Unlocking an Urdu writer's treasure for scholars

The Sajjad Zaheer Digital Archive is the result of a collaboration between two varsities and the communist ideologue's family

Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD) and the University of Texas (UT) at Austin have good news for scholars and researchers, who are struggling to access physical archives during the Covid pandemic due to restrictions on domestic and international travel.

Letters, manuscripts, photographs and other materials belonging to Urdu writer Sajjad Zaheer (1905-1973), who founded the Association of Indian Progressive Writers’ in London and later in India, are now available for open access in a digital archive that was launched on Tuesday. Hosted at https://sites.utexas.edu/zaheerarchive this initiative is a collaboration between the Zaheer family, AUD and UT.

Sajjad Zaheer’s granddaughter, Seema Baquer, who works as an independent cross-disability consultant in Delhi, has been associated with the archive since its inception. She says, “As the primary custodian of my grandfather’s papers and other materials of historical relevance, my mother Najma Zaheer Baquer wanted to make them available for researchers.”

She adds, “We were looking for possible partners for archiving and AUD came up with the offer of a digital archive with the possibility of finding a place for the physical material as well. The proposition for a digital archive was a great idea as it gave a wider reach and a longer life to the preservation of the material. And then the other partner, UT, came on board. Together, they had the knowledge and expertise for such a project.”

Zaheer was born in Lucknow, and studied law at Oxford. He is known for books such as Bimar, London Ki Ek Raat, Roshanai and Pighla Neelam, and has several essays to his credit. He translated William Shakespeare’s Othello, Voltaire’s Candide and Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora.

Zaheer also edited the journals Chingari, Qaumi Jang, Naya Zamana and Awami Daur, reflecting his political views. He joined the Communist Party of India (CPI) before India got independence. In 1948, he was the party’s general secretary in Pakistan, a country that imprisoned him for four and a half years for the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. Upon his release in 1955, he was sent back to India, where he continued his political and literary activities.

“Bringing knowledge from the margins into the mainstream is our focus as a research centre. Sajjad Zaheer’s work is of great significance because, in addition to being a writer, he was a political organiser, a member of the CPI and the Progressive Writers’ Movement,” says Surajit Sarkar, associate professor at AUD’s Centre for Community Knowledge. He believes that the archive would interest historians, literary scholars, journalists and interdisciplinary researchers.

R Prakash and G Sundar from the Roja Muthiah Research Library in Chennai oversaw the digitisation of the entire collection. The staff at Daastaan Media Communications, led by D Bhattacharya Tato, created the original inventory for this archive. “It contains several handwritten and autographed items, which throw light on the organisational activities of leftist parties and their cultural fronts in the 1950s and 60s,” he says.

He adds, “This archive also bears witness to the development of Urdu literature and its connection with Bombay films through personalities such as Sahir Ludhianvi, Jan Nisar Akhtar, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ali Sardar Jafri, Kaifi Azmi, Qurratulain Hyder, Amrita Pritam, Mohammed Rafi and Naushad.”

As mentioned on the archive’s website, the collection includes over 2,000 items in English, more than 1,300 in Urdu, and less than 100 in Hindi. Apart from Zaheer, they shed light on the work and thought of various other writers who were part of the Progressive Writers’ Association and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association. Significant among these was his wife Razia, who was a novelist, translator and writer of short stories.

UT’s South Asia Institute (SAI) and the South Asia Materials Project (SAMP) provided all financial funding for the digital archive, says Mary Rader, the South Asian Studies Liaison Librarian and the Head of the Arts, Humanities, and Global Studies Engagement Team. “SAI is a National Resource Center funded in part by the US Department of Education to promote knowledge of South Asia; SAMP is a member-driven and -funded project to preserve materials from and about South Asia and make them accessible to researchers,” she adds.

Kamran Asdar Ali, who has written about Zaheer’s work in his book Communism in Pakistan: Politics and Class activism, 1947-1972, and Bilal Hashmi, who has translated London Ki Ek Raat into English (A Night in London), are among the scholars who envision the use of this material. A conference related to the archive is also on the cards.

There is no membership fee or any other kind of academic gatekeeping. People interested in engaging with the material do not have to be affiliated to any academic institution. Through the use of Zooniverse, a platform for people-powered research, volunteers from all over the world can help by identifying people, places, dates and contextual details in over 700 photographs featured in the collection.