Mohammad Yasin passed away peacefully on August 19. He was a versatile artist calligrapher, print maker and pioneered the technique of Lithography in Department of Graphics, Jamia Millia Islamia.
Mohammad Yasin
“laa.ī hayāt aae qazā le chalī chale apnī ḳhushī na aae na apnī ḳhushī chale” (I came as life had brought me, as death takes me, I go. I came not of my own accord / nor of my own I go.) -Sheikh Ibrahim Zauq
This was one of the customary couplets that Yasinn Sahab loved to recite whenever I visited him. It seems that he was always ready for his heavenly abode and wanted to cheer his remaining life with enthusiasm.
Mohammad Yasin at the age of 92, passed away peacefully on August 19, 2020 at his residence in Shaheen Bagh, New Delhi. He was born on January 4th, 1928 at Mugalgidda village, Hyderabad (Andra Pradesh). Under the aegis of Aseem Asha Foundation, I understood him while making an hour-long documentary film on his work and life in association with Dagar Family i.e. Pictorial Calligrapher Qamar Dagar, Dhrupad Singer Ustad Wasifuddin Dagar etc. Later I consociated with him.
He was a versatile person, calligrapher, print maker and pioneered the technique of Lithography in Department of Graphics (Print Making), Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. It was great endeavor in meeting with veteran artist Mohd. Yasin for the first time. This was the first full length documentary on Art & Artist by me which I enjoyed making a lot. I learned many new things on each and every step that enriched me to understand the variety, depth and details of his work.
I took Yasin ji’s interviews in many schedules. Every time I found a new and very interesting story from him. He himself was a great storyteller. His stories are detailed and very informative, a learning experience for everyone. I learned a sense of perfection, purity, innocence, humanity, selflessness and foremost devotion for the arts from him.
His film was appreciated and screened at various places such as The Attic, Delhi, India International Center (IIC), Delhi, Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur etc.
He painted till his last breath. The integration of OM and Allah in his paintings were mesmerizing. Throughout his life, he conveyed the message of Peace and Harmony that are in line with the principles of Aseem Asha Foundation as well. He was a poetry enthusiast too, and used to recite Urdu couplets while sharing anecdotes with an amused face. In 2017 Aseem Asha Foundation was honored to confer a life time achievement award on him at IC’s hotel, Okhla.
He was also selected for several important scholarship and fellowship programs. During his scholarship at east-west center, Honolulu, Hawaii, he studied at the department of Art, University of Hawaii and at Pratts graphic Art center, New York.
Yasin had about 37 solo exhibitions including one in Paris in 1991, among others, one titled, “A decade in Retrospect 1974-84” was held at the Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi in 1984, another one titled, “Retrospective of Paintings, Drawings and Graphics” spanning 1958-2005 was held at Castelo Branco, Portugal in 2005.
The remarkable work of Yasinn Sahab has inspired many students of Aseem Asha Foundation to take apprenticeship in arts and now they are doing extraordinary work in this field. To commemorate his work, we renamed our project as “M Yasin Community Visual Art Project”. He is not with us physically but spiritually his soul will always remain with us and pour the blessing on every work that we do.
He would invite me in each birthday since 2013 and I was the only outside person in his birthday celebrations. He was loquacious with me when I used to visit with my students, he used to give them blessing as well and hold the conversations very affectionately. He always advised us to make the Art as a part of the life in order to become good person. Art connoisseur Laurence Bastit who deceased recently played a very significant role in promoting him as a painter at national and international level.
I still remember an incident when he got the news from All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society (AIFACS), New Delhi about his life time achievement awards and honorarium of rupees 1 lac with a commemoratory lunch. He called and invited me first, I hurried to his home, we were in euphoria, and selected the attire for his awarding ceremony such as Sherwaani, Topi, Jootis etc. His face was as bright as an innocent child. Unfortunately, due to lockdown it could not be conferred upon him in his presence.
I feel, people like Mohd. Yasin don’t require any award or honor, in fact he awarded his life to us, to the young generation. He himself faced lot of physical, financial and mental challenges throughout his life. He was also affected with Tuberculosis and Paresis but never compromised with the quality of his work, he was never bothered about any acknowledgement though his work should get a great recognition from the government. Later in his life he taught at Delhi College of Art and Faculty of Fine Art, Jamia Millia Islamia. His works are in permanent collections of galleries, Art Institutions, museums and in private & individual collection in India & abroad.
I cannot forget the cherished moments with him specifically attending his birthdays, art exhibitions, award ceremonies and personal meetings. His legacy will be a great source of inspiration for the contemporary world and to the generations coming ahead.
source: http://www.nationalheraldindia.com / National Herald / Home> Obituary / by Aseem Asha Usman / August 20th, 2020
Decades before the birth of the city of Calcutta, the area that is now Tollygunge was a dense forest land called Russapugla with an abundance of mangrove trees.
The clubhouse on the grounds of Tollygunge Club in Kolkata. The club is preparing for its New Year’s Eve party with stage equipment on its grounds. (Express photo: Neha Banka) ______________________
Most know Tollygunge as a neighbourhood in south Kolkata rather than the long stretch of road by the same name that cuts through a large swathe of the area.
Decades before the birth of the city of Calcutta, the area that is now Tollygunge was a dense forest land called Russapugla with an abundance of mangrove trees. Over the centuries, the land was cleared for settlement and urban planning but some traces of the forest can still be found in the expansive property belonging to Tollygunge Club and the Royal Calcutta Golf Club in the neighbourhood, some of the oldest social clubs in the city.
