Faruqi came to fiction late — first through a collection of stories on Urdu poets, and, then, through his magnum opus, Kai Chand, which he translated into English in 2013 as The Mirror of Beauty. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi rejected, like the character from his majestic novel, Kai Chand thé Sar-e Aasman (2006), “the notion that the past is a foreign country and strangers who visit there cannot comprehend its language”. Faruqi took the Urdu literary establishment by storm in the late 1960s with a literary journal, Shabkhoon, that was as uncompromisingly high-brow as it was irreverent. Nearly a quarter of a century’s work went into a four-volume exegesis on the life and works of Mir, freeing his works from limiting, moral analysis. It is a plenitude that is also the legacy of Faruqi.

Source: Indian Express December 25, 2020 18:34 UTC