My father Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s archive of letters is vast. Before emails diminished the volume of handwritten letters, my father wrote and received thousands of letters.

As the editor of the Urdu literary journal Shabkhoon, he received bundles of letters nearly every day. He meticulously filed away all sorts of letters that were important to him, letters from family and friends, from his peers, fellow literati, aspiring authors and so on.

There are stacks of thick brown paper folders stuffed with letters in his library whose pages are now yellowed and brittle with age. They contain a veritable treasure house of information about the contemporary literary scenario of the 1960s and ’70s, the high days of Shabkhoon, when my father was deeply committed to literary pursuits (while holding an exacting full-time job). He was young and full of zealous energy, often staying up at nights to keep up with his correspondence.

My sister Baran, who is taking care of father’s archive, had mentioned to me the corpus of letters in his collection that is now being sorted and scanned. I had been looking forward to diving into some of the folders on my current visit to Allahabad, but I wasn’t prepared for the stacks of letters that filled the surface of three to four large tables. They have now been arranged alphabetically by the sender’s names. Baran also showed me a few letters that we had written to father when we were children; he had kept them safely.

There are many luminary Urdu writers with whom father had lengthy discussions through letters. Some have been published, notably the important exchanges with Muhammad Hasan Askari (1919-78), the noted literary critic, fiction writer, translator and columnist. Since I have done some work on Askari’s modernism, I was drawn to the stack of Askari sahib’s letters.

I had read the published letters but hoped to find a few unpublished ones. There is something fascinating, intensely personal about handwritten letters — the choice of paper, colour of ink, layout, the individualistic eccentricities of the cursive hand, scratched out words and phrases, postscripts.

My next foray was the file of Naiyer Masud’s (1936-2017) letters. I was curious about Naiyer Masud’s (Naiyer Chacha for me) letters from the 1960s, when the friendship between him and my father was a formal one — editor and contributor type. Naiyer Chacha’s elder sister, known as bajiya was married to professor Masihuzzaman of the Urdu department at Allahabad University, so Naiyer Masud visited Allahabad often; and there was this connection between them as well.

He was a newly minted professor of Persian literature at Lucknow University and had not made his name as a unique fiction writer. Naiyer Masud perhaps was better known as the son of Masud Hasan Rizvi Adeeb, the eminent Urdu and Persian scholar.

Masud’s earliest letter in my father’s file is from March 4, 1968. The last one that I found is from 2010 (later, he suffered from a stroke that paralysed his right side). Masud’s calligraphy is iconic. His handwriting stands out for its whimsical characters embellished with coils and whorls, colourful inks, and a pearl-like luminosity; he arranges his sentences on a page with artistic flair, often with postscripts as borders.

In the early correspondence, my father is addressed as “biradiram [brother] Farooqi sahib”, followed by the greeting “adaab arz” which is a formal but friendly form of address. Later, biradiram is replaced with the informal “pyaare [dear] Farooqi sahib.” My father addressed Naiyer Chacha as “Mir sahib.” It is interesting that neither of them addressed each other by their first names or without the honorific “sahib.” (See the image below. The ink changes colour in the last part of the letter; also of note is the calligraphy of bismillah at the top.)

Faruqi sahib and Mir sahib discussed and critiqued each other’s ongoing or recently published work. I came across an interesting letter dated May 10, 1973, that quizzed some of Ghalib’s unfamiliar idioms in a verse. Although the verse is not mentioned in the letter, I was able to locate it because of the unusual idioms under review:

Rag-i-Laila ko khaak-i-dasht-i-Majnun reshagi bakhshay
Agar bove baja-i-danah dehqan nok nishtar ki

[The dust of Majnun’s desert might bestow wounds on Laila’s veins
If the farmer were to sow tips of lancets instead of seeds]

The premise of this ambiguous verse is the story handed down through generations that, when Laila’s veins were lanced, Majnun’s hands would bleed. While this premise gives something to hold on to while unravelling this obscure verse, it doesn’t explain the meaning satisfactorily. Why would a farmer sow points of lancets in a desert and why would dust bestow “reshagi” or “impetus to grow?”

In the letter to my father, mentioned above, Naiyer Masud ponders if “rag-i-Laila” could be the name of a tree just as baid-i-Majnun is the name of a tree, and khoon-i-Siyahvash is a grass and panja-i-Maryam is a herb. He further adds that to infer reshagi as “wounds” also seems far-fetched because the verb bakhshna means “to bestow.” According to Masud, bestowing wounds is unidiomatic.

In Tafheem-i-Ghalib, my father offers a different reading of this almost meaningless verse. He begins by pointing out the contradictory meanings of reshagi offered by Ghalib’s commentators. Ghulam Rasool Mehr prefers “to grow” while Bekhud Dihlavi prefers “wound” but mentions “growth” as well. Bekhud Mohani, Taba Tabai and other eminent commentators seem nonplussed by this verse, but all commentators agree that the verse is about the spiritual connection between the lover and beloved. But as Faruqi argues, it is absurd to think that the beloved would suffer at the hands of the lover — that Laila would suffer wounds from the lancets planted in Majnun’s desert if she were to walk there.

Faruqi reads this verse as an example of a “tanz” (irony). I think the meaning becomes clearer if we say: If someone could be so irrational as to plant lancets in the desert, then Laila’s veins could also bleed.

[To be continued]

The columnist is professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia in the US. X: @FarooqiMehr

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 13th, 2025