Gulzar was born in Dina (District Jhelum, now in Pakistan) in 1934. After partition, the family split and moved to Delhi and Mumbai. Partition and the horrors of partition significantly influenced young Gulzar, and later in his life, he published short stories and a novel about this apocalyptic event. As a student, he was impressed by the poetry of Tagore and Ghalib. After a short stay in Delhi, he moved to Mumbai and worked in a motor garage owned by the family, working on paints and colors....

Javed Akhtar was born in Gwalior. There is hardly any other Urdu poet connected to such eminent and epoch-making personalities on either side of his birth—maternal and paternal—where the legacy of poetry and knowledge is continuous and uninterrupted. Who wouldn’t know Allama Fazle Haq Khairabadi? He was a talented man and a great scholar of his time. Ghalib appreciated him and was fond of him. He said he assisted in the selection of ghazals for Ghalib’s Divan. Fazle Haq signed the fatwa for...

Poet Shahryar was born in 1936 in a small town near Bareilly, and early in his life, he came under the influence of Khaleelur Rehman Azmi, a prominent Urdu critic and poet. He joined the Aligarh Muslim University, where he earned his doctoral degree. Shahryar started his career at the Anjuman Taraqqqi-e Urdu,  where Professor Ale Ahmad Suroor was the President. Later, he moved to the Department of Urdu at AMU and taught there until his retirement in 1996. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi...

Jayant Parmar, born in Ahmedabad in 1954, overcame socio-economic barriers to get a good education and succeed as a poet. He also gained fame as an accomplished painter. His work has won recognition both at the national and state levels. He won the coveted Sahitya Akademi Award in 2008 and three state Sahitya Akademi awards between 2001 and 2008. Six collections of his poems and ghazals have been published. His poetry is known for its natural sensibility and the creative use of metaphors. His...

Dr. Bashir Badr was born in Ayodhya in 1935. He received his college education at Aligarh Muslim University, where he earned his graduate and doctoral degrees. He spent most of his life as a college professor, first in Aligarh and then in Meerut. He now lives in Bhopal. He was awarded Padma Shri in 1999, and the same year, he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for one of his poetry collections. Widely published, Bashir Badr is a poet of ghazal, rich in romantic allusions and an appealing...

Nida Fazli (1938-2016) was born in Delhi into a family of Kashmiri descent, but he grew up in Gwalior. During the partition, his parents migrated to Pakistan, but he decided to stay in India. Early in his life, he was influenced by the poetry of saints and bhaktas like Kabir, Surdas, and Mirabai, and this was his inspiration for writing poetry in Hindi, Gujarati, and Urdu. Later in life, he studied Urdu poetry, especially the works of Mir and Ghalib. He moved to Mumbai in 1964, and with time,...

Parveen Shakir (1952-1994) attained fame early when her first poetry collection was published in 1976. The literary career that followed consisted of several acclaimed poetry collections and honors. She was highly educated, earning her degrees from Karachi and Harvard Universities. She was selected for the Pakistan Civil Service, and her untimely death in a car accident shocked everyone. With her death, the Urdu language lost one of its most promising young writers who had much more to...

Jaun Elia (1931-2002) was born in Amroha, a town in Uttar Pradesh. He migrated to Pakistan in 1957 with some reluctance, but the agony of migration that forced separation from his roots never left him. Coming from a highly literate family, Jaun gained a good grounding in Eastern and Western philosophy and Islamic and Sufi belief systems at an early age. Although he was born into a Muslim family and had studied at the Deoband School of Islamic Jurisprudence, he kept religion out of his life....

Nasir Kazmi (1925-1972) was born in the Indian town of Ambala in Punjab and moved to Lahore after partition. He was associated with Radio Pakistan for several years. His poetry is known for its mellow and soft lyricism and is rich in novel similes and metaphors. It is rooted in the prakritic tradition of Mir Taqi Mir and reflects sad tones reflecting the uprootedness and tragedy of partition. He wrote perceptively on Mir and also published a selection of his verse. At the same time, he was...

Ahmad Faraz (1931-2008) was a close friend of both Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Ali Sardar Jafri, and he followed in their footsteps to be an icon of modern progressive poetry. Because he opposed the military rule of Zia-ul Haq, he was arrested, lost his job, and on his release, he went into a self-imposed exile, spending many years in foreign lands. He started as a romantic poet, and when Mehdi Hasan sang one of his ghazals, ranjish hi sahi, his popularity touched new heights. Following Faiz, there...

Majrooh Sultanpuri (1919-2000) was called Mir Taqi Mir of Urdu poetry, as someone who had fully internalized the legacy of ghazal writing. The humanistic aspects of Marxism are very much present in his poetry. He was a poet of the people, which is what he wanted to be. He had one slim volume of poetry that he expanded every few years. Since some of the keywords were common among the progressives, some readers felt that some of Majrooh’s couplets sounded like Faiz wrote them. His significant...

Kaifi Azmi (1919-2002) was born in a conservative Muslim family near Azamgarh in UP, but he adopted socialism as his creed. He was an active participant in the Communist Party of India. He published his first collection of poems called Jhankaar in 1943. Sajjad Zahir welcomed Kaifi as a valuable addition to the front-ranking poets in the assembly of Urdu poetry. His entry into Hindi films and his energetic presentations in mushairas brought him great fame. Kaifi stood firmly for three things....

