The Urdu Ghazal Podcast

Send us Fan Mail 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 ev...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 o...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 t...

Send us Fan Mail 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 Hind...

Send us Fan Mail 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 so...

Send us Fan Mail 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 twentie...

Send us Fan Mail 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,...

Send us Fan Mail 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’...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 Kaleem in 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 lyric...

Send us Fan Mail 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 it...

Send us Fan Mail 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, includin...

Send us Fan Mail 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 197...

Send us Fan Mail 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 sai...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 hi...

Send us Fan Mail 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 Abb...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 on...

Send us Fan Mail 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, A...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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...