C. M. Naim and the Many Lives of Urdu

The Wire

11-07-2025

In the quiet attrition of our present age – where language buckles under ideology and tradition is either embalmed or defiled – the death of C. M. Naim on July 9, 2025, passed like a line of verse which is unspoken, but unforgettable. No pomp, no preening obituaries. Only the hush of loss, felt most acutely by those who had learned to see through his eyes: the doubters who refused despair, the lovers of Urdu who no longer had to apologise for their longing. A Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, of South Asian Languages and Civilisations, Naim did not simply write about Urdu – he lived as if the language itself were a moral landscape, as demanding and as fragile as any republic.
One of the foremost scholars of Urdu, the American professor Choudhri M. Naim was born in Barabanki (Uttar Pradesh); educated at the University of Lucknow and the University of California, Berkeley. In an era when language was weaponised for purity, he stood for mongrel beauty, a courageous stance that continues to inspire. In Urdu Texts and Contexts, Naim reads like a cartographer of vanished worlds – his essays tracing not just meaning, but the silences history left behind. Each page holds the precision of scholarship and the pulse of a language resisting its forgetting.
To read Naim was to be reminded that literature, like faith, is at its most potent when it unsettles rather than assures. His essay ' Be Crazy with God...', which is a deceptively light fragment of reflection, now feels like a spiritual testament. The phrase it orbits, a Sufi injunction laden with peril and paradox, invites the believer to abandon propriety in divine intimacy while anchoring themselves in the sober ethics of the prophetic example. In that one line, 'Don't be proper with God. Be crazy with God," Naim captured an entire theology of resistance: resistance to the bureaucratisation of belief, to the domestication of the sacred, and to the garish pieties that too often pass for devotion in our time.
Naim's Politics
And yet, even that daring essay would be misunderstood without its echo in another of his masterworks, his 2009 chronicle of visiting Palestine. Here, the literary grace that characterised all his prose collided with the urgency of moral witness. ' A visit to Palestine' is not merely travel writing; it is a text of quiet outrage. What Naim sees, and what he forces the reader to see, is the theatre of occupation dressed in the language of civility. His is not the anger of slogans but the grief of a man trained to notice erasures: of language, of memory, of the human. In Palestine, he confronts a world where even metaphors are policed, and he writes as one who has known, from the long arc of the subcontinent, what it means to watch a culture vanish behind walls of steel and ideology.
It was this capacity to bear witness, to see clearly and still write lovingly, that marked Naim's intellectual and moral sensibility. In his 2023 reflection on the bicentenary of the Urdu press, published in The Wire, he lamented what might seem to others a mere demographic detail:
'It is sad to note that there is now no major Urdu newspaper or magazine that is edited by a non-Muslim.'
But in that line lies a vast and tragic diagnosis. For Naim, the Urdu language had once been the shared inheritance of Hindus and Muslims alike, a mother tongue unbothered by lineage. That this pluralism had withered was not a footnote, it was a wound. The familial, interfaith intimacy of the Urdu reading public had been quietly extinguished, another victim of the postcolonial compact that married linguistic identity to religious purity.
Naim resisted that false marriage for the rest of his life. He wrote, taught, and translated as though Urdu still belonged to everyone – and perhaps more poignantly, to anyone willing to love it with care. In his final years, he turned his attention to what many might consider a literary cul-de-sac: Urdu Crime Fiction, 1890–1950: An Informal History. But this book, published in 2023, was no detour. It was a love letter to the populist, unpretentious roots of the language, a defence of storytelling that refused to be sanitised or stratified. In treating pulp fiction with the same seriousness he gave to Ghalib or Intizar Husain, Naim demonstrated the egalitarian ethics of his literary gaze. There was no hierarchy in his affection – only the unwavering belief that language, like humanity, deserved to be seen in full, a commitment that reassures us about the future of Urdu.
For four decades at the University of Chicago, Naim shaped minds not with dogma, but with questions. He taught students to read Urdu not as a script, but as a way of seeing – through the lilt of a ghazal, the satirical sting of a short story, the elegiac murmur of a marsiya. As chair of the South Asian Languages and Civilisations Department from 1985 to 1991, he transformed an academic field still half-bound in Orientalist habits into a space of serious self-reflection. His founding of Mahfil and The Annual of Urdu Studies created rare sanctuaries for Urdu scholarship in the West – places where the language could breathe without having to prove its utility.
But Naim was never an apologist. He refused both the nostalgia of the diaspora and the sentimentality of cultural nationalism. His was a critical love – tender, exacting, and utterly unsentimental. He believed Urdu was not just a language of emperors and courtiers, but of thieves, lovers, and tricksters. 'It is a language of emperors and pickpockets,' he once said, not to degrade it, but to reveal its democratic soul, a belief that instills a sense of equality and inclusivity.
Naim's Thought
It is tempting, in the aftermath of such a life, to reach for easy epithets. Secularist. Humanist. Cosmopolitan. But these labels collapse before the specificity of his thought. Naim was not interested in abstract pieties; he was concerned with the real. With how belief is lived. With how language bruises and binds. His secularism, if it can be called that, was not a retreat from religion but an embrace of its paradoxes. He understood, well before it became fashionable in academia, that faith was not always dogma—that it could be interior, chaotic, even mad. And that this madness could be beautiful.
Naim was something subtler, more enduring: a man of ethical imagination. His secularism was not a posture of distance but a closeness to complexity – Hindu and Muslim, believer and sceptic, bhakti and baroque. And yet, he also anticipated what scholars like Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood later theorised: that to understand the entwining of faith, subjectivity, and politics in the post-colonial condition, one had to move beyond liberal pieties about religion's privatisation. In his work, as in his life, Naim recognised that tradition could be both constraint and resource, and that piety – genuinely held – deserved neither romanticisation nor contempt.
He stood, ultimately, for what might be called the aesthetics of ethical clarity. His writing was never merely beautiful, it was responsible.
And that, in a time like ours, is a rare thing. Even his satire, sharp as it was, aimed not to humiliate but to awaken. His mischief had a purpose. It made space for contradiction, for delight, for sorrow unencumbered by ideology. But his mischief was never nihilistic. It was the mischief of a man who still believed language could heal, that meaning could be made in the rubble of broken worlds.
In an age that rewards noise and scorn, C. M. Naim modelled something else: an exacting tenderness, a commitment to complexity, a willingness to be misunderstood in the service of truth. He leaves behind a body of work that speaks not only to lovers of Urdu but to anyone who has ever found themselves caught between belonging and estrangement, tradition and critique, madness and meaning.
C. M. Naim did not belong to a single tradition, but to all traditions that refuse to die quietly. His legacy is not institutional; it is intimate. It lives in the strange thrill of a perfectly turned sher, in the patient labor of translation, in the refusal to surrender language to sect or state. He taught us not just to read better, but to live more attentively—to the minor key, the unspoken word, the difficult beauty of what endures.
And so we are left with his words, which were never merely text, but testament. A call to humility. A defence of pluralism without platitude. A reminder, urgent as ever, to be crazy with God, and with language, with justice, with love.
Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic, writer and essayist working across London, Toronto, Paris, and Geneva.