Faruqi celebrated the idea that the contents of someone’s bookcase are part of their history, like an ancestral portrait. That’s not the only reason PrintWeek remembers the author who wrote with consummate ease in both Urdu and English.

PrintWeek celebrates Faruqi’s work on the Dastan-e Amir Hamza — a world-class treasury of narrative and certainly the greatest work of Urdu prose. As an obituary said, “It was sad that both the literary and literate community of Urdu had permitted it to be lost.” Faruqi found out quickly enough how much lost to sight the Dastan had become barely a few decades after its halcyon days. Individual Dastan volumes were hard to come by: not a single library in India seemed to possess more than a few, if any of the individual volumes.

None of the foreign libraries that Faruqi could approach showed better results. It seemed that there wasn’t a single individual or library in the world which could boast to possess all the 46 —some said 47, some even 52 — individual volumes. Again, it would be tedious to tell the story of the Great Quest, but a day dawned when Shamsur Rahman Faruqi was the only individual in the contemporary world to own all the 46 volumes (he’d long since determined the number 46 as definitive). He preserved a tradition; also preserved a bit of a language.

After all, it is language which creates civilisation. In 1997, he delivered the two Nizam Lectures at the University of Delhi. This became the nucleus for a multi-volume project on Urdu’s immense oral romance, Dastan-e Amir Hamza. With more than 46,000 pages and more than 20 million words, it is perhaps the world’s largest oral romance available in a printed form.

At the beginning of 2021, PrintWeek celebrates the need to tell fables. After all, to survive one needs to tell fables. The reason to share the story of Dastan-e Amir Hamza is to allay fears of dooms and glooms. There are 1,008 languages in India with a million stories that remain untold. A huge opportunity for print.

And in its most ideal form, print is still ink on paper. To celebrate this idea, the January issue is all about the smell of ink, where an ink manufacturer shares what makes its inks unique. Also read our conversation with Parvesh Jain of Meerutbased Arihant who has published more than 3,000 titles of education books.

And the extraordinary work being done in the field of children’s education by Arundhati Deosthale, founder of a village ‘library and activity centre’ in Nainital and children’s book publisher, Pratham Books.

I believe we are formed of tiny scraps of wisdom. Books enable me to gather it. That’s why at PrintWeek we will believe in books, always. 

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Dibyajyoti Sarma is the associate editor of PrintWeek and WhatPackaging? magazines