April, 2003, was the cruellest month for the people of Iraq, a month of reflection on Pakistan by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and a rare opportunity for Worldview India, a dedicated group of Indian journalists who helped lift the mist from the historic events that month. If the Gandhi trio stirred themselves into action as a serious opposition, is there a possibility that they would end up in jail? If they were spared despite this affront, it would imply that the Modi outfit has come to the conclusion that the Gandhis are now totally harmless. It reflects on the civilisational power of Lord Rama in this ancient land that Independent India’s five prime ministers involved themselves in the affairs of his birthplace at Ayodhya: Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi, P.V. Narasimha Rao, Narendra Modi and, tangentially, V.P. Singh in between.
Students of history are often warned of the pitfalls of ‘big person’ history, or the tendency to see history simply as a series of biographies of extraordinary individuals, ignoring larger socioeconomic forces.
Faced with the loss of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, however, and tasked with remembering his work, I am forced to throw all caution to the wind and look up in awe to this single individual. The amount, range and depth of all his work is hard to describe in a few lines.
Perhaps his single most important achievement was saving the classical Urdu ghazal, and embracing and elaborating its native poetics once and for all. Although Faruqi worked towards this across multiple works, the single most forceful and consolidated expression of this is his magnum opus, Sher-i-Shor Angez [The Tumult-Raising Verse], a four-volume work on the classical Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir (1725-1810).
Abdul Hayee 'Sahir' Ludhianvi was arguably the greatest poet-lyricist in the history of Hindi film. Despite his stupendous success as a lyricist of the highest order, Sahir abhorred this tag (lyricist). Instead, he always preferred to be called a poet.
Mainstream
Mainstream, VOL LIX No 4, New Delhi, January 9, 2021
Aligarh and Women’s education: a brief overview | Ishrat Mushtaq and Sajad Hassan Khan
Saturday 9 January 2021
by Ishrat Mushtaq and Sajad Hassan Khan
Women’s education in nineteenth-century India was no easy task. In the case of Muslim women, the task was even more difficult due to their triply marginal identity: as colonial subjects, as women, and as Muslims. Not only did the custom of
purdah added to their seclusion from the social and cultural changes, their men hated everything about the western cultural influence (being displaced as rulers by the British). As a result, the middle class (the initiators of reform) was to develop late among the Indian Muslims than their Hindu counterparts. Nevertheless, by the late nineteenth century, a middle-class among the Indian Muslims was fledging. For this, no institution of the nineteenth-century can be given more commendation than Aligarh Muslim University.
Speakers, both in person and via web links, in discussion at the 13th International Urdu Conference at the Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi | Fahim Siddiqi/White Star
One could sense a note of dejection in the voice of Ahmed Shah, president of the Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi, when, at the press conference to talk about the programme for the 13th International Urdu Conference, he told the media that this time round the event would be organised largely online because of the Covid-19 situation in the country. It was understandable.
The conference in the last 12 years had attracted large crowds for multiple reasons and not necessarily for the love of the Urdu language especially on its opening and closing days. To be honest, when Indian scholar Professor Shamim Hanfi and Pakistani poet Yasmeen Hameed (whom one had seen in the flesh at some of the earlier editions of the very conference) delivered their keynote addresses on the inaugural day via video link from Delhi and Laho