The Urdu Ghazal Podcast

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 t...

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 Akade...

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 choi...

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 contri...

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. S...

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 gr...

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 i...

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 c...

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 Ak...

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 soc...

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, a...

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 c...

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 h...

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. Hi...

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 thi...

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 no...

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 co...

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 ...

In this episode, I present a short story written by Yashpal, an eminent Hindi writer whose work has been compared with that of Munshi Prem Chand. Yashpal was born in Kangra Hills in 1903. He was an early follower of Gandhi Ji's non-violent approach, but after meeting Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev at the National College in Lahore, he became a full-fledged revolutionary, turning himself to be a fugitive in 1929 when he tried to blow up a train carrying Viceroy Lord Irwin. On release from prison, he...

It is a romantic story written by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, who is remembered as a novelist, story writer, film director, and distinguished journalist. Although I did not fully subscribe to the communist worldview, when I picked up a copy of BLITZ weekly magazine as a student, I immediately jumped to what was called the Last Page. This place was reserved for a column by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas. He was born in Panipat, a town in Haryana that we often associate with Maulana Hali. Abbas’s grandfather Khwaj...

Bhisham Sahni, the younger brother of famous Bollywood actor Balraj Sahni, was born in Rawalpindi in 1915. Throughout his life, Bhisham Sahni’s name was associated with progressive causes and movements. He is most remembered for his epic novel Tamas in which he soulfully narrated the 1947 riots he witnessed in the city of his birth. Sahni also wrote plays, and two of his creations, Kabira Khada Bazaar Mein and Madhvi, earned critical acclaim. About his literary contributions, Kamleshwar wrote...

Welcome to IndiStories Episode 22. Qurratulain Hyder, Aini Aapa to her friends, was an outstanding literary personality who wrote both in Urdu and English. Her novel Aag Ka Dariya (the River of Fire), her magnum opus, bears a comparison to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. In this episode, I present her Urdu short story Nazzara Darmiyaan Hai, which is one of the best Urdu short stories ever written. Aini Aapa won several literary awards, including Jnanpith Award in 1989....

When we look at the landscape of modern Hindi fiction, there are a few names like Munshi Prem Chand that take the top spot, but there are a few others who made lasting contributions to the art of storytelling. One such name that comes to my mind is Agyeya. He was born in Kasia, a small town in Uttar Pradesh, in 1911 in a Punjabi Brahmin family and he adopted an unusual pen name, Agyeya, meaning the unknowable. Agyeya wrote poetry, published novels and short stories, plays, travelogues, and se...

In this episode, I present FALLS, a short story by Geeetha Nair G. It is about a romance that happened many years ago. Still, a chance encounter brought back memories of what looked real at one time, but underneath, it was a show rather than a commitment. We calculate how our future will play out, but the arc of life is unpredictable. All our plans and schemes can unravel as time marches forward. The story is drawn from the Punch Magazine Anthology of New Writing by the Woman Writers and is p...

If you love good Urdu prose, we have a real gift for you. A. Hameed was a Pakistani novelist and story writer who wrote fiction with a poetic flair. Using metaphors, mainly drawn from the beauty of nature, he weaved a net of words that enveloped the reader in its fold. He was born in Amritsar in 1928 and wrote about 200 novels and nearly 100 books for children. He was awarded the Pride of Performance Award by the government in 1997. He passed away in 2011. The story ‘Aur Pull Tuut Gaya’ selec...

The story “Kashmir Valley’s Soofiya Bano” was written by Humra Quraishi. Set against the backdrop of the devastating floods in the valley in 2014, we learn from the story about the painful search of a mother for her missing son. The son was arrested and then he fell into the black hole of the security apparatus. The story starts with the description of the flooded Srinagar home of academic Agha Ashraf Ali, father of Agha Shahid Ali, the well-known poet, and his wife from Awadh, with a n...

The story titled "Pinjara" was written by Upendranath Ashk, a famous novelist, story writer, and playwright. He was born in Jalandhar, in 1910. He worked for All India Radio for many years and invented what came to be known as naturalistic Hindi theater. Upenderanath Ashk had complete mastery over Hindi and Urdu and his books were published in both these languages. In 1940 he moved to Allahabad where he spent the rest of his life. He passed away in 1996.

"Puure Chaand Ki Raat" is a story written by Krishan Chander, the eminent Urdu fiction writer, who weaved poetry into his prose writing. This love story is set in Kashmir and even if you have never visited this place you can smell the purified and fragrant air of the Valley in Krishan Chander’s writing. Love can take many forms, but if you have loved someone deeply your love for that person will never die. Krishan Chander’s description of nature is realistic as well as mysterious. He creates ...

We start the second season with a fascinating story titled "Static A.D." written by Ameta Bal. The story is drawn from the "Anthology of New Writing by Women Writers" produced by the Punch literary magazine and edited by Shireen Quadri. This anthology is a beautiful collection. Get a copy of this book, and you can spend hours reading these fascinating tales. "Static A.D." selected for this program is about what looks like the end of the world, or the world as we know it. There are ...

The Chessplayers as a piece of historical fiction is a class by itself. At the surface level, it is the story of two petty Nawabs who were obsessed with the game of chess, but at the deeper level, it is the story of the fall of Oudh, and even the fall of independent India. Once the British took hold of Oudh, very little could come in their way to grasp the remnants of the Mughal Empire in Delhi and the rest of India. For the city of Lucknow itself, it was the best of times and the worst of ti...

Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore is a writer who needs no introduction to the listeners. He not only rejuvenated Bengali literature, but there is not an Indian genre or subgenre of fiction, poetry, playwriting, philosophy, art, and education that he did not profoundly influence. He was born in Calcutta in 1861 in a distinguished family at the forefront of the Indian renaissance. While on a trip to England, he showed his translation of Gitanjali to poets William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound, who hel...

IndiStories presents a piece written by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and the most loved Indian political leader. Because of his education at Harrow School, Trinity College, Cambridge, and the one who was trained in law at the Inner Temple, he acquired deep thinking skills that he used to probe India’s history and culture. Who doesn’t remember his Tryst With Destiny speech that he delivered as the clock struck midnight to usher India into an era of freedom? Nehru call...

'The Death of Mahatma Gandhi’ is a story like no other because it is based on the eyewitness account of someone who saw it all. Nayantara Sahgal, the distinguished novelist, is a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family. Her mother Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister, was the 8th president of the UN General Assembly, besides being a governor and a member of parliament. Nayantara is Pandit Nehru’s niece and Indira Gandhi’s cousin. She has published about a dozen novels besides two ...

Famous Urdu novelist and short story writer Qurratulain Hyder once described Professor Gopi Chand Narang, who passed away on June 15, 2022, as a "renaissance man" of Urdu. Narang called his life a safr-e i'shq (the journey of love) for Urdu language and literature. The story of Ghazal included in this episode has been excerpted from the book The Urdu Ghazal: A Gift of India’s Composite Culture. We all love ghazals and that is why we read them and listen to them in the immortal voices of singe...

Satyajit Ray was a multidimensional genius who showed his talent in many fields and genres besides films. He was an author, lyricist, illustrator, calligrapher, and music composer. Ray was born in Calcutta in 1921. He was only three when his father passed away, and he was raised by his mother, Suprabha Ray. He was educated at the Presidency College, Calcutta, and Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan. His first job was at a book publishing company where he designed book covers. This work g...

Ismat Chughtai was born in Badaun in 1915 in a large family of six brothers and four sisters. Her elder brother, Mirza Azim Beg Chughtai, a novelist, became her mentor and encouraged her to become a writer. Because she wrote openly about female sexuality, she got into legal trouble with the publication of her s short story Lihaaf, which featured a begum having a lesbian relationship with her maid. She was charged with promoting obscenity, and the case went up to Lahore High Court before...

This week I present the work of an outstanding Punjabi poet and fiction writer Amrita Pritam. She was born in 1919 in a village in Gujranwala district, now in Pakistan. She moved to Lahore to work for the All-India Radio and married a businessman named Pritam Singh. This is how she acquired her last name. The country’s partition was a traumatic event for millions of people who were uprooted. Amrita Pritam felt the pain of everyone and penned her most famous work, a poem titled ajj aakhaan war...

This week I bring you the work of an outstanding Indian novelist and short story-writer Qurratulain Hyder or simply “Ainee Aapa” to many of her fans. To her literary admirers, she was the Grande Dame of Urdu literature. She was born in Aligarh in 1927 where her parents were established literary figures. Educated in Delhi and Lucknow, she moved to Pakistan in 1947 where she published her Magnum Opus Aag Ka Dariya or The River of Fire. This work is often compared with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s n...

This week I bring you the work of another leading storyteller from the Progressive Writers Movement: Krishan Chander, a familiar name to Urdu and Hindi readers. He was born in 1914 in Bharatpur in Rajasthan, where his father practiced medicine. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the F.C. College in Lahore, a reputable institution of higher learning before the partition. Krishan Chander was a prolific writer – he wrote 50 novels and 34 collections of short stories, and his prose was al...

Rajinder Singh Bedi, a leading short story writer in the Urdu's progressive writers' movement was born in 1915. He started to write at an early age and achieved fame as an author of path-breaking stories like Woolen Coat and Give Me Your Sorrows. After the partition, he spent the rest of his life in the film industry in Mumbai, or Bombay as it was called then. Starting with a low-budget movie called Bari Behan in 1949, Bedi succeeded as a script or a dialogue writer or a director of top-rated...

This episode brings a story written by Mulk Raj Anand, a path-breaking writer. Born in Punjab in 1905, he broke many barriers, earning a doctorate in philosophy from Cambridge University in 1929. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, which included many bright minds of the 20th century like E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and Virginia Woolf. He was also a close friend of T.S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, and Picasso, and a founder member of the Progressive Writers Association...

Munshi Premchand was a trailblazer storyteller who is remembered for his path-breaking contributions to both Urdu and Hindi languages. He was born in 1880 and was named Dhanpat Rai Srivastava. He started his writing career as an Urdu writer but later moved to Hindi at the advice of a friend. He is truly the father of Urdu afsana and Hindi kahani. In his creative journey, we find evidence of progress from a softer to a more mature persona, a sign of how he moved from describing familiar social...

Welcome to IndiStories, a new Podcast about creative short fiction. My name is Surinder Deol. In this Podcast, I’m going to present the work of highly gifted South Asian fiction writers. In this first episode, I present a classic of Indian literature titled “Toba Tek Singh” written by Saadat Hasan Manto. It is a story about India's partition. It captures the human tragedy involving the exchange of lunatics between India and Pakistan, and its ending shatters our hearts. Saadat Hasan Manto was ...