My usual explorative visit to Karachi’s Urdu bazaar a fortnight ago revealed that though book piracy in Pakistan has been going on for a long time, nowadays it has taken a slightly different path.

Contrary to the past, when Indian books on popular subjects such as humour, fiction and technical subjects were pirated, Urdu criticism and research done across the border has found a ready market here of late.

In the past, we used to see pirated versions of Urdu books published in India of writers such as Krishan Chandr, Qurratulain Hyder and Rasheed Ahmed Siddiqi, along with some English books on engineering, finance, accounting or medical science. Once in a blue moon, one saw a pirated version of a research or a critical work, but that too was limited to well-known works by literary stalwarts, such as research on Ghalib by Malik Ram or work on Urdu orthography by Rasheed Hasan Khan.

Indeed some authorised versions of Indian research and critical works in Urdu were published by Majlis-i-Taraqqi-i-Adab in the 1960s and 1970s, but not only were they printed with due permission but were also published first and in Pakistan. In many cases, the Pakistani edition remained the only edition.

Similarly, in the past few years, authorised versions of Indian works such as Shamim Hanafi’s ‘Jadeediyet aur shaeri’, Gopi Chand Narang’s ‘Urdu zaban aur lisaniyaat’ and Shamsur Rahman Farooqi’s ‘Urdu ka ibtedai zamana’ and his ‘Lughaat-i-Rozmarra’, in addition to his somewhat controversial novel ‘Kai chaand the sar-i-aasman’, have been published. However, these days, Pakistani publishers, especially the ones based in Lahore, seem to be doing good business from Urdu works published in India judging by the speed with which new titles keep coming up.

The pirated Indian books which I came across included ‘Urdu kahavaten aur un ka samaaji aur lisaani pehlu’, a doctoral dissertation by Dr Younus Ugaskar, ‘Arooz sab ke liye’, a work on prosody and poetics by Kamal Ahmed Siddiqi, ‘Tazkira-i-muaasreen’, a volume combining four anthologies of obituaries-cum-biographies by Malik Ram, ‘Kahavaten aur unka hikayti-o-talmeehi pas manzar’, a work on Urdu proverbs by Dr Shareef Ahmed Qureshi and a linguistic research on the origin of the Urdu language by Prof Mirza Khalil Baig, ‘Urdu zaban ki taareekh’. The latest publication which created ripples in literary circles and the book trade was the monumental work of Yakoob Miran Mujtahedi, an unauthorised edition of Urdu-English dictionary, comprising three volumes.

Now, there is no need to discuss the downsides of piracy which everyone is aware of and nobody supports it, despite a little grumbling from some quarters, especially students, who say that the original works are so expensive that pirated ones are a boon for the have-nots.

The fact remains that piracy of an intellectual property is a crime and poverty cannot serve as an excuse for violating the law. It is just like a robbery. Take the example of Mujtahidi sahib who spent 25 precious years of his life working on the dictionary in spite of his failing health. Now as unauthorised publishers laugh with joy at their profits as the poor lexicographer turns in his grave.

Without doubt, dictionary-writing is a back-breaking job, as Samuel Johnson, who himself was a lexicographer, called it ‘harmless drudgery’. Many publishers had contacted Mujtahidi sahib for the rights to publish his dictionary in Pakistan but he was reluctant and demanded quite a large sum for it. But after a couple of years of his death, a Lahore-based publisher not only pirated the three-volume dictionary, he also proudly put his name on the title as a ‘sponsor’.

Similarly, other publishers pirating Indian works print their names and addresses on pirated works in bold letters, unlike unauthorised publishers of English fiction or computer books who hide their identity. This goes to show that Urdu publishers have grown overconfident by the fact that very little action, if at all, has ever been taken against the violators of copyright laws.

In these circumstances, the legal publication in Pakistan of research work by a well known Indian scholar, Prof Dr Haneef Naqvi, comes as a pleasant surprise. Naqvi sahib has served as a chairman of the Urdu department at the Banaras Hindu University and is especially respected for his work on Ghalib, though his acumen is not limited to Ghalib alone. His book ‘Tehqeeq-o-tadveen: masaail aur mabahis’ is a collection of research articles and was recently published in India. Multan’s Beacon Books published it with an informative preface by a rising young scholar, Dr Abrar Abdus Salaam. Some of the articles included are especially helpful for students of MPhil and PhD since Naqvi sahib has described some very important issues concerning Urdu research.

drraufparekh@yahoo.com