A man of letters, a bridge between East and West

Chaudhary Mohammad Naim or CM Naim, the great Urdu scholar, teacher and translator, passed away in Chicago last week. We have been friends since the 1960s, and he has helped me on countless occasions. An early incident was in 1968 when I completed my MA and enrolled for a PhD at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in the comparative study of progressive poetry in Urdu and Hindi. Comparative literature was a new field of study in those days. I was searching for a competent mentor until someone pointed to Professor Naim, who was in the Urdu department on a sabbatical from University of Chicago. I went to meet him though I had only heard about him from his students, Steven Poulos and Carlo Coppola who had joined AMU's Urdu department a couple of years ago for their research.

- Asghar Wajahat

My first impression of Naim sahab was of a person who was cold, distant and snooty. When I told him about my predicament, he asked me to join him in the evening when he took long walks. That evening he cleared all my confusion and doubts with effortless ease. Naim sahab had come to AMU after a long stint in the US because he felt he needed to give something back to his country. However, things didn’t materialise as per his plans. He found the cultural gap between the two university systems difficult to bridge. AMU’s conservative ways created a situation where Naim sahab found himself constrained while his colleagues felt threatened and uncomfortable. In one of the research committee meetings, he declined to guide a research scholar who was working on Hali Altaf Hussian Hali saying that he hadn't read Hali enough to be able to guide a research scholar. The department wasn't ready for such honesty. Within a year, Naim sahab returned to Chicago.