Mehr Afshan Farooqi, writer, literary critic, historian and research scholar, is daughter of Shams ur Rahman Faruqi and Jamila Faruqi. Although the family hails from Azamgarh, she studied at Allahabad University from where she did her PhD in history.

Despite being the daughter of a great Urdu scholar, she was sent to an English medium school. But the father started teaching her Urdu at home. Faruqi would ask young Mehr to read the editorial of an Urdu newspaper, something she dreaded. The day the Urdu paper was not published, she felt a sense of relief. She was also taught Persian at home.

When asked how she managed to stay out of the influence of her father, she says that her being away from India and in the United States helped her grow independently. No doubt, her path-breaking research and work on Urdu literature has established her own independent status in the realm of literary circles.

Currently, she is Associate Professor in the department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Culture at the University of Virginia. Her most recent project is writing a commentary on the ‘mustarad’ kalam of Ghalib. She was in Lahore a few weeks ago to participate in the Faiz International Festival where The News on Sunday had a chance to chat with her.

The News on Sunday: Tell us something about your early life?

Mehr Afshan Farooqi: I got University Grants Fellowship which is awarded to the best student and as part of the fellowship you get to teach a class. That’s how I got training in teaching. I got married very early so I finished my masters and PhD after marriage, with small children.

In India, busy bringing up my two sons, I took a break from academia for five to eight years. Once both the children had started going to school, I seriously started thinking about resuming my academic work. The experience of teaching at Allahabad University was not very exciting because the classes were big and the students were not attentive enough. I was looking for teaching a job in a smaller college when I learnt about a vacancy at the University of Pennsylvania. I am talking about the 1990s. They were looking for a one-year replacement position and I was fortunate enough to be invited.

In the one year that I was there, I was teaching a mixture of courses -- history of Mughal period and then a course on Urdu literature. Because, I was daughter of such an important Urdu personality, I was always interested in Urdu literature. After teaching Urdu literature, I began to think of doing that on a more regular basis. That was the beginning of a sort of reinventing myself from a historian into a person who is interested in literature. I came back to India after that one year.

It was a very transformative experience for me, living in Philadelphia, living by myself. After I came back, the first thing I did for myself was to buy a computer and get connected to the internet. I then started looking for other opportunities overseas, because I felt that it just gave me the distance from my own roots -- to reflect, look back and go forward. I began to apply and again I got a position and there was no looking back.

TNS: What was your first writing assignment?

MAF: I was struggling to make my mark and willing to go along with whatever space I was given. In the West, normally single papers are represented either by very senior scholars or very junior and sort of middle range scholars, joined in what is called the ‘panel’. So I was invited to join a panel to write about the importance of Abjad. It was printed in a very important journal called Adbiat which is published from two universities in the US in English. So that was my first article.

TNS: So you are now known as a literary critic or literary person than a historian?

MAF: Absolutely, my identity now is as a scholar of literature. When I was teaching, I needed more Urdu in translation. So I started doing translation works and was approached by the Oxford University Press (OUP). Actually it was Prof. C. M. Naim who recommended my name to OUP -- to edit a two volume anthology of prose and poetry. That was a major work which took five years to finish and that established my credentials.

TNS: Which writers did you include and what was the criterion?

MAF: The anthology included writers from both India and Pakistan. It was all about hundred years of Urdu literature from 1905 to 2005. We included important writers from that period.

TNS: It must be very difficult to pick and choose?

MAF: Starting from Akbar llahabadi, Allama Iqbal and coming right to Irfan Siddiqi among poets. Siddiqi was a very important poet who died very young, unfortunately. It was hard to include very young people because they still had a long career ahead of them. I decided to include anyone born by 1955 but not after that. In prose, I included all big names like Manto, but I also included some not so important names.

TNS: Let us talk about your major work on the rejected kalam of Ghalib?

