Pir Hissamuddin Rashdi

Sayyid Hissamuddin Shah Rashdi, widely known as Pir Hissamuddin Rashdi, was born on 20 September 1911 in the village of Bahman in Larkana district, in the Sindh region of what was then British India ^[1]. His family belonged to a line of sayyids associated with the Rashdi branch of a well known religious lineage of upper Sindh, a background that gave the household social standing but not great wealth ^[2]. His elder brother, Pir Ali Muhammad Rashdi, later became a prominent journalist and politician, and the two brothers remained closely linked throughout their careers ^[3].

Rashdi received almost no formal schooling. Apart from elementary instruction in the village, he never attended a college or university, a fact he acknowledged openly in later life ^[1]. What he lacked in institutional education he made up for through relentless private reading. In his youth he taught himself Persian, the language in which most of Sindh's premodern chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and poetry collections had been written, and he gradually acquired a command of the classical literary tradition that few degree holders of his generation could match ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Pir Hissamuddin Rashdi finds the answer in this unusual formation: a scholar built entirely by curiosity, family libraries, and the company of learned men rather than by classrooms. The deprivations of his early years left him with a lifelong conviction that Sindh's history had been neglected and that recovering it required patient work on original manuscripts ^[2].

Rashdi entered public life through journalism. In the late 1920s and 1930s he worked alongside his brother on Sindhi newspapers, writing on political and social questions during the campaign for the separation of Sindh from the Bombay Presidency, which succeeded in 1936 ^[3]. This period sharpened his prose and introduced him to the province's political and literary circles, but his real interests were already drifting toward the past rather than the present ^[2].

By the 1940s he had begun collecting and studying Persian manuscripts relating to Sindh, many of them scattered in private libraries, shrines, and family collections across the region. He developed the habits that defined his mature scholarship: careful collation of manuscript copies, dense annotation, and long biographical introductions that placed each text in its historical setting ^[4].

The founding of the Sindhi Adabi Board in 1951, a publicly funded body created to publish research on Sindhi language, literature, and history, gave Rashdi an institutional home. He became one of its most active members and served on its governing bodies, guiding an ambitious program of editing and printing the Persian and Sindhi sources of Sindh's history ^[1]. Through the Board he transformed a personal passion into a coordinated scholarly enterprise.

The core of Pir Hissamuddin Rashdi achievements lies in his critical editions of Persian texts. Among the most celebrated is his edition of the Makli Namo, a Persian account of the great necropolis at Makli near Thatta, which he expanded with extensive annotation on the monuments, saints, and rulers buried there; the work grew into a substantial reference on the funerary history of lower Sindh ^[5]. He also edited the Maqalat al Shu'ara of Mir Ali Sher Qani Thattavi, an eighteenth century biographical dictionary of poets connected with Sindh, restoring to circulation a foundational source for the region's literary history ^[4].

His output extended well beyond these titles. Over roughly four decades he edited or authored dozens of volumes, including studies of the Tarkhan and Arghun periods, biographical works on Sindhi scholars who had migrated to other lands, and research on the cultural ties between Sindh, Iran, and Central Asia ^[1]. He wrote in both Sindhi and Persian, and his introductions were often books in themselves, running to hundreds of pages of original research ^[4].

This work earned international recognition. The government of Iran decorated him for his services to Persian scholarship, and he represented Pakistan at academic gatherings in Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia ^[2]. At home, the University of Sindh conferred an honorary doctorate of letters on the man who had never sat a university examination, and the government of Pakistan awarded him the Sitara e Imtiaz, one of the country's high civil honors, in recognition of his contribution to literature and historical research ^[1].

Rashdi never married and lived a deliberately austere life organized around books. Colleagues described a man who spent his income on manuscripts and rare printed volumes, assembling one of the finest private research libraries in Pakistan ^[2]. He worked from Karachi for most of his later career, though his emotional attachment remained fixed on the towns, shrines, and graveyards of interior Sindh that filled his scholarship ^[5].

His memoir Hoo Dothi Hoo Deenhan (Those Days, Those People), written in Sindhi, is regarded as a classic of the language. In it he recorded portraits of the scholars, politicians, and eccentrics he had known, and the book is frequently cited as a model of Sindhi prose style ^[6]. The memoir also preserved details of rural Sindhi life in the early twentieth century that would otherwise have gone unrecorded.

Among basic Pir Hissamuddin Rashdi facts, his generosity to younger researchers deserves mention. He opened his library to students, corrected their drafts, and pressed the Sindhi Adabi Board to publish promising work by unknown authors, seeing the training of successors as part of his own task ^[2].

Through the 1960s and 1970s Rashdi continued editing at a steady pace while his health gradually declined. He remained involved with the Sindhi Adabi Board and with national institutions concerned with historical research, and he continued to travel abroad for conferences when his condition allowed ^[1]. His standing in Iranian academic circles stayed strong, and Persian scholars counted his editions among the essential tools for studying the eastern reaches of the Persianate world ^[4].

In his final years he suffered from cancer. He kept working almost to the end, correcting proofs and organizing his papers, and he arranged for his library and manuscript collection to pass to public institutions in Sindh so that the materials he had gathered over a lifetime would remain available to researchers ^[2]. Pir Hissamuddin Rashdi died in Karachi on 1 April 1982, at the age of seventy ^[1].

In accordance with his wishes, he was buried at the Makli necropolis near Thatta, the vast historic graveyard whose monuments he had documented in his best known book. The choice struck contemporaries as fitting: the historian of Makli became part of the site he had spent decades explaining ^[5].

Any serious Pir Hissamuddin Rashdi biography must reckon with the scale of what he left behind. His editions remain standard references for the medieval and early modern history of Sindh, and later historians of the region routinely build on the textual foundations he laid ^[4]. The Sindhi Adabi Board has kept many of his volumes in print, and his memoirs continue to be read for both their content and their prose ^[6].

Scholars of the wider Persianate world also acknowledge his role. By editing texts produced in Thatta, Sehwan, and other Sindhi centers, he demonstrated that Sindh had been an active province of Persian letters rather than a periphery, a point that reshaped how the region figures in histories of Persian literature ^[4]. The German orientalist Annemarie Schimmel, who surveyed Sindhi literary history for an international audience, drew on the body of source publications that Rashdi and his colleagues at the Board had produced ^[6].

In Pakistan his name is attached to libraries, seminars, and commemorative volumes, and anniversary tributes in the national press continue to recall his career as proof that rigorous scholarship can flourish outside formal academia ^[3]. For students of Sindh, he remains the example of what a single determined editor can recover from scattered and decaying manuscripts ^[2].