User:Ather Farouqui

Dr Ather Farouqui General Secretary Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind)

Dr Ather Farouqui was born on January 18, 1964, in the sleepy town of Sikandrabad, located in the Bulandshahr district of western Uttar Pradesh. His ancestral village though is Aarha or Aadha, some five kilometres away. Before India’s violent Partition from Pakistan, Arha was a quiet settlement of Qazis, and Dr Farouqui’s grandfather, Qazi Rasheeduddin—who hailed from a Silsila of the Sufi order—was the 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, 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 led the Friday and Eid prayers as well. Hearkened back to the aristocratic past of his ancestors, Farouqui remained in Sainta for a few years and upon his return to native Sikandrabad, enrolled in Standard IV in the lone school there, Nehru Bal Niketan—with highest nationalist leanings run by old Congress loyalists family. 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 prevail upon his mother to return to India and joined Shri Patel Smarak Higher Secondary School in Dhaulana, in the Ghaziabad district, were his maternal aunt lived. After high school in 1980, he re-joined MS Inter College and passed his Intermediate in Humanitie, 1983. Still traumatized by the religious claustrophobia of his early teens, he opted for political activism and joined the ranks of the Communist Party of India. He paid his dues dispensing a motley assortment of duties for the Party and organizing its literary and cultural events. Whatever little time he could spare, he devoted to his undergraduate studies as a private student in humanities. Later he completed MA in Urdu Literature, although his first love remained history. During 1987-88, Dr Farouqui joined MPhil in Delhi University, the centre of all aspiration for students from the cramped and the dusty mentality of small-town India, which offered few options in life and narrow aspirations to young people at that time. To his utter disillusionment, the atmosphere in the Urdu Department at Delhi University was abysmal. As he had already received a part-time diploma of Mass-Media from JNU in 1986, he chose to enrol there to pursue MPhil rather than languish in DU.

Since joining CPI, Farouqui had increasingly de-classed himself to the point that he became a Bohemian until he had left JNU. 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 possible by opting to not renew his Card. At JNU, he came into close contact with noted political sociologist Imtiaz Ahmad under whose mentorship he acquainted himself with varied facets of the Urdu language, its embedded sensibilities and nuances, and its political, cultural, and socio-economic undercurrents—an area of research that had so far remained uncharted. Truth be told, 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 état de choses unfortunately persists with no scholar—before or after Dr Farouqui—opting to locate the language and its literature in its accurate political milieu as well as the socio-cultural repercussions of its unfortunate association with the carnage of Partition. 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. Consequently, both during his MPhil and PhD years, he fine-tooth-combed through debates and reports on all committees and subcommittees constituted on the question of Urdu language prior to and post-independence. While discussing 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 there searcher and his team comprising so-called literary stalwarts of Urdu, all sitting in their ivory towers without the remotest inkling of the real problems on the ground that threatened Urdu’s survival as a functional language. He conscientiously went through the relevant papers of the Muslim League too, even those from Pakistan. In 1992 and on the basis of excellent field work, he finally made a breakthrough with the publication of his article, “Future Prospects of Urdu in India”, in the prestigious weekly Mainstream’s annual issue of 1992. So momentous was this work to the position of Urdu and language politics that the weekly’s celebrated editor Nikhil Chakravarty annotated the article hailing the author as a “pioneer scholar”. And this was no undeserved, effusive praise. Back in 1989,Dr Farouqui, for the first time went around India collecting data on Urdu education which he updated until 1993, and on the basis of which he wrote his first scholarly article for the Economic & Political Weekly(April 2 1994),entitled “Urdu Education in Four Representative States”. His thesis was that if Urdu was to survive in India, it had to be located in the secular educational framework and not interred in the theological graveyard of madrassas. Again, he was the first to coin the expression “functional language” for Urdu; in fact, the article’s lexicon has become part of the discourse on Urdu in academics and journalism. First published as “Emerging Dilemma of Urdu Press in India” in South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies (University of New England, Australia), this piece on Urdu journalism in India is still widely referenced. At one point, he had decided to become a full time social activist and read for his second degree in law. After leaving the Communist party, he vacillated but still got a full scholarship in 2008 for Master in Law (LLM) provided he secured admission at a reputed British University; he was fortunate to be offered a place at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London but he could not join even after reaching London as he had to return to India due to exigent circumstances at home. He is still a serious student of Constitutional Law.

On his doctoral dissertation, a PhD examiner commented that Dr Farouqui’s thesis was one of the best emerging from any Indian university and JNU should award him DLitt instead of PhD on this seminal work. Despite this, he developed an intense dislike, even extreme contempt, for the cliché of the Urdu teaching fraternity interested as it was in all matters except academic. Most Urdu academics were mired in money-making schemes regardless of their limited scholarly capabilities, as their backgrounds were mostly theological rather than academic. Dr Farouqui chose the work pressures of the private sector instead, while continuing to write and research on Urdu. Besides his countless English articles, Oxford University Press published two major edited books of his—Muslims & Media Images: News vs Views (2009) and Redefining Urdu Politics in India (2006). He did several translations and wrote six books in Urdu, most of them published by the legendary Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind).

The post of Anjuman’s general secretary was offered to him in 2012, when the institution was on the verge of collapse. By then, and despite its glorious past, the emaciated organization was ready to sing its swansong. Dr Khaleeq Anjum, its general secretary for 40 years, was not an able administrator and oblivious to the pressing challenges faced by Urdu. An ex-lecturer of Urdu at DU’s Kirorimal College,he remained in limbo, stuck in Urdu’s poetic past. On taking over as general secretary, Dr Farouqui immediately put the Anjuman’s set-up back on its administrative rails, with his efforts gaining international acclaim having turned the Anjuman into a dynamic and vibrant organisation once again. He continues to write prolifically on multiple aspects of Urdu and perceptions of and about Muslims as well as on myriad topics. He successfully translated and produced Salman Khurshid’s play Sons of Babur and was the driving force behind its more than 50 staging’s in English and Hindustani, both in India and abroad. In 2012, he won the Sahitya Akademi Award for its Urdu translation. Ever the polyglot, his English play Marx My Word (2015) was well received by connoisseurs of English theatre. 09:10, 27 April 2016 (UTC)Ather Farouqui (talk)