“Unhappy is the land that is in need of heroes,” says Galileo in Bertolt Brecht’s play ‘The life of Galileo’ in response to a dialogue of another character who laments the loss of respect for heroes in his country. The real hero in fact is a mortal who without claiming or being acclaimed hero does something that at the end of the day proves to be transformative.

Sardar Mohammad Khan (S.M.K) appeared to be an ordinary mortal all his life. Only a few knew what he had been doing while he lived. He spent all his life searching quietly what he loved most: the words. If you start looking closely at words you are doomed to live surrounded by mysterious whisperings with their strange audio landscapes that can make them meaningfully meaningless and meaninglessly meaningful. Only when his monumental work ‘Punjabi Urdu Dictionary’ was posthumously published the literati came to know what he had made of the whisperings he had all his life lived with, away from the public glare in an unknown corner of Rawalpindi city.

S.M.K (1915-1998) was born in a Punjabi-Pathan family in Basti Danishmandan, Jalandhar. After doing his secondary education he got his BA degree from the University of the Punjab in 1934. He joined Indian Army as a civil employee and served for a number of years at the GHQ Rawalpindi. His seemed to be a very prosaic rather boring life on the face of it. Apparently all he did was a job to make a living. But underneath the still waters was an incessant stirring that kept him restlessly busy with what he wanted to grasp: the words; the sounds and all that they signified.

He had a great passion for music which helped him in the journey he undertook to de-code the mysteries of sounds and words. Study of phonetics, philology, lexicography and music made him a scholar of linguistics par excellence. The irony is that while serving in the army he could not publish any of his writings due to the rules of his service.

His writings established his credentials as a scholar of great depth and vision. But what earned him enduring name and fame is his highly celebrated ‘Punjabi Urdu Dictionary’ published posthumously. A small part of the dictionary came out in 1965. The title reads: Punjabi Urdu Lughat, compiled and edited by S. Khanam. Who was this S. Khanam? It was his daughter. What a pity! To steer clear of bureaucratic rules he was compelled to hide the real name of the author. The dictionary suffered as much neglect as the language it dealt with.

None of the institutions -- public and private -- was willing to cough out the required funds. So the dictionary, to be exact, a big pile of drab handwritten papers kept gathering dust somewhere in his modest home.

In 1990s another great scholar and linguist Asif Khan, the then secretary of the Pakistan Punjabi Adabi Board, who happened to know S.M.K, personally persuaded him to allow the Board to publish his dictionary. But the Board had no funds to undertake such a big project. The Pakistan Academy of Letters was requested for help and it bought the Board rights for Rs100,000 to publish the dictionary. Asif Khan started the work but barely managed to get a few hundred pages composed. Years passed and no progress could be made. Then in 2006 Sachal Studios founded by Izzat Majeed came up with a generous donation of more than Rs2 million for the project and S.M.K’s dictionary was finally published in 2009. It is in two volumes comprising 3,600 pages. It is the most authoritative dictionary published this side of Punjab. Just to get a measure of its depth and breadth it suffices to say that S.M.K listed 64 dialects of Punjab which provided him material for his work.

The other day Mohammad Saleem-ur-Rehman, the most distinguished Urdu writer with encyclopedic knowledge, was telling his friends that he came across a word ‘Padam Shukkri’ used by Firaq Gorakhpuri. He looked up all the available Urdu and Hindi dictionaries but couldn’t find it. He finally consulted S.M.K’s Punjabi Urdu dictionary and to his pleasant surprise the word was there with its correct meaning.

Sardar Khan all his life wanted to discover the origins of secret world of words. “In the beginning was the word--”, says Bible. And he surely knew that without knowing our beginning we would not know what our end could be. — soofi01@hotmail.com