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The Wire
2 days ago
- General
- The Wire
C.M. Naim's First Day in the US
'I have experienced exploitation and racial prejudice. But thanks to that day I have always managed not to blame some anonymous America for my troubles.' Uttar Pradesh-born scholar and respected expert on Urdu and other South Asian languages, C.M. Naim passed away last week. Below is his piece for The First Days Project of the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), that shares stories from immigrants and refugees about their first experiences in the US. It was a date in mid-September, 1957, when the Pan Am round-the-world flight I had caught in Calcutta reached San Francisco. There was no one to meet me at the airport; the professor who had invited me to work with him was in the hospital. He had however sent me detailed instructions: I was to take a bus into the city, then two other buses to get to Berkeley, and finally a fourth bus to get to the International House. I was bone-tired, not only from the long journey but also from the three months of uncertainty. The perversity of Indian bureaucracy and an appendectomy that had become complicated as I had rushed around from one office to another had left me drained, both physically and in spirit. I have no memory of how I got through the customs and found the bus to the downtown terminal, which then was just a large hall on a side street where buses gorged and disgorged airline passengers and their baggage. Jostled around by the crowd I somehow managed to find my heavy, unwieldy suitcase, but could not locate the equally stuffed Pan Am airbag. Among other things it contained my degrees and passport, the instructions from my professor, and all my American money, a grand sum of twenty-five dollars. My panic increased as I rushed around, dragging my suitcase with me. If I collided with people, I didn't notice. If they spoke to me, I didn't hear. I didn't know what to do. I had no experience with telephones, nor did I know anyone's phone number to call. All such information was in that bag. As the hall emptied and it became clear that my bag was nowhere in sight, I sat down on a bench and quietly cried. Then the elderly black man whom I had seen helping passengers with their bags and taxis came over and spoke to me. At first I didn't understand him—I had never heard anyone talk that way—but gradually some sense of what he was saying came through to me. He wanted to know why I was crying. He asked me if I needed some help. Somehow I managed to explain my situation—my loss and my not knowing what to do. Neither my accent nor my dilemma seemed to him insurmountable. According to him, the bus that had brought me had also brought a woman who had a vast assortment of bags and parcels with her. He was sure she had unknowingly gone off with my bag too. He assured me it was not a big problem since he knew the cabs that had come that morning, and that he was going to send out a radio call for a particular cab to come back to the terminal. I heard the words but couldn't make any sense of them. I only stared at him with blank eyes. I think he brought me something to drink, then went away to do the 'magic' I had no reason to believe in. When he came back he told me that the cab he believed the woman had taken was a private one, and thus not equipped with a radio. He had, therefore, asked all Yellow Cab drivers to be on the lookout for that cab and send it back to the terminal when located. Needless to say, I had no idea what he was talking about. I sat there, numb with a fear of the unknown. I had no money, no way to contact my professor or find my way to the International House in Berkeley. What was I going to do? After nearly an hour, the old black gentleman came back with a white man, and explained to me that he was the driver of the taxi that took that woman to her hotel and that he was now going to take me to her. I'm sure I didn't believe what he said, but I picked up my suitcase, not letting anyone give me a hand with it, and went with the driver. At the hotel, I wanted to drag my suitcase with me but the cabman made me put it in the trunk. Then we marched up to the Reception and from there to an elevator that rose and rose until it opened on to a corridor of thick carpet and muffled lights. The cabman knocked briskly on a door; then explained to the lady who opened it why we had come. But I had already seen my precious bag in the midst of her suitcases and boxes scattered over the floor. I rushed forward and grabbed it, and zipped it open to show them its contents. My eyes glared: 'Look, this is mine—not yours.' She was flustered. She apologised. We marched out. I don't think I said a word until the driver and I were back in the cab; I then asked him if he could take me straight to the International House in Berkeley. It was on the other side of the Bay, and there were tolls to pay. I showed him the money I had. 