandit Brij Mohan Dattatriya Kaifi was associated with the Anjuman from the 1920s, and many of his major poetic and scholarly works were published by the Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu. The Anjuman has successfully survived in its conviction that Urdu is the language not just of Muslims and non-Muslims have contributed greatly to its growth, making its literature one of the richest in the world.

References

External links

• Anjuman Tarraqui Urdu (Hind)
• It Is Majoritarianism That Needs To Be Contested
• State of the Urdu Press in India