Literary ambassador

"Urdu and Hindi, historically speaking, are the same language. But now, after the Partition, it just suits the narrative of two nation states of India and Pakistan to portray them as two separate languages. But when I speak of the Urdu language, I speak of the common cultural language of both India and Pakistan and the literature that developed in it, especially classical literature."

When talking about the Urdu language, Musharraf Ali Farooqi is decisive about pointing out the negative role of the British colonialists in terms of dividing the subcontinent along ethnic and religious lines that, after the partition, according to Farooqi, created an "identity mess that could not be reversed."

Firm positions

Though endowed with a mild-mannered composure, Farooqi takes a decisive stand on certain issues. In one interview, for instance, he spoke his mind on Salman Rushdie's prose, saying: "I think he is boring and tedious…I'm tired of clever novels. Anybody can write clever novels."

This critique is certainly due in part to the tremendous differences in style: While Rushdie is a master of exuberant storytelling, Farooqi's prose does quite the opposite. His novels all focus on the characters, his stories unfold naturally, almost as though there is no narrator. Virtually all critics who reviewed Farooqi's "Story of a Widow" hailed the elegance of its style, but also its masterly simplicity.

The Urdu Project

But there might be yet another reason why Farooqi dismisses Rushdie's writing and that is because the man from Bombay stands for the fact that Asian writers are usually acclaimed only when they're writing in English. "Despite the huge interest in the English-language writers from India in the recent past and the current interest that exists in the English-language fiction coming out of Pakistan, there is almost zero interest by English publishers in seeking out and publishing original works from Urdu or Hindi in translation and this situation is not because of any absence of good translations from Urdu," Farooqi explains. "It reveals to me more about how western publishers see English-language writers from the subcontinent as somehow being more relevant to their markets."

In order to address this grievance, Farooqi and a good handful of experts and colleagues founded the Urdu Project to foster translations of Urdu literary works into English. This way, he hopes a wider range of human experience will be opened up to readers."The embrace of the industrial model by publishers in the West," Farooqi and his companions argue, often require foreign literature to be "accessible" or "user-friendly." This, they say, "disregards some of the central functions of literature – educating readers in the wider range of human experience, and exposure to new ways of imagining stories." In Farooqi's opinion, the western literary canon still has blind spots.

Cross-cultural

To several critics, Farroqi's novel, "The Story of a Widow," resembles the novels of Jane Austen, the 19th century England. Farooqi says he never read Jane Austen, and that his book was inspired by Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki's novel "The Makioka Sisters." What Musharraf Ali Farooqi is aiming at is, in fact, writing simple stories that transcend cultural boundaries - stories about people that everyone everywhere in the world can relate to.

"I feel that in order to understand, or make a connection with the universal human experience, as presented in a work of fiction, it is not necessary for a reader to know about the everyday-life in a culture." Farooqi adds that though some knowledge is necessary, "the major success of a fictional work is that it's not only relevant to its cultural world alone, but that it can also be understood and experienced by a reader outside of that culture." With all his detailed knowledge about life and literature on the Subcontinent, Farooqi is a true proponent of world literature.

Author: Lewis Gropp
Editor: Sarah Berning