IT was Jan 19, 2010. And it was as cold and foggy that evening as it gets in Lahore. Dr Zia-ul-Hasan and gusts of chilly winds ‘warmly’ welcomed us as we came out of the Lahore airport building. The party included some scholars — such as Prof Dr Aslam Farrukhi, Prof Sahar Ansari, Dr Asif Farrukhi and Mubeen Mirza — and a student, this writer.
Dr Tehseen Firaqi, the then head of the Urdu department at Punjab University, had aptly invited Aslam Farrukhi sahib to deliver the keynote address at the international seminar organised to mark Muhammad Hussain Azad’s centenary, as Farrukhi sahib was an authority on Azad. We all were secretly concerned for Dr Aslam Farrukhi’s well-being: he was a frail, 85-year-old scholar and it was, perhaps, too cold for him.
We were commenting in lighter vein on the difference between the temperatures at Lahore and Karachi. Aslam Farrukhi sahib, however, was quiet, only giving a faint smile. But as soon as we got on the van that Dr Zia-ul-Hasan had brought to pick us up, Aslam Farrukhi noticed that the van’s window panes were misty due to condensation and instantly composed and recited a poetic line that referred to the “blurred mirror of the heart”.
Addressing Sahar Ansari, he asked him to compose the second line. After thinking momentarily, Ansari sahib completed the couplet with an apt second line and we all were amazed and amused, uttering “Subhan Allah”. Aslam Farrukhi smiled heartily this time around, and it was a good sign as it assured us of how mentally alert and quick-witted he was at that ripe age.
The next morning was as icy as it could be. At least I was convinced that it was a conspiracy hatched by Lahoris against the Karachiites in connivance with nature. But Aslam Farrukhi seemed unfazed, least bothered with the weather, when he delivered his address on Azad’s exquisite Urdu prose in almost just as bewitchingly beautiful parlance. The audience was enthralled and broke into spontaneous and thunderous rounds of applause many times over.
During Farrukhi sahib’s address when a student tried to say something to someone sitting next to him, Nasir Ziadi, the well-known poet, got angry. He scolded the student and told him in a muted tone to be quite and listen because “you won’t be able to have many opportunities like this and you would be proud to tell that you saw Dr Aslam Farrukhi and heard him give a speech”. Such was the awe Farrukhi sahib was held in.
Sometimes Aslam Farrukhi was the natural choice for certain tasks. Once we at Urdu Dictionary Board (UDB) felt an urgent need to request some scholar to review our dictionary’s manuscript as two of our senior external scholars were not available anymore. One of them, Prof Dr Akber Hussain Qureshi, a scholar from Aligarh settled in Peshawar, succumbed to the injuries sustained in a shoot-out at his residence where robbers had tried to break in. The other veteran scholar, the much respected Muhammad Saleem-ur-Rahman, had excused himself from reviewing for certain reasons.
When I let Dr Farman Fatehpuri, the then president of the UDB, know of that, he said that “the problem is that these days we have very few scholars well-versed in the matters of language and lexicography. Aslam Farrukhi is one such scholar. I shall ask him”.
Farrukhi sahib agreed and we started sending him the manuscript. The additions and alterations he suggested were invaluable. His erudite opinion in the matters of prosody was immensely helpful and he was very particular about correcting the ill-composed couplets, used in the dictionary as citations, as it would have rendered them out of poetic meter. With a keen eye for the shades of meanings, he carefully pointed out even minor lapses. It was his experience with Shan-ul-Haq Haqqee’s Oxford English-Urdu Dictionary as editor, too, that came in handy. His promptly submitted reviews helped keep the pace of work steady at the UDB and we were able to bring out the volumes as planned.
Aslam Farrukhi wrote flawless Urdu prose. He is reckoned as one of the most celebrated sketch-writers of modern Urdu literature. His prose played a vital role in it. A firm grip on Urdu idiom and a profound knowledge of intricacies of the language was of course an element that helped, but it alone does not make one write impeccable prose. It was unconscious or perhaps intentionally accepted influence of Muhammad Hussain Azad, Urdu’s legendary prose writer whose works he researched and whom he loved, that made Farrukhi write a lovely flowing prose. Azad’s prose is a magical blend of classical and modern. On one hand it is laden with metaphors and flowery expressions but on the other it is idiomatic, modernly simple and more concerned with getting the message across, unlike the maestros of old school who tended to rather impress with the pompous verbosity. Aslam Farrukhi’s prose is idiomatic and stylish yet flowing and highly readable. He was ever so careful not to use any English words unnecessarily in his Urdu writings.
Known for his exquisite, flowing Urdu prose and his research work on Muhammad Hussain Azad, Aslam Farrukhi passed away in Karachi on June 15, 2016. He was a research scholar, educationist, critic, sketch-writer, poet, lexicographer, dramatist and broadcaster. He penned a number of books for children as well. He will be dearly missed for his elegant, chaste Urdu prose.
Published in Dawn, June 20th, 2016
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