My grandfather Rashid Ashraf, who has died aged 90, was an Urdu scholar and broadcaster who wrote, produced, and presented thousands of radio programmes for the BBC Urdu Service from the mid-1960s onwards.
His voice became well known to many listeners across India and Pakistan, as well as on television in the UK, where he was the regular newsreader on Nai Zindagi Naya Jeevan (A New Life, 1968-92) and then Asian Magazine (1982-87), both broadcast on the BBC.
Those two groundbreaking programmes, with their mix of news, current affairs and cultural presentations from the subcontinent, were the first in the UK to be presented entirely in Hindi and Urdu, and created a sense of belonging for many Asian people in 80s Britain.
Rashid was born in Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh, British India, to politically active parents, Bushra (nee Khatoon) and her husband, Shurfudin Ashraf, a landowner. He experienced the violence and unrest of the years leading up to the 1947 partition of India, and at 14 stood in the midnight crowds in Delhi on the night that independence from Britain was formally declared.
His schooling did not begin until he had turned 10, but he was an avid reader throughout childhood and taught himself English. After studying at the Anglo Arabic higher secondary school in Delhi he migrated to Lahore, in Pakistan, at the age of 17 with some of his family members. There he completed a degree in journalism, followed by a master’s, at Punjab University, earning distinctions in both while suffering from tuberculosis.
In the decade from 1956 to 1965 Rashid took on various freelancing jobs as a translator, including with the Pakistan government. In 1966 he married Kishwar Wajdani and they moved to the UK so that he could work for the BBC World Service.
Rashid was a master orator, linguist and storyteller who had an unparalleled knowledge of the BBC’s Hindi and Urdu Service and was a mentor to the next generation of British Asian journalists and producers.
At his core he was a scholar of language, knowledgable in the linguistic histories of Urdu and Hindi, along with Farsi and Arabic. A passionate admirer and reciter of Urdu prose and poetry, he could analyse and educate others on the most intricate of verse. His published work included a collection of short stories, Dehleez Aur Dusri Kahani (translated as The Threshold and other stories) in 2019, a translation of Ben Okri’s novel The Famished Road (2020), and perhaps his most significant contribution to Urdu scholarship, Lughat, an Urdu-English phrase dictionary. He also completed an Urdu translation of Alaa Al Aswany’s novel The Yacoubian Building, which is as yet unpublished but which was a project that gave him immense joy.
Rashid was dignified, good-humoured and greatly respected.
He is survived by Kishwar, his daughters, Annie, Monuza and Bushra, his nieces, nephews and grandchildren.
