Harvard May Get Minute Rice Bequest

The University may have a Syud Houssain Professor of Persian and Urdu in a few years, under the terms of a bequest of the late Ataullah K. Ozai-Durrani, the inventor of Minute Rice.

Ozai-Durrani, died May 9, at the age of 67, leaving more than half of his $1 million estate for the translation into English and continuing study of the works of two 19th century Persian poets, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib and Meer Taqui Meer.

The inventor said the bequest was intended as a memorial to his friend, Syud Hossain, India's first ambassador to Egypt, who died in Cairo in 1949.

The will indicates that the money should go to Harvard or some "such non-profit institution." The trustees of the bequest are therefore required to give the money to a non-profit institution, but not necessarily to Harvard, according to Milton, Sargoy, a partner in the New York law firm, Hays, Saint John, Abramson and Heilbron, Ozai-Durrani's attorneys.

Harvard has already contacted Hays, Saint John, and has sent a copy of the will. If the University does get the money, it will take at least a year to complete all the arrangements, according to Eugene G. Kraetzer '29, assistant secretary to the Corporation.

Sargoy indicated, however, that the trustees are not committed to giving the money to Harvard.

If Ozai-Durrani's wish is to be fulfilled, the trustees of his bequest will probably have to establish a professorhip at some university, according to Richard N. Frye, Aga Khan Professor of Iranian. Sargoy said that the trustees have "quite absolute discretion" and could do just that, if they deemed it the most satisfactory arrangement.

"It would take more than a lifetime," Frye said, "to properly translate and edit the works of these poets." He added that if such an undertaking is to have "any validity in an academic surrounding," it must "be related to the rest of Persian literature and to the lives and times of the two poets."

This is particularly so, since Ghalib and Meer lived in the court of the last of the Moguls, a dynasty that ruled Pakistan and northern. India between the 16th and 19th centuries; the two poets, therefore, represented "the end of a tradition."

Ghalib and Meer both wrote in Urdu, as well as in Persian, Frye said, so it would be necessary to find a scholar competent in both those languages, as well as in English. Harvard does not offer Urdu, and Frye said it would be "highly desirable," to have someone who could teach the language, which is spoken in Pakistan.

Frye feels that ideally the trustees should establish a chair of Persian and Urdu, or of Indo-Persian studies. There is no such professorship anywhere in the country, and a scholar might well have to be brought from Europe. "You would have to offer him something, to get anyone to come," he said. "You could not just hire someone for five years."