March 23, 2003

SHANUL HAQ HAQQEE is a very prolific writer. If we were to divide the number of pages he has written by his age — 86 years or thereabout — we would arrive at a formidable figure. An ordinary mortal would shudder at the very idea of matching such a colossal literary output. However, Mr Haqqee is very blase about it. “I write in inspired moments only,” he says, leaving his listeners to conclude that his life must have been a prolonged spell of profound inspiration.

In spite of such prodigal prolificacy, Mr Haqqee has never been a hack. Far from it; all his life he has been a meticulous researcher, putting pen to paper only when he has pored over all the relevant books and records of a subject. A stickler for accuracy and perfection, he at times loves to play Henry Higgins. His gripping memoirs, which were serialized by Afkaar in 41 parts, contain the correct pronunciation of quite a few tricky words and tongue-twisters in parentheses. For instance, in the August 1992 issue of the literary monthly he writes the oft-mispronounced word Jizbiz with these directions: kasra, jeem, bay. (Needless to say, it’s all Greek to those who have only a rudimentary understanding of Urdu grammar.)

Unlike backward-looking old-timers who are forever wallowing in nostalgia and bewailing the falling standards of the Urdu language, Mr Haqqee has done his mother tongue a great service in the field of lexicography and linguistics. In addition to his regular professional duties, Mr Haqqee remained associated with the Urdu Lughat Board for 17 long years from 1958 to 1975, untiringly doing the spadework for what would be a monumental 24-volume dictionary, with each volume consisting of an average of a thousand pages. It was essentially a labour of love, for he received no remuneration whatsoever.

Anxious to preserve the pristine beauty of the Urdu language — and, perhaps, appalled at the thoughtless manner in which some easy-going native speakers speak it, disregarding the various nuances of pronunciation — Mr Haqqee undertook a daunting project (again, about a thousand well-researched pages) which afterwards came to be called Farhang-i-Talaffuz. In the preface to the dictionary, which is by all accounts a trail-blazing work, Mr Haqqee writes: “If a language was widely spoken, educated people could do without A’rab (the vowel or diacritical points). But it is a great pity that the use of Urdu has become limited. As a result, a large number of educated people are not conversant with the correct pronunciation of common words. One practical objective of the dictionary is to enunciate the received pronunciation of words. It also aims to do away with the mistakes that have gained currency owing largely to ignorance. This would go a long way towards strengthening the language.”

His latest tour de force was the translation of the eighth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, which first came out in 1911. Published by the Oxford University Press, it is the only English-to-Urdu dictionary in the country which has translations of sentences illustrating the usage of words. In addition, it provides a non-native speaker of the English language with information about the correct pronunciation of words based on the International Phonetic Alphabet.

In a prefatory note to the dictionary, Mr Haqqee has touched upon the works of his predecessors — J.B. Gilchrist, John Shakespeare, Duncan Forbes, Reverend Craven, G.P. Hazelgrov, Henry Block, S.W. Fallon, etc. Interestingly, he omits to mention the dictionaries compiled by Maulvi Abdul Haq and the Muqtadra Qaumi Zaban. “These dictionaries should have been mentioned in the preface,” he concedes.

Born in Delhi on Dec 15, 1917, Mr Haqqee did his BA from Aligarh Muslim University. He obtained a Master’s in English literature from the famous St Stephen’s College. In a brief introductory note to the first part of Mr Haqqee’s memoirs, the legendary editor of Afkaar, the late Sehba Lucknawi, says: “Shanul Haq Haqqee is a scion of a great literary family from Delhi. His father, Maulvi Ehtashamuddin Haqqee, wrote quite a few books, including short stories, a study of Hafiz, Tarjuman-ul-Ghaib, a translation of Diwan-i-Hafiz in verse, and a dictionary.”

As an impressionable youth he accompanied his father to the kotha of Khurshid Jan, who was in love with his father’s friend. (Her fidelity to the gentleman concerned lasted only as long as he remained prosperous). The visits allowed his father to indulge his passion for music, for Khurshid Jan, no unlettered prostitute, was well known for singing Persian ghazals with remarkable facility. It also afforded the young Haqqee an opportunity to learn the finer points of conversational culture. In those days, a young man unfamiliar with the linguistic niceties of elegant speech was considered uncouth. Much to his consternation, his father used to make him give the bail (a sum of money given to a singer as a personal reward) to the courtesan.

Growing up as he did in a city steeped in history and culture, Mr Haqqee recited his first ghazal at an annual poetic gathering of St Stephen’s College. His two anthologies of poems, Tair-i-Pairahan (1957) and Harf-i-Dilras (1979), testify to his refined poetic taste. However, preoccupied with time-consuming research work, Mr Haqqee stayed away from Mushairas, where, in most cases, only highly intelligible (or superficial) poetry wins the approbation of the uninitiated audience. As a consequence, it is little known that apart from ghazal, Mr Haqqee has tried his hand at other genres of poetry, such as Peheylian, Kehmukarnian, and Qitat-i-Tareekhi.

In the solitude of his study at home, he had an opportunity to compose poems for children, which would certainly not have found favour with an audience at a Mushaira. Published by the Hamdard Foundation, Phool khilay hain rang birangey contains the poem that most of us read, and laughed heartily at, in our childhood days.

Dost hain apne bhai bhulaker was the poem that was selected by the education authorities, who included it in a textbook without the author’s permission, and expurgated it, much to his chagrin. That the education authorities have little sense of humour is evident from the fact that they edited out the more facetious part of the poem. (Mr Haqqee concedes sheepishly that the poem is somewhat autobiographical. Forgetful as he is, he has often found himself wearing socks of different colours.)

Translation comes naturally to Mr Haqqee. Having imbibed the literature of various languages — Urdu, English, Persian, Arabic, Hindi and Sanskrit — he has little difficulty in finding Urdu equivalent of words capturing all shades of meaning. He has proved his mettle in the dicey field of translation by rendering Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra into Urdu. His other major translations include Bhagvatgita and Arth Shastra. (“I had to learn the Sanskrit language to translate Arth Shastra,” he recalls.)

Furthermore, Mr Haqqee has few equals in the field of literary criticism. In Nawadir-i-Zafar he refutes Mohammad Hussain Azad’s accusation that his mentor, Shaikh Ibrahim Zauq, ghost-wrote poetry for Bahadur Shah Zafar. In Aina-i-Afkar-i-Ghalib he performs what could be called a linguistic analysis of Ghalib’s poetry.

Selfless scholars like Mr Haqqee do not work for awards and medals. He does not even mention that he already has a Sitara-i-Imtiaz under his belt. All the same, the government should appreciate the efforts of individuals like him who have done the job which might have not been accomplished by institutions.

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