'Was it enough?' He nodded, and away we went. Gradually, my senses crept back into me. I began to see the sights, hear the noises, feel the air blowing in. And then suddenly a whole new sense of confidence filled me. There we were, on that amazing bridge, with vast stretches of sun-lit blue water spread underneath us. A powerful machine was speeding me ever so smoothly to a destination that now seemed so certain. The cab no doubt had a roof, but it felt as if there was no barrier of any kind between this world and me. An openness prevailed. The new world held no terror for me any more. I had witnessed a miracle, wrought by a total stranger who had helped me when I had no one to turn to and lost all hope. I gained that day a kind of confidence and feeling of trust that has come to my rescue many a time since then. Not that I have not despaired since that day. I've hit the bottom several times. I have been lonely and angry and terrified, and worse. I have experienced exploitation and racial prejudice. But thanks to that day I have always managed not to blame some anonymous America for my troubles. This essay first appeared on the First Days Project's website. Read the original here. The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
The Wire
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Wire
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Books C.M. Naim, May You Always Be Our Lodestar Manan Ahmed Asif 2 minutes ago I wish I had another 90 years to learn from you, Naim Sahib. C.M. Naim (1936-2025). Photo: By arrangement. My last meeting with C.M. Naim (or Naim Sahib, as we referred to him, no matter our age) was in late May 2025 in Chicago. He welcomed me to Apt 2F and spoke to me about 1) President Obama's Presidential Library and the dismantling of everglades nearby (you could see the tall structure from his window), 2) the publishing scene in India, then Pakistan, 3) my recent book (briefly) which he commended me for not being full of jargon, 4) an 'extraordinary' novel he had just finished – The Return of Faraz Ali by Aamina Ahmad – and, 5) the state of the manuscript he was finishing up. He was a bit slowed down but these topics and themes (US politics, Urdu, literature, his current research) could be the synopsis of any conversation I had had with him since I first met him in the spring of 1998. At the end of the visit, he led me to his book shelf and handed me a series of books with the advice (stern) that I must write on them: Munshi Ihtesamuddin's Shagrufnama-e Vilayat, Maulvi Syed Mazhar Ali Sandelvi's Roznamcha and some texts by the late Syed Hasan Askari (someone he has been telling me to write on for many years). Suitably instructed, I left his house feeling full of his wisdom, his admonishment, and his love. Again, a typical experience. My first class with Naim Sahib was in 1998. We read Persian and Urdu tazkirah and malfuzat. We read under his stern eye, his exacting pronunciation, his exquisite grasp of Persian, Urdu, Arabic etymologies. Yet, we read for the culture, the social, the gender-relations, the power that seeped into the text from its margins – the salutations, the encomiums, the repetitive anecdotes that diverged just by a word or a simple setting. Often a three-hour class would be spent just on a passage. I think I irritated him with my final paper (I wrote an imagined tazkirah set in the South Side of Chicago), but he gave me an A. Naim Sahib retired from the South Asian Languages and Civilizations department in 2001. He had joined the department in 1961, at a time when 'Area Studies' was just launching. He was part of a new set of hires, alongside Edward C. Dimock, Jr. (Bangla), Colin Masica (Hindi), A.K. Ramanujan (Tamil) and others. Naim Sahib had already published An Urdu Reader with John Gumperz (while at UC Berkeley) and he would follow that up with his Introductory Urdu course in 1965. He also recorded the audio material for that course and his sharp diction can still be heard by students. This short note in his introduction sums up his exacting standards: 'This book is not for self-instruction; it has to be studied with a regular instructor. Not just any 'native-speaker' would do. Nor does this book allow for a lazy separation