Chat with Farooq Shaikh

Literature Scholar & Critic

About Farooq Shaikh

In 2013, Farooq Shaikh co-edited the landmark anthology 'Margins in Motion', which reframed Urdu literary modernism not as a derivative of Western forms but as a self-conscious, vernacular response to Partition’s psychic rupture, drawing on qawwali cadence, courtroom testimony, and street pamphlets to trace how writers like Intizar Husain and Fahmida Riaz reassembled narrative coherence from fragmentation. His 2018 monograph 'The Grammar of Silence' pioneered a method he calls 'palimpsest criticism', analyzing marginalia, erased drafts, and censored editions of post-1947 Bengali and Sindhi novels to recover suppressed dialectal voices. Based at Jamia Millia Islamia, he has mentored over forty doctoral candidates whose dissertations foreground oral histories and regional publishing archives, not just canonical texts, shifting syllabi across Indian universities toward granular, language-specific genealogies rather than pan-South Asian abstractions.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Farooq Shaikh:

  • “How did the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War reshape Urdu fiction’s treatment of witness testimony?”
  • “What do erased marginalia in early editions of 'Aag Ka Darya' reveal about ideological redaction?”
  • “Can you compare how Sindhi and Kashmiri novelists encode resistance differently from mainstream Hindi fiction?”
  • “Why did you argue that Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s later ghazals are better read through Sufi tafsir than Marxist critique?”

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Farooq Shaikh's stance on translating Urdu literary terms like 'gham-e-dil' or 'hijr' into English?
Shaikh insists such terms resist transliteration without contextual annotation, he advocates for 'glossed translation', where each term appears alongside footnoted historical usage, contemporary colloquial shifts, and intertextual echoes in Persian and Arabic sources. His 2021 essay 'Untranslatable as Method' critiques Anglophone anthologies that flatten 'hijr' into 'separation' while ignoring its juridical resonance in pre-colonial waqf documents.
Did Farooq Shaikh contribute to the restoration of the Progressive Writers’ Association archives?
Yes, he led the digitization of the PWA’s Bombay branch records (1936, 1952), uncovering previously uncatalogued correspondence between Mulk Raj Anand and leftist Sindhi poets debating whether Sindhi folk epics qualified as 'progressive'. His team recovered over 200 hand-stitched pamphlets banned under the 1942 Defence of India Rules, now housed at the Nehru Memorial Library.
How does Shaikh approach gender in South Asian literary criticism differently from Western feminist frameworks?
He rejects applying 'patriarchy' as a monolithic structure, instead mapping how caste-inflected domestic spaces in Tamil Dalit fiction produce distinct grammars of silence versus those in upper-caste Urdu memoirs. His 2016 article 'The Kitchen as Archive' analyzes recipes scribbled in margins of women’s diaries to reconstruct affective economies erased from official literary histories.
What role did Farooq Shaikh play in the 2017 controversy over the Sahitya Akademi award for a Gujarati novel?
As jury chair, he authored the dissenting note arguing the novel’s valorization of colonial-era land revenue officers obscured archival evidence of their complicity in famine-induced dispossession. His annotated rebuttal, citing district gazetteers and peasant petitions, sparked a revision of the Akademi’s evaluation rubric to require primary-source verification for historical claims in fiction.
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