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Shamsur Rahman Farooqi Quotes

1935–2020 India

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (30 September 1935 – 25 December 2020) was an eminent Indian Urdu critic, theorist, lexicographer, and linguist. He is widely recognized for pioneering and consolidating modernism (Jadeediyat) in Urdu literature.

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Random Shamsur Rahman Farooqi quote

5 quotes

The true triumph of criticism lies in evaluating a writer’s prose within its own linguistic and cultural era, rather than forcefully imposing the manufactured theories of our own time upon it.

Urdu prose possesses an extraordinary flexibility and intellectual depth capable of absorbing the world's most complex philosophical and scientific ideas. We only need to have faith in its expansiveness.

Modernism in literature does not mean severing ties with the past. Rather, it is about giving the finest intellectual treasures of the past a new prose format that aligns with the changing social and mental demands of our own era.

Lexicography and the study of the history of words are, in reality, the study of a nation's cultural history. Words are not merely clusters of sounds; they hold within themselves the travelogue of a centuries-old civilizational journey.

Among my contemporaries and near-contemporaries, I have always preferred those for whom literature is not a game of conspiracies, but a reality that transcends life itself. If this is termed "groupism," then I consider myself fortunate to be a member of such a group.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Shamsur Rahman Farooqi (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.