Shamsur Rahman Faruqi


Shamsur Rahman Faruqi is an Indian poet and an Urdu critic and theorist. He has formulated fresh models of literary appreciation. He absorbed western principles of literary criticism and subsequently applied them to Urdu literature, but only after adapting them to address literary aesthetics native to Arabic, Persian, and Urdu.

Early life

He was born on 15 January 1935 in India. He received his Master of Arts degree in English from Allahabad University in 1955.

Career

He began writing in 1960. Initially he worked for the Indian postal service, and then as a chief postmaster-general and member of the Postal Services Board, New Delhi until 1994. He was also editor of his literary magazine Shabkhoon and part-time professor at the South Asia Regional Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
An expert in classical prosody and ‘ilm-e bayan, he has contributed to modern literary discourse with a profundity rarely seen in contemporary Urdu critics. His most recent books, The Mirror of Beauty, and The Sun That Rose From The Earth, have been highly critically acclaimed.
He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards. Most recently he was awarded the prestigious Saraswati Samman for his work She`r-e Shor-Angez, a four-volume study of the eighteenth-century poet Mir Taqi Mir.
is a 16th-century Urdu oral storytelling art form. The art form was revived in 2005 and has been performed in India, Pakistan, and the United States. The art form reached its in the Indian sub-continent in the 19th century and is said to have died with the demise of Mir Baqar Ali in 1928. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi and his nephew, writer and director Mahmood Farooqui have played significant roles in its revival in the 21st century.

Awards

He was awarded the Saraswati Samman, an Indian literary award, in 1996. The Government of India awarded him the civilian honour of Padma Shri in 2009.