of tasks between a linguist and an informant-assistant—the same teacher must be present in the class all the time. This book does not replace the teacher; it merely provides him/her with most of the necessary tools.' Yet the phrase 'a linguist and an informant-assistant' draw our attention to the racial and educational hierarchies of mid-to-late twentieth century US. Naim Sahib represents both the worldliness of Urdu and the extreme precarity of its existence. The work he did to bring Urdu to the world is widely-recognized and well-documented. He founded Mahfil in 1963 (later, the Journal of South Asian Literature), then founded Journal of Urdu Studies (1981), translated Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1971), Ghalib (1970), Mir Taqi Mir (1999), Qurratulain Hyder (1999), Deputy Nazir Ahmad (2003) and Muhammadi Begum (2022). Beyond his translation work, was his deep commitment to the social and the political. His essays examined queer life in Urdu poetry ('The Theme of Homosexual (Pederastic) Love in Pre-modern Urdu Poetry' from 1979 and 'Transvestic Words? The Rekhti in Urdu' from 2001) and Muslim life in US ('The Outrage of Bernard Lewis' from 1992 and 'A Clash of Fanaticisms' from 2006). Other writers and thinkers will undoubtedly say more about the recent losses to the intellectual life of Urdu scholarship that Naim Sahib's passing puts into a critical stage – some of them are: Muhammad Umar Memon (1939-2018), Muhammad Umar Memon (1939-2018), Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (1935-2020), Mazhar Mahmood Shairani (1935-2020), and Gopi Chand Narang (1931-2022). As a historian, I did not spend much time reading literature or criticism so my days, and evenings, with Naim Sahib were taken up by his love of two other things: what he termed 'polemics' and 'Hindustaniyat.' In the introduction to Ambiguities of Heritage: Fictions and Polemics (City Press, 1999), he writes that the polemics 'are usually cluttered with 'facts' giving them an aura of being more real' and that they 'had a kind of therapeutic quality and function – they let me get things 'off my chest' (p. 10). Belying the name, his 'polemics' were carefully argued and empirically rich essays with a caustic self-deprecating air. He published many of them in Outlook India with Sundeep Dougal (Ajmal Kamal would publish the collected versions with his City Press). These collected essay volumes – A Killing in Ferozewala, The Muslim League in Barabanki and The Hijab and I – range across Pakistan, India, the US, the Middle East (Palestine, Iraq, Egypt). The essays constitute his daily reading of newspapers (a dozen each from these sites) and political commentaries, columns and the occasional book. Hence, they often start with his act of reading (a headline, a report, a quote), pulling back to assess the political and social context and then exposing the hypocrisy, or the hatred, or the falsity undergirding it all. After his retirement, Naim Sahib continued to visit Foster Hall for every Tuesday or Thursday seminar (and sometimes for the Friday teas). At the seminar, he would sit against the wall (alongside us students) and not at the table. Yet, he would often ask the first question. He would always speak about the topic/the argument with us students. He was deeply interested in the histories that Partition had erased, both structurally (by the rendering of archives and libraries and languages) and politically (by the creation of new majoritarian identities and ideologies). I remember fondly, in 2018, when I told him that I was writing a book on the early seventeenth century history by Muhammad Qasim Firishta (a book that I dedicated to him, alongside my two other teachers, Muzaffar Alam and Shahid Amin). He remembered that as a school child in British India, he was required to draw a map of India from memory. 'Draw a vertical line 6' long (AB). Mark a spot 2' from the top. Draw a line (CD) 6' long dissecting the first line at 90 degrees, so that you have 2' on the left and 3' on the right. Mark a point (E) on it on the right at 2' from the dissection point. Now draw lines, connecting A and B to C and E. But extend lines AE and BE one inch further.' and so on. He later sent me a photograph of the exercise he had not done since was nine years old. He captioned it: 'Drawn from memory+corrected from memory.' In Sufi cosmology, there are Beings (hasti) who anchor the world, orient it, are the lodestar. On that University of Chicago campus in September of 2001, he was the one person who stood and allowed us graduate students to feel brave enough to