THE sitting to pay tribute to Shamsur Rahman Farooqi under way at Arts Council Karachi. White Star
KARACHI: The Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi, on Saturday evening held an event to pay tribute to the renowned Indian critic, fiction writer and linguist Shamsur Rahman Farooqi who passed away last year on Dec 25.
Prof Sahar Ansari, one of the three speakers present in the council’s Josh Malihabadi Library, said Farooqi sahib was an institution who was an expert in undertaking a variety of [literary] works in a masterful way. Although he had achievements in various genres of literature, even if he had focused on one of them, he still would have been a big name in the field. Giving this argument, Prof Ansari touched upon the late scholar’s great critical accomplishment Sher-i-Shor Angez. He argued it was important on two counts. One, it provided the reader with the understanding of the great poet Mir Taqi Mir’s poetry on the level of meaning (as is done at educational instituti
Students of history are often warned of the pitfalls of ‘big person’ history, or the tendency to see history simply as a series of biographies of extraordinary individuals, ignoring larger socioeconomic forces.
Faced with the loss of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, however, and tasked with remembering his work, I am forced to throw all caution to the wind and look up in awe to this single individual. The amount, range and depth of all his work is hard to describe in a few lines.
Perhaps his single most important achievement was saving the classical Urdu ghazal, and embracing and elaborating its native poetics once and for all. Although Faruqi worked towards this across multiple works, the single most forceful and consolidated expression of this is his magnum opus, Sher-i-Shor Angez [The Tumult-Raising Verse], a four-volume work on the classical Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir (1725-1810).