WHILE comparing Urdu literature written in India and Pakistan, it is a commonly held view that as far as creative writings are concerned Pakistan has outdone India, but when it comes to research and critical works, Indian scholars have been a bit ahead of their counterparts across the border.

This was the perception at least until a decade ago. While there has never been any dearth of good creative writers and poets in India, here in Pakistan, we, too, have been able to produce a good deal of decent research and critical works. So it has been a good contest. But now one feels that both India and Pakistan have not been able to live up to their reputations and during a couple of past decades or so the standards have suffered from a visible lapse. A general fall in standards of education and especially deterioration in standards of teaching of Urdu at universities is to blame.

Another interesting debate that often ensues from informal discussion among academics is that whether or not the better part of Urdu research has been carried out and published by individuals who had never been associated with any university. Be it India or Pakistan, some of the best examples of Urdu’s research works have been produced outside the universities and colleges, some scholars opine. Some of our great researchers, they say, had never been part of any faculty. For instance, in India, Qazi Abdul Wadood and Imtiaz Ali Khan Arshi, considered among the greatest researchers of Urdu, were not associated with any university. Rasheed Hasan Khan was indeed associated with a university, but he was not part of faculty and was assigned some work much below his calibre and erudition. Malik Ram, another Indian scholar, did not teach, but he as a researcher is well-known.

Similarly, in Pakistan many scholars who had earned name and fame in research had never taught at any university or college. They include some awe-inspiring names, such as Afsar Amrohvi, Sakhawat Mirza, Ghulam Rasool Mehr, Kalbe Ali Khan Faiq, Khalilur Rahman Dawoodi, Sheikh Muhammad Ikram, Mushfiq Khwaja, Qudrat Naqvi, Ikram Chughtai, Shanul Haq Haqqee and many more. Though Jameel Jalibi had become Karachi University’s vice chancellor, he had no previous exposure to working or teaching at any university.

Likewise, Agha Iftikhar Husain, a researcher who brought to light works on Urdu carried out by European scholars, began teaching at a Islamabad university only after retirement and he had done almost his entire research work while working as a civil servant. And all these names prove that both in India and Pakistan, research work done outside universities is much better.

Some other academics feel that Indian and Pakistani scholars who remained associated with universities have produced very fine research work. For example, in India, they say, we find scholars who did research at universities include Abdus Sattar Siddiqi, Abdul Qadir Sravari, Noorul Hasan Naqvi, Masood Hasan Rizvi Adeeb, Hanif Naqvi, Gopi Chand Narang, Masood Hussain Khan, Gian Chand Jain, Syeda Jaffer, and many others.

In Pakistan, too, we can find some of the best researchers at universities and they include, for example, Ghulam Mustafa Khan, Syed Abdullah, Abul Lais Siddiqi, Farman Fatehpuri, Iftikhar Ahmed Siddiqi, Ghulam Husain Zulfiqar, Waheed Qureshi, Ibadat Barelvi, Ayoob Qadri, Najmul Islam and, in recent times, Tehseen Firqai, Rafiuddin Hashmi, Moinuddin Aqeel and Tabassum Kashmiri.

In addition, there are some researchers who had been associated with universities for quite some time before or after joining some other organisation and among them are giants such as Moulvi Abdul, Hafiz Mahmood Sherani and Shaukat Sabzwari, to name but a few.

So we find bigwigs both in and away from universities are too close to call. But with an outbreak of a pandemic disease known as ‘MPhil/ PhD programme’ about a decade ago at our universities, we have witnessed a tangible lapse in standards of Urdu research. Those who had been associated with our universities in distant or recent past carried out research because it was their passion. They did not intend to get any promotion on the basis of their research work. Their sincerity and genuine scholarship produced amazing results.

But now, the faculty members at our universities write research papers just to meet the criterion for promotion laid down by the Higher Education Commission. We can name many university teachers who quit research, even reading, once they were made professors. So one can conclude that our researchers in past, either teaching at a university or otherwise, felt research was a reward itself and did not seek any worldly reward. Now our universities lag behind in Urdu research because research is not a passion, but just a means of promotion.

In India too, standards of Urdu research have been falling and some shockingly substandard PhD dissertations have been written there in recent years, albeit younger researchers in Pakistan, too, are not far behind.

drraufparekh@yahoo.com

Published in Dawn, June 6th, 2022

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