January 12, 2003

Recalling legendary figures who may have left abiding imprints on your memory, and creating their personality profiles in words, has always been a taxing task in any language or literature.

Urdu literature has certainly been no exception to this daunting challenge. And yet there have been brilliant essayists and prose writers of olympian calibre, like professor Rashid Ahmed Siddiqi and Patras Bokhari, who did full justice to their subjects, steering clear of the temptation to write hagiography, instead. The greatest humorist of our age, Mushtaq Yusufi, added a uniquely esoteric dimension of his own to essay writing with superbly fictional characters who come vibrantly alive in his refreshing and witty prose.

Pir Hassamuddin Rashdi did not belong to that recognised genre of Urdu prose writers who excelled in profile essays. He was not an ahle linguist like Rashid Ahmed Siddiqi to lay a claim on chaste Urdu prose. Yet he was a renowned scholar, researcher and historian who devoted his life to unearthing his native Sindh’s glorious past and its historical links with the kernel of Islamic civilization. Rashdi was a self-taught man with no formal schooling. But he had an incisive mind and a great flair with the pen to produce some truly fascinating pieces of prose-writing.

Karachi University’s Institute of Central and West Asian Studies has paid a befitting tribute to the scholarly stature of Pir Hassam Rashdi — the younger of the famous Rashdi duo (the other was Pir Ali Mohammad Rashdi who made his mark in journalism, politics and diplomacy) — by coming up, on his 20th death anniversary, with a valuable compilation of 21 of his Urdu essays. Written over a period of three decades, they mostly deal with the history of Sindh and legends of his era, especially those he came to know after the birth of Pakistan.

Rashdi was a proud son of the Sindhi soil who relished his native land’s undisputed claim as the pioneer of Islam in South Asia. But more than that, Sindh takes the pride of place as the crossroads of Central Asian and South Asian histories and cultures including, of course, languages. He claimed, for instance, in the early years of Pakistan that Sindh was the cradle of Urdu, a claim without historical evidence. He himself subsequently disowned this idea but for some of his followers this ‘novel’ idea still holds great lure and significance. Rashdi did make up for his slip of the tongue — or pang of romanticism — by writing a fine essay on Sindh’s Urdu poets, some of whom would be quite unfamiliar to the readers of Urdu.

But while Rashdi may have been on a slippery wicket about Urdu’s cradle in Sindh, his scholarly discourse on Sindh’s centuries-old political and cultural connections with Iran is beyond dispute. He furnishes historical evidence of Persian soldiers coming to Sindh in tow with Mohammad bin Qasim, and putting down their roots here. Persian culture and literature spread its wings in Sindh quickly, so much so that the first ever compilation of Persian poetry (Diwan) was undertaken in Sindh.

Tracing the evolution of Sindh as a focal concern for the Mughals at the peak of their power in India, the author writes of Sindh’s centrality to the Mughals. After all, Humayun, the second Mughal emperor, had escaped to Iran via Sindh which already had flourishing relations with the Safavis. Akbar the Great, born at Umar Kot in Sindh, never underestimated Sindh’s great strategic importance. Rashdi brings that era to life in two illuminating essays: one on Mir Abul Qasim Namkeen, and the other on Mirza Ghazi Beg Tarkhan.

As a probing and meandering essayist, he draws the pen pictures of those who inspired and enthralled him and enriched his scholarly horizons and interests after the birth of Pakistan.

In his brilliantly written “Panba kuja kuja nahum”, Rashdi pays ungrudging tribute to Shahid Ahmed Dehlvi, whose path- breaking magazine, Saqi, not only inspired him but at least two generations of Urdu readers and literati in three decades of Sahid Ahmed’s missionary pursuit. But this essay is also the surgeon’s scalpel in Rashdi’s hands with which he dexterously, and almost brutally, exposes the money-lust and the inevitable culture of corruption and sycophancy that quickly had the better of Pakistani society.

The pathos of his diction truly evokes atavistic passion when he mourns the neglect that attended the new-born nation’s treatment —- or lack of it — of stalwarts like Maulana Syed Suleiman Nadvi and Maulana Shabbir Ahmed Usmani. Rashdi also regrets the disdain shown to a man as brilliant and versatile as Dr Itrat Hussain Zubairi.

The collection’s liveliest piece is on Babae-Urdu, Maulvi Abdul Haq and his bosom pal, Pandit Birj Mohan Kaifi Data Tarya, who accompanied him to his new abode in Karachi from Delhi. Rashdi’s prolific pen draws a riveting picture of the two legendary titans of Urdu literature and also brings to life Karachi’s cultural and political ambience in the wake of the great influx of the literati in the then capital of Pakistan from all corners of India.

We learn of Maulvi Abdul Haq’s desperate attempts to rope in the moneyed people in the cause of promotion of Urdu. But Baba-i- Urdu was tilting at the wrong mindmills. His quarries remained elusive and unresponding. The situation has improved not a whit in 50 years; Urdu still remains an orphan shunned by the powerful elite. It is still buffeted by apathy and lack of patronage as much as it was in the days of BabaeUrdu. Somethings never change.

The editor of Rashdi’s scholarly works has done a superb job by including pithy descriptions of each one of the essays in the book’s preface. However, it would have been equally helpful if Urdu translations of the Persian couplets and references, generously quoted by Rashdi, were also included. Rashdi’s erudition made him completely at home in Persian. But such is not the norm with most readers of his collection.

Maqalat-i-Rashdi
(Compilation of essays) Edited by Ghulam Mohammad Lakho The Institute of Central and West Asian Studies, Karachi University
Shauba-e-Tasneef-o-Talif wa Tarjuma, Karachi University
428pp. Rs400

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