‘I Never Held Money with my Teeth’: Constructions of Exemplarity in Abul Fazl Farooqi’s Nasheb-o-Faraz

Although life-stories have been playing a central role in the construction of exemplarity in South Asia for centuries, the autobiographical genre was a latecomer on the region’s literary scene. It only developed in the late nineteenth, early 20th century and was constrained by conventional ‘rules of reticence’, which discouraged narratives of self-aggrandizement. Nasheb-o-Faraz (Ups and Downs), the autobiography of the Delhi-based real estate entrepreneur Mohammad Abul Fazl Farooqi (born ca. 1940), which constitutes the focus of this paper, is not immune to such ‘rules of reticence.’ Nevertheless, Farooqi takes some liberty with these moral and literary codes, and his narrative is a deeply subjective one, through which he aims to project himself as a role model, and more specifically as a moral achiever. This endeavour is not free of internal tensions and, all along the text, Farooqi seems hesitant about the example he ambitions to set. The reception of the text, within his family and beyond, also points to the limits of self-constructions of exemplarity in contemporary India, where the economy of greatness is undergoing major changes in a context of economic liberalization and political democratization.