“Baaz logon ke bohat ajeeb-o-ghareeb kisam k achay buray shouq hotay hain, yeh bhi humain abhi tak tou shouq he para hua hai” (“Some people have very strange, all kinds of good or bad passions. This too, for now, is a passion of mine.”)
These are the words of Muhammad Shahid Hanif – a prolific indexer and cataloguer of Urdu periodicals – describing the motivation behind this underappreciated and often overlooked yet invaluable work. What exactly does he do?
Imagine being a researcher in Pakistan and trying to access relevant material for your project. The public libraries are severely underfunded, the catalogs are incomplete, and the staff is primarily focused on ensuring that visitors either leave the reading room or to tell them that the required material is missing from the shelves. Those who mostly visit the public libraries is also for mainly to prepare for civil services exams or tests for admissions abroad. There is no research culture or a repository that you can turn to for planning and conducting an effective and rigorous project. But there are individuals who are doing the work of what research institutions should be doing. Muhammad Shahif Hanif is one such person.
Over the last two decades, Hanif has worked meticulously to manually browse through hundreds of Urdu literary and journals, turned thousands of their pages, and made elaborate notes about their themes. He has collated this information to put together multiple indices of various Urdu journals. Consider the latest 20-volume index of more than 50 Urdu journals that Hanif has recently published. You are an MPhil student who wants to work on the sufi heritage of Lahore. You can browse through this index which has been catalogued along author names and themes, narrow down your research to the peculiar Sufi shrine you are interested in, and then find dozens of articles published on it over the last 100 years. All of this has been digitized, which makes the index searchable and easier to locate the relevant article as well. Hanif’s work, in this way, has revolutionized the research culture in local languages, and is equally important for even researchers from top universities abroad who routinely use his works for their research projects.
Born in Mianwali in 1975 and raised in Lahore, Hanif did not come from a family of academics. Largely self-taught, it took Hanif years to first finish a private BA and subsequently complete an MA in Library Science from Allama Iqbal University Lahore. He was the first in his family to complete a masters and venture into the world of research.
As a youth, his passion for reading and learning led him to build a small library in his house. For his collection, Hanif procured a complete set of a digest, Mahanama Hikyat, which had been publishing for 35 years at that time. However, Hanif soon realized how difficult it was to search for a particular essay in the collection, or look for the publications of a particular author or find essays based on a particular theme. He then took it upon himself to prepare a comprehensive index for it. And hence began Hanif’s journey into the quiet and tedious realm of literary preservation.
His journey took an institutional turn when, over two decades ago, he joined the Islamic Research Council (IRC) in Model Town, Lahore. Here, Hanif’s mission expanded beyond personal projects to academic and religious journals/magazines he was commissioned to work on. These publications, though integral to Urdu literature, lacked complete files in any institution or library. Hanif, along with fellow researchers at IRC, was successful in gathering more than one hundred literary magazines and has prepared indexes and contents for about one hundred of those over the years. Working under the supervision of mentors like Professor Saleem Mansoor Khalid, Dr. Hafiz Abdur Rehman Madni, and Dr. Hafiz Hasan Madni, Hanif’s passion grew and he further mastered the art of indexing.
Urdu periodicals – repositories of cultural and historical snapshots – which are overlooked and underappreciated in mainstream academia, became Hanif’s focus. These periodicals offer a unique window into the past; they illustrate the social, political, and economic conditions specific to a particular time and people. Despite the wealth of information they contain, Hanif regrettably acknowledges, there exists no proper institution or library dedicated to their preservation. Hanif notes that while books remain in print for years, periodicals are published only once and run the risk of being completely lost if not collected and preserved.
Maintaining a modest job at the Iqbal Academy Pakistan for the last eighteen years, Hanif has found a community of fellow researchers across Pakistan and continues to work both personally and on projects commissioned by individuals/institutions for preservation of such invaluable collections. He leads a team of eight individuals, half of them women, who share his passion. From gathering and safekeeping magazines to scanning, preparing contents, indexing, and digitizing, they do it all. The team’s dedication is evident in their commitment to this passion project while working separate main jobs. Together, they navigate the complexities of magazine indexing, a task that extends beyond mere categorization.
Due to his training and job in the IT sector for several years, technology played a pivotal role in Hanif’s evolution as an indexer. From the initial days of pen and paper, he swiftly transitioned to the efficiency of computers—using Excel to categorize essays and streamline the indexing process. Hanif has also brought these values and skills to his team. The team employs three different ways of categorization: chronological order, author-based, and theme-wise indexing for each magazine/journal. What used to take hours on paper now merely takes minutes on a computer, ushering in an era of efficiency and collaboration. Technology has also allowed them to reach across the border to fellow researchers and indexers in India. They are able to have their Indian colleagues scan and send over copies of periodicals not available in Pakistan.
While technology has aided some parts of Hanif’s work, the complete process of collecting, reading, analyzing, indexing, proof-reading, cataloging, scanning and digitizing the magazines remains extremely laborious and tedious. While he has garnered some recognition for his work over the years, Hanif candidly admits that it has been in no way equivalent to the effort it takes. There are also no significant monetary gains. Hanif’s work thus remains a labour of love—his passion for the obscure craft of indexing extending beyond materialistic concerns. Despite all the challenges and limitations in this field, Hanif is adamant on continuing this work.
Hanif envisions a future where educational institutions collaborate with the government to create a proper mechanism for cataloging these invaluable Urdu periodicals. This would not only streamline the entire process but also bring recognition and financial stability for anyone working in the field. After working on projects such as preparing an encyclopedia of indexes for BA, MA, MPhil, and Post-doctoral Urdu theses from eighty-five Pakistani universities – published by the University of Lahore in twenty volumes and soon to be available online – Hanif is hopeful about the future of indexing and academic collaborations. He also hopes that his three daughters will follow in his footsteps into the world of academia and research, with the eldest already working with him.
Muhammad Shahid Hanif, characterized by his modest family-man persona, thus emerges as an unsung hero in the realm of literary preservation. His endeavors have allowed researchers and academics access to obscure Urdu journals, magazines and newspapers that would have otherwise been impossible to find or navigate. Hanif’s dedication to indexing Urdu magazines and periodicals – despite the lack of recognition or institutional support – paints a portrait of a man driven by an unyielding passion for preserving and making Urdu literature widely accessible.
