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Of Moons and Mirrors
From Urdu to Hindi and then English, Kai Chand the Sar-e Asman sets out on a creative journey.
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s monumental novel Kai Chand the Sar-e Asman created history when it was published in Urdu in 2005 (Scheherazade) and in 2006 and 2011 (Penguin). It was brought out in Hindi in 2010 (Penguin) and recently in English, translated by the author himself (Penguin, July 2013). One could say that this politico-historical, cultural romance has been written not once but thrice!
Faruqi, who is acclaimed for his critical, path-breaking work on Ghalib, Mir Taqi Mir and the Dastan tradition, had returned to fiction only a few years earlier, storming Urdu’s literary world with his quasi-fictional construction of north India’s cultural (Indo-Muslim) milieu. These fictions are brimming with minute details of history, culture and the arts, recapitulated with an extraordinary felicity of language. The fiction is speckled with Persian and Urdu verses drawn from a spectrum of classical poetry admirably suited to the subject of his stories.
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