In CM Naim, East and West met

Indian Express

15-07-2025

Last week, a friend called to give me the sad news of Naim sahib's passing. He had not been too well since suffering a stroke a couple of years ago. But after returning from rehab, his spirit was as indomitable as ever. He relished writing and wrote with zest: Sparkling essays, columns and a weekly, later monthly, newsletter that he dispatched electronically to a large following. Naim sahib did not shy away from technology. He had a website on which he posted stuff he liked. But the newsletter was his commentary on various subjects related to literature, including world politics that impacted literature. He wrote what was on his mind without mincing the truth. It was a privilege to be on his mailing list.
Choudhri Muhammad Naim (1935-2025) was a very dear friend of my father, (Urdu writer) Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. He would affectionately call him Choudhri but I always addressed him as Naim sahib, never Naim chacha or uncle, as is the common tradition in South Asian families. Perhaps this form of address was an instinctive nod to the fact that he lived in America, taught at the University of Chicago and had a 'Western' air about him. But he always spoke chaste Urdu, never English. As a young girl, my interpretation of Western manners was not just his corduroy trousers and jacket but also his bluntness. If Naim sahib didn't like something, he would firmly say, 'no'. I admired him and kept a safe distance from him.
Naim sahib also carried a camera and would take pictures of us. In the India of the 1970s, a sleek camera was a luxury one often associated with foreigners. I still have the pictures he took of my parents and one of me with my father.
I remember my father looking forward to Naim sahib's yearly visits to India. They would be engaged in discussions for hours on serious subjects but also find time to share life stories. I could hear the sounds of laughter floating from my father's study. He would joke about my father's obsession with work, advise him to relax and take up gardening. My father would be half-amused and half-annoyed at this. Only Naim sahib could chastise him. I have memories of his visits from my father's postings at Lucknow, Allahabad, Delhi and Patna. Lucknow was special because Naim sahib was from Barabanki, a town not far from there. He did his Master's in Urdu literature from Lucknow University in 1955, after which he joined the University of California, Berkeley, as a graduate student. He completed an MA in Linguistics from UC Berkeley in 1961. From 1968 until his retirement in 2001, he taught at the University of Chicago's Department of South Asian Languages and Civilisations; he served as its chairperson from 1985 to 1991.
When Naim sahib began teaching Urdu language and literature, there weren't many resources for teaching Urdu at universities. He had to improvise and find a methodology that would connect with his students. His style of teaching was very South Asian; that is, he criticised more than he praised. He pushed his students to higher levels of proficiency; sometimes, there were disappointments, at other times spectacular successes. His list of accomplishments is long and I am not going to go into the many programmes and university presses he served, but I must mention his enduring achievements — first as the co-founder of the pathbreaking Mahfil: Journal of South Asian Literature in 1965, and later, as the founding editor of Urdu's premier journal, The Journal of Urdu Studies. The journal began publication in 1981. He did great service in producing two textbooks of Urdu, Readings in Urdu Prose and Poetry (1965) and Introductory Urdu in two volumes (1999).
At Chicago, he produced several distinguished PhDs, among them the critic and scholar Frances W Pritchett. Scrolling through Pritchett's website on Naim sahib for his publications, one finds an impressive list of articles and translations. He did not have a taste for writing books/monographs but one of his enduring works is the stellar translation, with an introduction and notes, of Mir Taqi Mir's convoluted autobiography, Zikr-e Mir (1999).
When I moved to the US in 1998, I did not expect Naim sahib to gush over my arrival. On my father's insistence, I did call him a few times and he was concerned in a friendly way about how I would manage alone in a foreign place. He didn't offer any help by way of writing recommendation letters. Thus, I was surprised when I received a letter in the mail from him (I do wish I could find that letter now). In that letter, he told me that he had suggested my name to Oxford University Press to edit an anthology of modern Urdu literature. It had been offered to him, he said, but he wrote that in his opinion, after my father, I was the only person he could see accomplishing this huge task. I was floored. I accepted the job and went on to publish the two-volume anthology in 2008. That was a milestone in my academic career and I owe it to Naim sahib.
Choudhri Naim straddled Eastern and Western literary conventions with acuity. His passing leaves a huge void in Urdu studies.
The writer is professor, Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Virginia, US