Opinion Go gently into the night, CM Naim sahab
You have been a beacon for those struggling to take Urdu to newer readers
C M Naim. (Photo: https://southernasia.uchicago.edu) 
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For the present generation of Urdu wallahs and translators, Chaudhry Mohammad Naim (popularly known as C M Naim) was an ustaadon ke ustaad. He showed the way to many with his immaculate scholarship, bilingual ease, vast and varied reading of the ocean that is Urdu literature and yes, prodigious publications. Always eclectic, consistently unorthodox and relentlessly prolific, Naim sahab continued to delight and astonish both the serious Urdu researcher and the literary dilettante with his steady stream of articles, essays and books covering a gamut of concerns and topics in the course of a long and illustrious literary career. Essentially a teacher of Urdu language and literature to several generations of American students, he had, over the years, emerged as a passionate crusader for Urdu zubaan and tehzeeb.
Born in Barabanki in 1936, educated at Lucknow University and the University of California, Berkeley, with Master’s degrees in Urdu and Linguistics respectively, he joined the University of Chicago’s Department of South Asian Languages and Civilisations in 1961, and chaired it from 1985 to 1991. On retiring from active teaching in 2001, he was a national fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla and a visiting professor at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He was also professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he edited two of Urdu’s most influential and widely read journals, Mahfil, and later the iconic Annual of Urdu Studies — both fortunately available online in their entirety.
Naim sahab’s list of publications is as long as it is varied, showing the range of his interests: From Urdu pedagogy to translations (from both Hindi and Urdu), polemical essays, Urdu readers and compilations for graduate students at American universities as well as several sharp takes on the state of Urdu, the challenge of being a Muslim in India, and timely interventions in newspapers and magazines, not to mention his seminal work on Mir and Ghalib. A meticulous keeper of his own archive, much of his writing can be found at https://cmnaim.com.
One of his later offerings, Urdu Crime Fiction, 1890-1950, bore the following by way of sub-heading: ‘An Informal History’. He confessed to an early and abiding love for mysteries and thrillers, in English and in Urdu, making his book “both a labour of love and an exercise in nostalgia”. Explaining the sub-title, he elaborated: “It is a ‘history’ because it offers an account of the past in a loose, chronological order, and it is an ‘informal’ history because I wrote it chiefly for those who read crime fiction in any language only for pleasure.” This, to my mind, sums up Naim sahab, the man and the writer. He was a man blessed with boundless curiosity that remained undimmed by age, coupled with his wide-ranging reading across genres and his steadfast refusal to be hemmed in by academic pretentiousness.
As a translator, I am constantly amazed by Naim sahab’s extraordinary ability to extend the scope of what might otherwise have been luminous but brief magazine-style mazmun (essays), often by forgotten or obscure writers. Take A Most Noble Life: The Biography of Ashrafunnisa Begum (1840-1903) by Muhammadi Begum (1877-1908), translated from the Urdu with additional material plucked from different sources that add layers of context, profuse footnotes that make delightful reading and supplement the translation in myriad ways along with a rigorously researched introduction and afterword. Through such feats of literary ingenuity, Naim sahab extends the “brief” translators have traditionally given themselves.
Having known him for several decades and corresponded sporadically over email and the occasional meeting during his visits to India, our correspondence had quickened in recent times. Upon hearing of my interest in Maulana Hasrat Mohani and the biography I have been fitfully working on over the years, he shared generously from his own rich collection of material on Hasrat, most notably photographs, newspaper clippings and recently his as-yet unpublished translations of Hasrat’s Mushahidaat-e-Zindaan, an account of his first jail term. His brief, often telegraphic emails contained a wealth of information and ideas.
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Go gently into the night, Naim sahab, for you have been a beacon, an unwavering chiraagh-e-raah for so many of us struggling to make Urdu accessible to newer readers and trying to rise above the picket fence of languages.
Rakhshanda Jalil is a writer, translator and literary historian. She writes on literature, culture and society
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