Ashfaq Ahmedਅਸ਼ਫ਼ਾਕ ਅਹਿਮਦ

Ashfaq Ahmed (22 August 1925 to 7 September 2004) was a Muktsar-born Pakistani writer, playwright and broadcaster who wrote in Urdu for radio, television and print. His radio programme Talqeen Shah and his television talks Zavia made him a household voice across Pakistan, while more than thirty books carried his stories, plays and spiritual reflections.

Early life in Muktsar and the move to Lahore

Ashfaq Ahmed was born on 22 August 1925 in Muktsar, in Punjab, British India. The town is known today as Sri Muktsar Sahib, in the Malwa region of Indian Punjab. He was born into a Pashtun family of the Mohmand tribe and received his early education in Muktsar. Writing came early: as a boy he was already writing stories, and they were published in Phool, a magazine for children.

Shortly before the Partition of India in 1947, he migrated to Pakistan and settled in Lahore, the city that stayed his home for the rest of his life. His early working life in the new country included work for Radio Azad Kashmir, the broadcasting service set up in the first years after independence. The move from a small Malwa town to Lahore placed him at the centre of Urdu literary life, and Lahore's colleges, radio studios and publishers shaped everything he wrote afterwards.

Education, teaching and the years in Europe

In Lahore he completed a Master of Arts degree in Urdu literature from Government College Lahore. Among his fellow students there was Bano Qudsia, who later became his wife and one of the best known Urdu novelists of her generation. After his degree he served as a lecturer at Dayal Singh College in Lahore for two years.

He then moved to Rome, where he worked as an Urdu newscaster for Radio Rome and taught Urdu at the University of Rome. His years in Europe were also years of study: he earned a diploma in Italian from the University of Rome and a diploma in French from the University of Grenoble in France, and he later took a specialised diploma in radio broadcasting from New York University. Few Urdu writers of his generation carried that mix of a Government College education, European languages and formal training in broadcasting.

What was Talqeen Shah, and why did it make him famous?

Talqeen Shah was the radio programme Ashfaq Ahmed began at Radio Pakistan in 1962, built around a preacher character whose sermons held a mirror up to everyday behaviour. The character projected a man of dual personality, and through him Ahmed exposed the hypocrisy he saw in society, in a voice that listeners in towns and villages took as their own. It ran as a weekly feature for decades and made him one of the most recognisable broadcasters in Pakistan.

Radio suited him. He had joined Radio Pakistan as a script writer after returning from Europe, and Talqeen Shah turned that studio craft into a public role: part storyteller, part moral commentator, always speaking in simple language about ordinary people. Long before television made his face familiar, his voice was already a fixture of Pakistani homes.

Writing, editing and the Urdu board

His reputation as a writer of fiction came with the short story Gadariya (The Shepherd), which brought him early fame in 1955. He went on to write more than thirty books: short story collections, plays, essays and a travelogue, Safar Dar Safar. Readers and critics noted a prose style that drew Punjabi literary words into Urdu, giving his Urdu a flavour that was recognisably his own. After returning from Europe he also published his own monthly literary magazine, Dastaango (Story Teller), and he was made editor of the popular Urdu weekly Lail-o-Nahar, in place of the poet Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum.

In 1966 he was appointed director of the Markazi Urdu Board in Lahore, the body later renamed the Urdu Science Board, and he is credited with helping to build up the Central Board for the Development of Urdu in Lahore from his own resources. He also served as an adviser in the federal Education Ministry during the period of General Zia-ul-Haq. In 1968 he tried cinema, writing and directing the Urdu film Dhoop Aur Sayay. It failed at the box office, though Ahmed argued that its content had been ahead of its time.

Television, Zavia and the turn to Sufism

Television carried his plays to a far larger audience. His drama series Aik Mohabbat Sau Afsanay, shown in 1975 and 1976 and based on his story collection of the same name, was appreciated in India as well as Pakistan. Other television work included Tota Kahani, Uchhay Burj Lahore De, Man Chalay Ka Sauda and Hairat Kadah. The leading actors of Lahore television in the late 1970s and 1980s built much of their reputations in his plays and in those of Bano Qudsia.

In his later years his writing and speaking turned increasingly towards Sufism, a tendency his friends linked to his close association with the writers Qudrat Ullah Shahab and Mumtaz Mufti. On Pakistan Television he appeared in Baithak and then in Zavia, where he sat with a mostly young audience and answered their questions about life, faith and conduct in short, plain spoken reflections. The Zavia talks were later collected in book form, and for many younger readers the books, rather than the plays, are where his voice is met first.

Honours, death and legacy

The Government of Pakistan honoured him with the President's Pride of Performance award in 1979 and with the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, its awards for his services to literature and broadcasting. Ashfaq Ahmed died in Lahore on 7 September 2004, aged 79, of pancreatic cancer, and he was buried in Model Town, Lahore.

At a tribute in Islamabad in November 2004, National Language Authority chairman Fateh Muhammad Malik said that Ahmed's death had left a vacuum in the literary world of Pakistan, and Pakistan Academy of Letters chairman Iftikhar Arif remembered him as a dynamic literary figure whose priorities had always included the welfare of ordinary people. His standing rests on that double reach: a serious Urdu writer who was also, for four decades, a familiar voice in homes that might never open his books.