NEW DELHI, June 16: Eminent Urdu scholar and former president of Sahitya Akademi Prof. Gopi Chand Narang passed away in the United States on Wednesday. The 91-year-old was living with his son Dr. Tarun Narang in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Through his perceptive analysis, academic rigour, and theoretical grounding, Prof. Narang was instrumental in making literary criticism a full-fledged branch of knowledge in Urdu literature.
A prolific writer with some 60 books to his credit, Prof. Narang’s seminal work Urdu Ghazal aur Hindustani Zehn-o Tahzeeb is remembered for examining and tracing the roots of the genesis of the Urdu ghazal . Narang never saw ghazal as merely a love poem. He explored its philosophical complexity and maintained that its communication with absolute consciousness is in sync with the Upanishadic philosophy.
His works, Hindustani Qisson Se Makhooz Urdu Masnaviyan and Hindustan Ki Tehreek-e-Azadi aur Urdu Shayari, blazed a new trail in understanding not only the nuances of Urdu prose and poetry but also the socio-cultural context in which they were penned.
Prof. Narang devoted his entire life in extricating Urdu from the confines of orthodoxy and communalisation. He would always say that language will adjust and survive, like a river, it keeps changing its bank.
Born in Dukki town of Balochistan, Prof. Narang inherited the love for Urdu literature from his father. Starting his teaching career at St. Stephen’s College, Prof. Narang taught at the Delhi University, University of Wisconsin, University of Minnesota, and the University of Oslo.
In Wisconsin, Prof. Narang, spent time with Nobel laureate Prof. Har Gobind Khorana. While Prof. Khorana chose to move to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for better labs, Prof. Narang returned to his social lab in India to teach at Jamia Millia Millia Islamia and rejoined Delhi University in 1986.
In 1995, Prof. Narang won the Sahitya Akademi Award for his comprehensive work Sakhtiyat, Pas-Sakhtiyat aur Mashriqui Sheriyat (Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and Eastern Poetics). He was charged with plagiarism but over a period of time, the accusations could not stand literary scrutiny.
Former Sahitya Akademi member and author Prof. Shafey Kidwai who worked closely with Prof. Narang said, “He revisited Ghalib, Meer, Manto, Premchand, and Bedi and analysed their work with critical acuity and broadened the horizons of theory, avoiding theme-centered criticism.”
He described Prof. Narang as “a strong votary of Urdu” who denounced efforts to equate Urdu with a particular religion and said language does not belong to a religion, men do.”
No wonder, he was the first Urdu scholar who received the Padma Bhushan and Pakistan’s Sitara-e-Imtiaz. (Agencies)
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