speak our minds in the face of rampant Islamophobia. He carefully marked for us all of the sites of dissent – 'This was the bench where Hannah Arendt smoked", "this was the window where the '68 protestors were hanging out from", "this is what Eqbal Ahmad said when the FBI showed up at his apartment,' etc. These stories were not just oral lore. For someone like me, they were oxygen. They showed to me that others had already occupied the very same grounds that I was forced to occupy, and they had asserted their dignity and humanity, nonetheless. This was the greatest lesson Naim Sahib would provide us: how to live critically, ethically and with dignity, no matter what. I wish I had another 90 years to learn from you, Naim Sahib. But I am profoundly grateful for the little that I was able to have of your learning. May you always be our lodestar. Manan Ahmed Asif is a professor of history at Columbia University. He received his PhD from University of Chicago in 2008. The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
The Wire
6 days ago
- Politics
- The Wire
Hasrat Mohani, the Maverick Maulana
C.M. Naim 28 minutes ago Hasrat Mohani was a master ghazal poet, maverick political activist, coiner of the slogan, 'Inqilāb Zindabād', and contrarian member of the Constituent Assembly of India. Maulana Hasrat Mohani (L) with Dr B.R. Ambedkar. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The following is C.M. Naim's preface to his upcoming volume by Primus Books, Delhi, on Hasrat Mohani, titled Prison Observations of a Maverik Maulana. Naim's formal dedication of the book reads: "This book about a 27-year-old maverick is dedicated to all 27-year-old mavericks in South Asia. May their tribe thrive and grow strong!" Naim passed away in the US on July 9, 2025. § Mushāhidāt-i Zindānī by Syed Fazlul Hasan Hasrat of Mohan, Unnao (U.P.), a unique book in Urdu, is an illuminating account of what a young Indian observed and experienced when he was sentenced to one year of 'rigorous imprisonment' at Naōn Central Jail in 1908 under Section 124-A ('Sedition') of the Indian Penal Code—Section 152 in the current Bharat Nyaya Sanhita. His crime: publishing an article on the state of public education in Egypt, then under British occupation, in his modest, monthly, Urdu-i Mu'alla (Aligarh). He was 27 at the time, slight, pudgy and near-sighted, married and father of an infant daughter. He had yet to become Maulana Hasrat Mohani – master ghazal poet, maverick political activist, coiner of the slogan, 'Inqilāb Zindabād', contrarian member of the Constituent Assembly of India – who during the remaining four decades of his life also performed more than a dozen Hajj at Mecca and possibly celebrated as many Janam Ashtamis at Brindavan. The dedication page of the draft. My book is primarily about that young man and his times, what he was like at that age and how people thought of him, how he coped with the calamity, and what insights he then shared with his fellow Indians and, more importantly, also practiced all his life. It is organized in two parts. The first part is an introduction, divided into short chapters and based on contemporary records. It aims to acquaint the reader with the youthful Fazlul Hasan, the milieu at the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, Aligarh, where he reached adulthood, and the literary journal he started as the first step in his grand project of saving classical Urdu poetry from oblivion. The second part is the translation of the title text, duly annotated, followed by an afterword that highlights certain milestones in his later public life. My translation of Hasrat's Urdu prose is close to the original but not literal. Sentences and words have frequently been rearranged to make for easier reading. Nothing, however, has been left out except a few duplications. Urdu words are quoted in a simple phonetic transcription; only two diacritics are used: a macron over a, i, u when they are pronounced long—Examples: kāmil, 'perfect,' mūlī, 'radish'—and a tilde over n (ñ) to indicate that the preceding vowel is nasalized—Examples: hāñ, 'yes,' maiñ, 'I.' I am indebted to Abdur Rasheed, Amrita Shodhan, and Shariq Khan for their acts of kindness and to for continuing to be an invaluable resource for people interested in Urdu across the world. I can only offer my sincere gratitude to B. N. Varma and Primus Books for helping me bring Hasrat's little book to new readers. Chicago, 2025 Choudhri Mohammed Naim is a legendary scholar of Urdu language and literature. He was professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
