1. Mahmood Farooqui specializes in a type of story-telling known as Dastangoi.
11 Facts About Mahmood Farooqui
1. 2.
Mahmood Farooqui was awarded the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar in 2010 for it.
3.
Mahmood Farooqui's book Besieged: voices from Delhi 1857 was awarded the Ramnath Goenka for the best Non-fiction book of the year.
4.
Mahmood Farooqui was a researcher for The Last Mughal, a book by William Dalrymple.
5.
Mahmood Farooqui completed his schooling from The Doon School and went on to read history at St Stephen's College, Delhi.
6.
Mahmood Farooqui was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to read history at St Peter's College, University of Oxford.
7.
Mahmood Farooqui began reinventing Dastangoi, the 16th-century Urdu oral storytelling art form, in 2005.
8.
Mahmood Farooqui has, over the years, built a team of dastangos trained by him, including Ankit Chadha, Darain Shahidi, Poonam Girdhani and Himanshu Bajpai.
9.
Mahmood Farooqui's publications include the award-winning Besieged: Voices from Delhi,1857, Habib Tanvir: Memoirs, a translation of theatre-director Habib Tanvir's memoirs from Urdu with notes and an introduction, Dastangoi, an introduction to the art of datangoi, and A Requiem for Pakistan: The world of Intizar Husain, a personal exploration of the literary and biographical world of Intizar Husain and brief history of modern Urdu Literary Culture.
10.
Mahmood Farooqui is married to film director and screenwriter Anusha Rizvi, who directed the 2010 Indian satirical comedy film Peepli Live which explores the topic of "farmer suicides".
11.
Mahmood Farooqui is a nephew of Urdu poet and literary critic Shamsur Rahman Faruqi.