MAF: Frances Pritchett has done a translation of Divan-e-Ghalib. She’s done a commentary on Ghalib in English and almost spent a lifetime on that. She has, of course, consulted my father’s work Tafheem-e-Ghalib and other published commentaries on Divan-e- Ghalib. As she was retiring from Columbia University, there was a volume that was put together and I was invited to write a paper for that. I thought I should do something new since so much has been written on Ghalib. It occurred to me that I had not seen much written on his mustarad kalam. I thought I should write a paper on that.

When I started researching, I was shocked to know that so little had been done on the subject. I realised that Ghalib had rejected more than half of his poetry, which is a huge thing. Also some of the rejected verses are not really so great, so he was justified in not including them but then there were others which were very interesting and they were loaded with meaning. I wondered why they were rejected so I made an intikhab from the rejected verses.

TNS: What was the criteria?

MAF: The criteria was the same that we use for classical Urdu poetry, classical ghazal poetry I would say: fasahat, balaghat, istiarah, nazakat, maenay key nazakat, mazmoon afrini -- yeh sari cheezain. So using that I selected about fifty ghazals which means about five hundred asha’aar and then I started writing a commentary, which by the way is in English. As a way of introducing it to the world, I first gave it to a paper and it created a lot of interest. I was already writing a column for Dawn and I asked them if I could write another column for them on the rejected verses. They said yes and I started doing one sher a month for them. I started receiving feedback from my readers which encouraged me.

Currently that work is in progress. Then I felt there was a need for a parallel work also because no one has actually studied the development of Ghalib’s poetry from a textual point of view. Since the different Divans -- 1816, 1821, 1826, 1828,1841 -- were only Nuskhas, I made selections from them. But I wanted to see his poetry as a whole and that merits a book. This book will have chapters on each Divan. That is what I am working on.

TNS: This should be something new?

MAF: Absolutely new. Nobody has done this work.

TNS: When are you expecting it to be published?

MAF: I thing the manuscript will be ready by the end of 2016. It will be published in 2017.

TNS: What are you going to name it?

MAF: I am thinking of giving it the name of ‘Uncreated Garden’ Gulsha-e-Naa-afrida.

TNS: It is in Ghalib’s diction?

MAF: Yes.

TNS: You have written about bulbul in Urdu poetry. Do you want to write about other birds and animals?

MAF: That is a very interesting thing that I am doing. I am going to write small essays on all the animals. I think the first thing I did was parwana, then bulbul, ghazaal and then taoos. Now I have a list. I am going to do qumri, cheeti, mor and murgh. It will be a small little book on ten to twelve animals of the ghazal world. It is cute.

TNS: It is a new angle?

MAF: Yes you are right. I am trying to open it up to new ways of looking at ghazal. And I thought this was very interesting as to what does peacock represent, what is the egg of peacock, ‘baiza-e taoos’. Baiza-e taoos represents all colours, desires. When the egg hatches, peacock comes out. So what does it represent?

TNS: You have also written on letters. Why did you choose them?

MAF: I think letters represents two things: one, they represent a particular style or genre of writing which is not trivial, because in letters people tend to say things which are personal and extensions of their selves; two, letters are a kind of alternate history. Letters make general remarks about what they are doing at a particular time, what is happening in the news, things in private as well as public life. For example, I am writing emails from here saying Lahore today is this and that. So if somebody reads it fifty years from now, he or she will get a perspective of what Faiz International Festival and LUMS [Mehr has also lectured at LUMS] were like in 2015.

I was interested particularly in letters from women writers because they are under-represented. So I worked on the letters of Safiya Akhtar. She comes across as a remarkable woman, very modern as a Muslim woman.

TNS: Did you look at some of the unpublished letters of Ghalib?

MAF: Of course I am looking at his letters now. I think Khaliq Anjum has done a very good job of compiling them in four volumes. And of course there is another volume of his Persian letters. I am not looking at any unpublished letter of Ghalib because I feel that whatever is available is more than enough.

TNS: Don’t you think his letters would help you understand his reasons for rejecting his verses?

