Asif Farrukhi: A man who thrived on building community of readers and writers

I am deeply grieved over the sudden and entirely unexpected passing of Dr Asif Aslam Farrukhi from a silent heart attack in Karachi this afternoon. Asif had numerous prestigious jobs and degrees in medicine and public health, but his lifelong passion was literature.

My association with him goes back well before we together founded and organised the Karachi Literature Festival (2010), the Islamabad Literature Festival (2013), and the Adab Festival (2019). For decades before that, I had been publishing books authored, translated, edited, introduced, or recommended by him. I was also connected with him because he too was a publisher (of the prestigious imprint Scheherazade), and he was a great literary critic.

Amongst his many celebrated books was ‘An Evening of Caged Beasts: Seven Postmodernist Urdu Poets, selected and introduced by Asif Farrukhi and translated by Asif and Frances Pritchett’. He wasn’t just an expert in Urdu literature. He was widely read in Spanish literature, Sindhi literature (e.g. he translated Attiya Dawood’s poetry into English, Raging to be Free), Arab and Palestinian literature, English Literature, Russian literature, etc.

At the time of his passing, he was translating Sudeep Sen’s poetry from English into Urdu, and was working on collecting and publishing the unpublished works of his dear friend Fahmida Riaz. He was a great collector of books and took pride in his personal library.

He loved his job at the Habib University where he was immersed in developing young writers and scholars of literature. He regularly invited literary giants to address and interact with his students at the varsity. He took his students to literary events and meetings with authors, and through such immersive educational experiences he enabled and empowered them to organise their own literary events, including a successful literary festival at the Habib University, and a literary event at T2F.

In the process of founding and organising various literature fests with him, Shayma Saiyid (Adab Fest director) and I found in the countless long hours that we spent in designing sessions, that he was eager to give everyone a chance. He would go on adding sessions because of his spirit of inclusiveness and abundance of ideas.

He thrived on, and believed in, building a strong community of readers, writers, and artists, and loved being in their midst. Despite being a literary giant and a great intellectual, he was full of fun, laughter, jokes, and interesting anecdotes. He made friends with people of all ages: those much younger and much older than him. “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” — Ameena Saiyid OBE with Shayma Saiyid