Mushtaq Ahmad Yousufi

An Urdu satirical and one of the most famous humourist and a humanist, Mushtaq Ahmad Yousufi was born in a learned family of Jaipur, Rajasthan on 4 August 1923. His father Abdul Karim Khan Yousufi was chairman of the Jaipur Municipality, and later Speaker of the Jaipur Legislative Assembly. Yousufi completed his early education in Rajputana and earned BA from Agra University while MA Philosophy and LLB from Aligarh Muslim University. After partition his family migrated to Karachi.

Apart from serving as the head of several national and international governmental and financial institutions, Mushtaq Ahmad Yousufi has throughout his life also served Urdu literature. The subtlety of his satire laced with an unlaboured and chaste Urdu idiom is his speciality that distinguishes him from others in the field. He received Sitara-e-Imtiaz and Hilal-i-Imtiaz, the highest literary honours by the Government of Pakistan in 1999.

Mushtaq Ahmad Yousufi Joined Muslim Commercial Bank in 1950 and became Deputy General Manager. He then Joined Allied Bank Ltd in 1965 as Managing Director. In 1974 he became President of United Bank Ltd. In 1977 became Chairman of the Pakistan Banking Council. He was awarded Quaid-i-Azam Memorial Medal for distinguished services in banking.

Mushtaq Ahmed Yusufi is a humorist with unified sensibility. He combines pre-modern, modern and post-modern sensibility in such a way that no other writer can paint the picture of man and society as he has painted it. His objects of humour are man, society and nature. He writes in an elevated language full of literary references but he does not peep into the depths and social behaviours of man. But his humorous writings contain literary values.

Mushtaq Ahmad Yusufi is basically a humourist who plays with the language and paints a picture of man, decentralized and imperfect. He combines all the styles, pre-modern, modern and post-modern. He writes in an elevated language full of literary references but he does not peep into the depths and social behaviours of man. But his humorous writings contain literary values. From Charagh Talay to Aab-e-Gum, we have the best humour available in recent times.

Ibn-e-Insha, himself an Urdu satirist and humourist, wrote about Yousufi that if ever we could give a name to the literary humour of our time, then the only name that comes to mind is that of Yousufi. Another scholar, Dr Zaheer Fatehpuri, wrote, “We are living in the 'Yousufi era' of Urdu literary humour” The Yousufi era started from 1961 when Yousufi's first book Chiragh talay was published. So far 11 editions of this book have appeared. It has a foreword titled 'Pahla pathhar' written by the author himself plus 12 satirical and humorous articles. He is living in Karachi and often appears in TV programs as well as seminars.