MAF: In two of his letters does he mention that ‘Anhoon Nay Qalamzad Kar diya, Yak Qalam Chaak kar diya’. But it is not literarily true; it is rhetorical. Ghalib’s letters are more of high prose style because Urdu was not still exactly high language of prose. It was a language of poetry and Ghalib was setting a new trend by doing that

TNS: You have also commented on Quran’s Urdu translations. What fascinated you?

MAF: I was studying the history of Urdu prose which made a very late entry. Urdu poetry, of course, had become very polished, urbane and sophisticated. Prose was always in farsi so I wanted to examine the reasons. I had read it was because of the publications from Fort William where Urdu prose had its beginning. But how can somebody manufacture prose? You can’t just manufacture it in a classroom or a laboratory.

There had to be some examples of prose from before and when I started looking I came across these commentaries of the Quran. One of the earliest writing from 1776 by Shah Murad Ullah, ‘Khudai Naimat’, is a translation of the thirteenth Paara. Then there are others after that. I felt that it was a very developed prose, a prose that has the capability of translating such multilayered text of the Quran. Imagine if a prose has the ability to do that, it has to be a literary prose. ‘Literary prose’, yes that is the word I was looking for, because prose can be of many types but it is literary prose

TNS: So they say nothing grows under a banyan tree. As daughter of a great scholar, how did it feel growing up and having an identity of your own?

MAF: I think moving away from my hometown of Allahabad and even India played an important role in establishing me as an independent scholar. I was ten thousand miles away and in a culture which disregards who your parents are. They give you a chance to succeed on your own. So I had the opportunity and I did not want to let it go; I took it with both hands. You know the other day I posted a picture on Facebook and somebody made a remark "Aray Is maein Faruqi Sahib Bhi Hain". That person obviously did not know I was Faruqi Sahib’s daughter.

Related article: Interview with Shamsur Rahman Faruqi

TNS: As a literary critic, how do you look at Shams ur Rahman Faruqi’s works.

MAF: I don’t think that is a fair question.

TNS: You have written a book on Muhammad Hasan Askari. Why did you choose to write on him considering that he had peculiar views and a particular reputation?

MAF: I chose him for many reasons. The first was that I wanted to look at literary criticism in Urdu from an important Urdu critic. When I started looking at the literary writings from the subcontinent, apart from my father’s it was his voice that stood out to me and I wanted to use it. So I started reading Askari Sahib and I was very impressed. Then I started translating him and when you translate someone you get to know the person and his writing very intimately because you are struggling with every word. That is how I came to know Askari Sahib and decided that he deserves a wider audience. He deserves to be introduced as a literary critic to the English Anglophile world.

TNS: Would like to share the problems of a translator? Is it really possible to translate the spirit or something always lacks?

MAF: It is difficult but it can be done, though not all the time. There are certain texts that are easier to translate and there are those that are culturally closer to the language. For example, translating from Persian or any of the central Asian languages is relatively easier than translating from English or French because the cultural vocabulary of the latter languages is very different.

First of all, you have to find words that suit the thought, the idea, and secondly you have to carry the author’s voice into translation. There are many choices but, generally speaking, I feel that consistency is a very good method to follow in what you choose to do, especially when you are translating a novel you have to be consistent throughout.

TNS: Have you translated any novel?

MAF: I have translated only one novel and I did it a long time ago. It was called Khwabon Ka Sawera by Abdul Samad. MacMillan was publishing a series of Indian novels in translations. They had already selected the novel so I accepted it for translation. It was more than 500 pages. It was a good experience.

TNS: Some people think there is no future of Urdu in India, and that it is a dying language. Would you like to comment on that?

MAF: No I don’t think it is a dying language at all. In fact, I see a new interest in Urdu because as awareness is growing about globalisation, while English is an important global language and is a language of the computer, there is also a realisation that English is swallowing up other languages. Therefore, there is a desire and will to push back the capitalism of this English.

I think there is awareness among the young generation and they want to learn Urdu. And it is also being delinked from religious colouring that had been given to it at the time of partition that Urdu is the language of Muslims and Urdu is the cause of partition which is not at all true. Urdu is the language of everyone.