Musharraf Ali Farooqi - Piali Roy

Farooqi’s real passion is Urdu, and his alter ego is the critically acclaimed translator of The Adventures of Amir Hamza, a mostly forgotten Indo-Persian classical romance, published last year to accolades from The New York Times and The Indian Express. The Dastan-e-Amir Hamza (its original title) is the story of the real-life uncle of the Prophet Muhammad, so embellished that it’s more fabulist creation than straight history. The tale is full of magical creatures, bawdy adventures and heroics. Even Rushdie has been caught in its lure: in The Enchantress of Florence, he depicts Mughal court painters at work on the famous Hamzanama, a series of paintings based on the legend.

William Dalrymple, writing in The Times, described the translation as “a classic of epic literature in an interpretation so fluent that it is a pleasure to sit down and lose oneself in it.” At a mere thousand pages, The Adventures of Amir Hamza took Farooqi seven years to translate.

RICHARD LAUTENS

Musharraf Ali Farooqi spent seven years translating The Adventures of Amir Hamza,
an Indo-Persian classical romance, from Urdu. Farooqi is working on an online
resource for Urdu readers and scholars.

Born in Hyderabad, Pakistan, and raised in Karachi, Farooqi never imagined himself a writer. “I was bunking classes in engineering to read the classics,” he says with a grin. After dropping out of university, he eventually became a journalist, meeting his wife, Michelle, at a Karachi newspaper. She was part of the small Christian community that was already feeling threatened in Pakistan. The pair immigrated to Canada, where Michelle had family, in 1994.

In his relatively young career, Farooqi has acquired fans including Anita Rau Badami and Mohammed Hanif, author of the Booker-nominated novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes. Hanif describes The Story of a Widow as an “ultra-realistic miniature in which Farooqi has evoked the tribulations of extended families and midlife with sparse prose.” It’s an apt description. (Hanif continues, “If Jane Austen had grown up in a Karachi suburb, this is what she would have written.” With two married daughters, however, Mona is not a typical Austen heroine.