Prof Masood Hussain Khan - By Rauf Parekh
One of the most redoubtable linguists and scholars of Urdu, Prof Masood Hussain Khan, turned 90 on January 28 this year. I cannot say for sure whether he celebrated his birthday for he lives in India, but his students, colleagues, fans and the lovers of Urdu all over the world celebrated it in their own ways. For instance, Prof Dr Mirza Khalil Ahmed Beg, an Indian linguist and scholar, celebrated it by writing an article on Prof Masood Sahib and his services for Urdu, paying tributes to extraordinary erudition of the nonagenarian scholar who truly deserves it.
Before Masood Sahib, Muhammad Hussain Azad, Hafiz Mahmood Sheerani, Shamsullah Qadri, Mohiuddin Qadri Zor, Syed Sulaiman Nadvi, T. Grahame Bailey and some other scholars had presented their theories on Urdu’s origin but none found favour with Masood sahib. So he set out to find for himself the truth. His advantage? A keen study of the Indo-Aryan linguistics and an understanding of the Shaurseni Prakrit that later developed into dialects, such as Khari boli, spoken in and around Delhi. In his opinion, the emergence of these modern Indo-Aryan dialects could not have begun earlier than 1000 AD and, therefore, Hafiz Mahmood Sheerani’s theory that saw Punjab as the cradle of Urdu and premised that Urdu was a language that was brought to Delhi by Muslim armies after the conquest of Punjab, was not plausible. First published in 1948, the book, originally his PhD dissertation, has run into many editions in India and Pakistan.
Phonetics is the other forte of Prof Masood Hussain Khan’s. He was the first to analyse the words of Urdu from a phonological point of view. During his stay in London, Masood Sahib had had a chance to benefit from the insights of Prof J. R. Firth who was the first to introduce the concept of ‘Prosodic Phonology’. Basing his DLit thesis ‘A phonetic and phonological study of the word in Urdu’ on Firth’s theory, he carried out research that was published in 1954. Said to be a rare feat of descriptive linguistics, it was translated into Urdu and published by Prof Mirza Khalil Beg in 1984.
Another sphere of Masood Sahib’s scholarly interest is literary criticism but at the beginning of his literary career he used to scoff at the then prevalent trend of criticism that indulged in flowery language and had become too rhetoric. The so-called ‘impressionistic school of literary criticism’ used to eulogise literary works in a way that reeked of romanticism and based evaluation on subjectivity rather than on any literary theory. ‘Stylistics’ is a significant branch of applied linguistics. During his stay in the US, Masood Sahib was inspired, says Prof Khalil Beg, by the theory of stylistics presented by Prof Archibald A. Hill. He then began applying linguistics to Urdu literary criticism and wrote many articles on Ghalib, Iqbal and Fani, not only presenting the linguistic critical analysis of their poetry but also laying the foundations for what came to be known as linguistic criticism in Urdu which later served as a launching pad for other critics such as Gopi Chand Narang, Mughni Tabassum and Mirza Khalil Beg.
Before Masood Sahib, Muhammad Hussain Azad, Hafiz Mahmood Sheerani, Shamsullah Qadri, Mohiuddin Qadri Zor, Syed Sulaiman Nadvi, T. Grahame Bailey and some other scholars had presented their theories on Urdu’s origin but none found favour with Masood sahib. So he set out to find for himself the truth. His advantage? A keen study of the Indo-Aryan linguistics and an understanding of the Shaurseni Prakrit that later developed into dialects, such as Khari boli, spoken in and around Delhi. In his opinion, the emergence of these modern Indo-Aryan dialects could not have begun earlier than 1000 AD and, therefore, Hafiz Mahmood Sheerani’s theory that saw Punjab as the cradle of Urdu and premised that Urdu was a language that was brought to Delhi by Muslim armies after the conquest of Punjab, was not plausible. First published in 1948, the book, originally his PhD dissertation, has run into many editions in India and Pakistan.
Phonetics is the other forte of Prof Masood Hussain Khan’s. He was the first to analyse the words of Urdu from a phonological point of view. During his stay in London, Masood Sahib had had a chance to benefit from the insights of Prof J. R. Firth who was the first to introduce the concept of ‘Prosodic Phonology’. Basing his DLit thesis ‘A phonetic and phonological study of the word in Urdu’ on Firth’s theory, he carried out research that was published in 1954. Said to be a rare feat of descriptive linguistics, it was translated into Urdu and published by Prof Mirza Khalil Beg in 1984.
Another sphere of Masood Sahib’s scholarly interest is literary criticism but at the beginning of his literary career he used to scoff at the then prevalent trend of criticism that indulged in flowery language and had become too rhetoric. The so-called ‘impressionistic school of literary criticism’ used to eulogise literary works in a way that reeked of romanticism and based evaluation on subjectivity rather than on any literary theory. ‘Stylistics’ is a significant branch of applied linguistics. During his stay in the US, Masood Sahib was inspired, says Prof Khalil Beg, by the theory of stylistics presented by Prof Archibald A. Hill. He then began applying linguistics to Urdu literary criticism and wrote many articles on Ghalib, Iqbal and Fani, not only presenting the linguistic critical analysis of their poetry but also laying the foundations for what came to be known as linguistic criticism in Urdu which later served as a launching pad for other critics such as Gopi Chand Narang, Mughni Tabassum and Mirza Khalil Beg.
posted by temporal at 2/04/2009
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