Mumtaz Muftiਮੁਮਤਾਜ਼ ਮੁਫ਼ਤੀ

Mumtaz Mufti (1905-1995) was an Urdu writer from Batala in Gurdaspur district whose two autobiographical books, Alipur Ka Aili and Alakh Nagri, are counted among the great works of Urdu literature. Over a writing life of more than sixty years he moved from sharp, freethinking short stories to a searching spiritual prose, and his books are still read, quoted and argued over in Punjab and Pakistan today.

Early life and education in Batala

Mumtaz Mufti was born Mumtaz Husain on 11 September 1905 in Batala, then a town in British Punjab and now the largest city of Gurdaspur district. He was the son of Mufti Muhammad Hussain and his first wife, Sughra Khanum, and he belonged to a Punjabi family that had supplied religious scholars and jurists, known as muftis, in the Mughal period. The family name itself came from that office, and the young Mumtaz grew up in a household where religion, learning and argument were part of daily life.

His schooling moved with his family from town to town. He studied in Mianwali, Amritsar and Dera Ghazi Khan, took his matriculation from Dera Ghazi Khan and his F.A. from Amritsar, and in 1929 graduated in Philosophy and Economics from Islamia College, Lahore. At college he sang and acted in student productions, and he took part in the Khilafat Movement, the first sign of a young man who would spend his life testing the ideas he had inherited.

From schoolteacher to civil servant

Mufti began his working life as a schoolteacher, and it was while he was teaching that he started writing Urdu short stories. Teaching gave him his first readers and his first subjects: ordinary people, their desires, their fears and the small hypocrisies of respectable life. He later joined the civil service under British rule, and he also worked for a time as a staff artist at All India Radio, leaving after an offer from the Bombay film industry.

The Partition of 1947 changed the course of his life, as it did for millions of Punjabis. Soon after Partition he migrated to Pakistan with his family. There he worked as a sub-editor of the magazine Istaqlal, became a psychoanalyst for the Pakistan Air Force in 1949, and joined Radio Azad Kashmir in 1950. The radio years mattered: the work brought him into close contact with the religious life of the new country, and his own thinking began to move in a new direction.

What did Mumtaz Mufti write?

Mufti wrote in almost every form Urdu offers: short stories, novels, sketches, essays and travel writing. His first published piece was an essay on psychology called Uljhao, and his first published story, Jhuki Jhuki Ankhen, appeared in 1932 in Adbi Duniya, the Lahore literary magazine. The early stories marked him out as a non-conformist. He wrote openly about psychology, sexuality and social taboo, drawing on Freud at a time when few Urdu writers did, and the critic Nasir Abbas Nayyar later described his style as psychological realism.

His short-story collections came steadily through the decades: Gehma Gehmi in 1949, Asmarain in 1952, Ghubare in 1954, Ghurya Ghar in 1965, Raughani Putle in 1984, the collected stories Muftiyane in 1989, and Kahi Na Jae, Chup and Samai Ka Bandhan in the early 1990s. He also wrote the play Nizam Saqqah in 1953, and his books of sketches and essays, Piyaz Ke Chilke (1968), Aukhe Log (1986) and Aukhe Avalre (1995), are portraits of the writers and public figures he knew, written with the same interest in what lies beneath the surface. As a traveller he wrote Hind Yatra (1982), an account of a journey to India, and Labbaik (1993), a frank and unconventional account of his Hajj pilgrimage in 1968.

Alipur Ka Aili and Alakh Nagri: two halves of one life

The two books Mufti is remembered by are his autobiographies, and together they tell the story of his inner life in two parts. Ali Pur Ka Aeeli, published in 1961, is the account of a lover who challenged the social taboos of his time. When it first appeared, readers took it for a novel; only later did Mufti make clear that it was a close account of his own early life. It is a bold book, honest about the self, society, sexuality and spiritual conflict, and it is still regarded as one of the most important autobiographical works in Urdu.

Alakh Nagri, published in 1992, is the second part, and it tells a different story: the account of a devotee. In the years between the two books Mufti had moved from religious scepticism toward Sufism, a change shaped above all by his close friendship with the civil servant and mystic writer Qudrat Ullah Shahab. His friend Ashfaq Ahmed, himself one of Pakistan's best-loved writers, was another constant companion in those years. Alakh Nagri records that turn with the same unsparing honesty as the first book, and the two together make Mufti's life read like a single argument carried across thirty years: first the rebellion, then the search.

Honours and later life

Recognition came late, but it came from both sides of the border. In 1986 the President of Pakistan conferred on him the Sitara-e-Imtiaz, and in 1989 he received India's Munshi Premchand Award. He kept writing into his eighties, and his last book, Talash, a reflection on the true spirit of Quranic teaching, appeared in 1996, the year after his death. Mufti died in Islamabad on 27 October 1995, aged 90, and was buried in the city's H-8 graveyard, alongside his friend Qudrat Ullah Shahab.

Legacy: why readers still turn to him

Mufti's son Uxi Mufti, a literary critic, set up the Mumtaz Mufti Trust after his father's death, and the trust has marked his death anniversary with events in cities across Pakistan, where friends and admirers such as Ashfaq Ahmed, Bano Qudsia and Ahmad Bashir have spoken about him. A road in Multan is named after him.

His standing rests on something simpler than honours. Few Urdu writers wrote as plainly about the inside of a person's mind, and fewer still wrote as plainly about changing their own mind. Readers who come to him for Alipur Ka Aili find a young man breaking rules; readers who stay for Alakh Nagri find an older man looking for meaning. That journey, from doubt to devotion, told without pretence, is why his books remain in print and why a writer born in Batala in 1905 is still argued over in Lahore, Islamabad and the Punjabi diaspora today.