Jan Nisar Akhtar (1914 – 1976), father of poet Javed Akhtar, was a part of the Progressive Writers Movement and a famous lyricist for several Bollywood movies. He was the son of poet Muztar Khairabadi and great-grandson of freedom fighter Fazle-Haq Khairabadi.  From his early days, he was sympathetic to progressive thinking. Although he wrote both ghazals and poems, we find the soul of his poetry in his ghazals. His poetry collection Khaake Dil (Ashes of the Heart) got him the Sahitya Akademi...

Jigar Moradabadi (1890-1960) was born in Benaras. Because he lost his father at an early age, he struggled to get a start in life and gain proficiency in Urdu and Persian. Due to his friendship with Asghar Gondvi, he settled in Gonda, a town near Lucknow. Jigar kept alive the classical, rhythmic traditional style of ghazal writing, and his name often occurs near the top of twentieth-century Urdu poets. His ghazals have a rare psychological touch and a sweeping lyrical flow. While making a...

Asrarul Haq Majaz (1911-1955) of Lucknow lived a relatively short life of 44 years, but within this short time, he made a significant impact with his alluring poems and captivating ghazals. Although he was not an excellent academic student, he influenced many people during his stay at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). He wrote his best work while at Aligarh. He composed the Tarana, anthem for AMU that is passionately sung today. His first poetry collection Aahang was heralded by Sajad Zahir,...

Among the modern progressives and those who were also associated with the film industry, Sahir Ludhianvi (1921-1980) occupies a very special place. It has to do with his celebrity status as much as his romantic poetry that appealed to a new generation of young people in post-independent India. Sahir was also a powerful voice against social injustice, exploitation, denial of women’s rights, and income inequalities. His collection of poetry Talkhiyaan was published in 1944, and several of the...

Hasrat Mohani (1875-1951) revived the Urdu ghazal after the onslaught of the Nayi Shaa’yari (New Poetry). He infused it with socio-political zeal while retaining its lyricism and charm. He learned from past masters like Mir and Ghalib about how feminine beauty is captured in verse. There is a visible influence of Mus-hafi, but his more important contribution lies in the fact that he domesticated beauty – he talked about meetings under the shadow of stars, coming up to the upper level of the...

In this episode, I present the ghazal poetry of Josh Malihabadi. He got his education at St. Peter’s College in Agra and a brief stint at Tagore’s University at Shanti Niketan. He founded the progressive magazine Kaleemin Delhi, and after the independence, he was appointed editor of Aajkal, a government of India literary publication, where he worked for eight years. His decision to migrate to Pakistan in 1956 shocked many people, including Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Prime Minister Jawaharlal...

Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984) is a milestone in the ghazal tradition as the climax of liberal Urdu poetry. He was a significant departure from Iqbal and the elasticity of the ghazal structure that allowed a new creative poetic transformation. His verse's captivating musicality is unsurpassed in contemporary Urdu poetry. Faiz’s poetry, soaked in the kernel of tagazzul, the lyrical love sensibility of the ghazal, played the most significant role in enriching the Urdu ghazal’s poetic tradition....

The Urdu Ghazal Podcast presents the ghazal poetry of a leading poet in each episode.  In this first episode, we present the magnificent poetry of Firaq Gorakhpuri who brought the taste of Sanskrit and Hindi poetic rasa into his compositions. He not only excelled in ghazal, but the rubai collections authored by him are also memorable for the exposition of feminine beauty in all its forms-- a young girl, a married woman, and an iconic universal mother.  Relax and enjoy listening to this...

Intizar Husain was born in a small town in the district of Bulandshahr, UP, and his family migrated to Pakistan in 1947. But it seems that he left his heart behind because not only pre-partition India but the dominant themes in the Indian culture, including folk tales and ancient epics, stayed in his consciousness. He repeatedly used these themes in his stories and novels. His 1979 novel Basti, translated into English by Francis Pritchett, was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize....

In this Season finale, I present a short story by Intizar Husain, the eminent short story writer, and novelist of the Indian subcontinent. He was born in a small town in the district of Bulandshahr, UP, and his family migrated to Pakistan in 1947. But it seems that he left his heart behind because not only pre-partition India but the dominant themes in the Indian culture, including folk tales and ancient epics, stayed in his consciousness. He repeatedly used these themes in his stories and...

This is a short story by Fahmida Riaz, a poet, distinguished author, and tireless fighter for women’s rights. She was born in Meerut in 1946, and after the partition, her family settled in Hyderabad, Sindh. During the dictatorial regime of Zia Ul Haq, she was charged with several crimes, and she sought refuge in India and spent seven years in exile. On Women’s Rights, she once said, and I quote, “Feminism has so many interpretations. What it means for me is simply that women, like men, are...

Saadat Hasan Manto’s name should be familiar to listeners of this Podcast because his short story Toba Tek Singh was the first story to be featured in this Podcast. Manto gained great fame as a playwright and a short story writer in pre-partition India, but his greatest achievement was how he captured the brutality unleashed by India’s partition and how women suffered the most in this carnage. Khol Do or Open! is truly a very short story consisting of 3 ½ print pages but it encapsulates more...