Shamsur Rahman Faruqi

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (1935–2020) was an Indian Urdu poet, author, critic and theorist, above all the critic who ushered modernism into Urdu literature. Born at Pratapgarh on 30 September 1935 and raised in Azamgarh and Gorakhpur, he took his M.A. in English from Allahabad University in 1955 and served in the Indian Postal Service from 1960 to 1994, rising to chief postmaster-general. In June 1966 he founded the modernist literary journal Shabkhoon, which he edited and published for nearly four decades. He formulated fresh models of literary appreciation that joined Western criticism to the aesthetics of Arabic, Persian and Urdu, most famously in his four-volume study of Mir Taqi Mir, Sher-e-Shor Angez. He also wrote the novel Kai Chand The Sar-e-Aasman (translated by himself as The Mirror of Beauty) and, with his nephew Mahmood Farooqui, revived the storytelling art of Dastangoi. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1986, the Saraswati Samman in 1996 and the Padma Shri in 2009, and died at Allahabad on 25 December 2020.