Prof Dalvi, Urdu and Mumbai
There are very few people who can talk with some authority about
Setu Madhava Rao Pagdi and A A A Fyzee. Prof Abdus Sattar Dalvi belongs to a rare
group of scholar. He had another visitor at his Bandra flat when I went to meet
him. Najeeb Raiba, the son of A A Raiba, the lesser-known contemporary of M F
Hussain and K H Ara, who belongs to Konkan (like Prof Dalvi), was there to
discuss his father's career. Though primarily Prof Dalvi is an Urdu scholar, his
energies and endeavours combine his passion for linguistics with history. This
explains the wide array of visitors he gets.
“People don’t know that Mumbai had a very old Versova Cadet
school where Hindustani was taught. Such was the popularity of an Urdu
textbook by Mohammad Ibrahim Makba that it was in circulation right up to
Lahore,” says Prof Dalvi. Western India also had a good number of Urdu/Gujarati
newspapers and periodicals. “Sadly very less is known of them as most of them
have been lost.”
In the commercial and glamourous world of Mumbai, the film
industry gets a huge credit for the advancement/popularisation of Urdu. And rightly
so. But beyond the painful and playful lyrics of Sahir, Majrooh, Kaifi and
Shakeel, it was the industriousness of people like Rafiq Zakaria, Khwaja Abdul
Ghafoor, K A Abbas, Krishan Chander, Ali Sardar Jaffri and Sikander Ali Wajd among
others, which gave a thrust to Urdu in Maharashtra and Mumbai. And Prof Dalvi
has witnessed it all, and in fact, has been a part of it.
The Maharashtra state Urdu academy was established in April 1975
and Prof Dalvi was appointed joint secretary. When a delegation called upon
the state chief minister S B Chavan to thank him for his support, Prof Dalvi earned
extra attention. He had recently edited the Urdu translation of Sant Ramdas’s Manache
Shloka by Shah Turab Chisti which had caught the attention of Chavan. Chisti was a Sufi Dakkhani poet and his
translation ‘Man Samjhavan’ was done way back in 1756. Chavan was already pleased
with the Urdu academy’s new joint secretary.
“My inspiration to carry out translation work came from Setu Madhava Rao
Pagdi. He has translated a huge body of work from Urdu into Marathi. I realised
there is a great need for translations and it is crucial that interactions between
people, languages and cultures continue.” Describing Pagdi as having ‘ghair maamooli
yaddashth’, he fondly remembered his telephone calls on Sunday mornings. “He was very prolific,
and kept himself busy till the last days of his advanced age. He had a special
talent to not just pick up but also gain mastery over different languages. He
went on to write a grammar of the Gondi language.” Pagdi was also associated
with the Urdu Academy. In 2005, Prof Dalvi helped organise a seminar on Setu
Madhavrao Pagdi at University of Hyderabad.
Prof Dalvi’s stance in his academic career as an Urdu
scholar has been one of co-operation and reaching out to fellow academics. This
has been due to his own educational achievements and the position of Urdu in
Maharashtra. He graduated from Ismail Yusuf College in 1958, and won the St
Xavier’s Gold Medal for the highest marks in Urdu. In 1960 he completed
MA (Urdu) bagging the coveted Chancellor’s medal. After gaining a PhD from
Bombay (on the life of Mohammad Hussain Azad), he studied linguistics at SOAS, and came back to University of Bombay
to do his second doctorate on ‘Bombay Urdu – a study in linguistic behaviour’. His
love and admiration for languages has not been limited to Urdu and Urdu scholars.
Despite the step-motherly treatment of Urdu in North India,
Mumbai’s civic body has a rich tradition of running schools in Urdu, Gujarati,
Hindi, Marathi and Kannada mediums. Several civil servants and politicians who
studied or hailed from the erstwhile Hyderabad state territories (including S B
Chavan) had a genuine affection for Urdu. This ensured that Urdu-medium schools
continued to be in existence in post-Independence Bombay. Large scale migration
of Muslims from North India swelled the number of interested students. These
factors effectively worked to minimise the bitterness relating to the future of
Urdu.
In 1983, he was appointed the first Krishan Chander professor
and head of the Urdu department, University of Mumbai. Though Urdu was being
taught in the city’s colleges, it was only in 1983 that University of Bombay got
an Urdu department. Some of his major translations include the works of
Sanskrit dramatist Bhartbihari, Sant Dnyaneshwar’s Pasayadan, Vishram Bedekar’s
novel Ranangan, P S Rege’s Savithri and Nissim Ezekiel’s Edinburgh Interlude. In
the early 1990s at the request of Govt of India, he helped establish the Urdu department
at Cairo’s Ain Shamsh University.
Though he retired from the University in 1997, he has been
associated with various organisations including Anjuman Islam Urdu Research
Institute, Deccan Muslim Educational and Research Institute, Hazrat Makhdoom
Ali Mahimi Research Institute and the Urdu Academy. He is currently working on
the history of Konkani Muslims and the cultural history of Bombay’s Muslims.
Superb piece Danny boy. Not many know what contributions people like Dalvi have made to the literary world. Very informative.
ReplyDeleteI think it is Bhartrhari and not Bharatbihari. Also, I think he was a poet, not a dramatist.
ReplyDeleteہمیں فخر ہے ایسی باوقار شخصیت پر . اردو ادب کے افق پر ایک تابناک ستارہ...
ReplyDeleteآپ کے لیے ایک اہم خبر
ReplyDeleteاہم خبریں
Urdu culture is necessary to be known. Thanks for the information. Urdu Literature demands dus t it
ReplyDeleteअप्रतिम लेख खूप खूप छान अभिनंदन
ReplyDeleteGreat personality from kokan...allah bless him.
ReplyDeleteDr. A. Sattar Dalvi is 80+ but his memory is still sharp. He will give references if you discuss any topic. He has still passion to do research .
ReplyDeleteMaa-Shaa-Allah he served and serving urdu by heart and soul... It's great to know him.
ReplyDelete