Tollygunge Club, established in 1895, derives its name from the neighbourhood of Tollygunge, that in turn got its name from William Tolly, a colonel in the British Army in 1767. Calcutta was a city of creeks, although many have been entirely or partially filled up. Today, few of those creeks remain, winding slowly across the city, trying to find their way into the Bay of Bengal, but one would have to search beneath cramped, illegal urban settlements and mounds of garbage to find them.
Tolly’s Nullah behind the grounds of Tollygunge Club in Kolkata. (Express photo: Neha Banka) ______________________
In the outer peripheries of the property that belongs to Tollygunge Club, a narrow creeks snakes past, as if conjoined to the boundaries of the club’s walls. On both banks of the creek, slums have developed over the years and garbage floats on the water, emanating a foul stench.
According to historian P Thankappan Nair, who has documented the city’s history extensively, this creek was originally called the Govindpur Creek. There is no historical documentation for why the creek was so named, but perhaps it acquired its name from that of the village of Govindapur, one of the three villages that went on to form the city of Calcutta. According to Nair, another name for this creek in Bengali was Adi Ganga or the original River Ganga that flows past the city.
This map is a conjecture map and shows the path of Adi Ganga. Tolly’s Canal is named ‘The Creek’ in this map and runs past Tollygunge when it was still the village of Govindapur. (Map credit: Chattopadhyay 1990/Jenia Mukherjee) ________________________
In 1775, Colonel Tolly wrote to Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of India, with a proposal of leading an excavation to connect the village of Balliaghat, now called the neighbourhood of Beliaghata, in the wetlands of the eastern fringes of the city, to the neighbourhood of Tollygunge through a waterway.
Slums have come up on both banks of Tolly’s Nullah. (Express photo: Neha Banka) ____________________
According to published letters in the Fort William-India House Correspondence Vol.7 (1773-1776), Tolly wrote to Hastings saying he can do the same on a contract with the East Indian Company or lend his services for Rs 80,000, along with a levy on tolls paid by boats passing through the creek for a period of 12 years. This plan was agreeable to the Company, and Tolly was directed to survey the land. This creek, 27 kilometres long, was then renamed Tolly’s Nullah after the colonel and opened for navigation in 1777.
After the opening of the Nullah, the neighbourhood became more developed and came to be known as Tollygunge. After Tolly’s death, his widow was unable to continue collecting the tolls and the maintenance of the waterways. The Company took over the management of the Nullah and auctioned its leasehold rights in March 1794 to an Englishman in the city, John Hooper Wilkinson. In 1804, the Bengal Government took control over the Nullah and the Collector of 24 Parganas was authorised to maintain it.
Passersby stand on a small bridge that connects the banks of Tolly’s Nullah. (Photo: Neha Banka) __________________________
There is no document to independently verify this fact, but according to the Tollygunge Club archives, the premises of the club was originally an indigo plantation home of Richard Johnson, a merchant in the East India Company, set up in 1781.
Around 1806, the British dispatched Tipu Sultan’s family to Calcutta and gave them a living allowance. Tipu Sultan’s son Ghulam Mohammed Shah purchased the plantation grounds from Johnson to be used as a residence and the family spent a considerable amount of time in the neighbourhood.
After the family’s fortunes changed, they sold some portions of the plantation and leased out other sections to William Dixon Cruickshank, a Scottish banker, who was looking to build a sports club for the British that would also allow residential facilities and provide space for the British to socialise.
After the fortunes of Tipu Sultan’s family changed, they sold some portions of the plantation and leased out other sections to William Dixon Cruickshank, who was looking to build a sports club for the British. (Express photo: Neha Banka) ___________________
Over time, Tipu Sultan’s family divested complete control of the estate and the lands came under the direct control of the Tollygunge Club, a name that the institution acquired because of the neighbourhood it was located in and because of the location of the creek that runs just behind its premises.
Over the decades, most of the open spaces in the club were converted into an 18-hole golf course and the forest land was cleared to make space for other structures and facilities inside the club premises.
Today, there are no signboards that indicate the location of the Tolly Nullah in the neighbourhood of Tollygunge. Haphazard modern construction has changed the facade of Tollygunge and to find the nullah, one would have to engage in a self-conducted walking tour using an old map of the city for guidance.
An offshoot of the main road in Tollygunge, a narrow lane, through which only one vehicle can pass at a time, is the only way to access the nullah these days. Slums occupy both banks of the waterway and an overwhelming sense of garbage permeates all around. Tollygunge Club itself has changed over the decades and its history can only be found in pockets.
Haphazard modern construction has changed the facade of Tollygunge and to find the nullah, one would have to engage in a self-conducted walking tour using an old map of the city for guidance. (Express photo: Neha Banka) ______________________
Although most of the dense forest has been cleared away over the years, jackals still roam its greens in the darkness of dusk and late into the night. On any given day, one can spot diverse species of birds on the club grounds, like kingfishers and cattle egret. Few city residents know of how the institution and its neighbourhood got its name and perhaps even fewer know of the existence of the waterway that lies beyond the high walls of the club.
source: http://www.indianexpress.com / The Indian Express / Home> Cities> Kolkata / by Neha Banka / Kolkata , December 27th, 2019
Following up on The New York Times article on the imposters who called themselves the descendants of Wajid Ali Shah, we trace the last prince of Awadh and the story of a family that settled in Kolkata after decades on the move.
Dr Kaukab Quder Meerza, a direct descendant of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, in his home in central Kolkata. (Express Photo: Shashi Ghosh) ________________________
Dr Kaukab Quder Meerza, 86, doesn’t keep well these days. Long conversations are challenging for him and his children and grandchildren have to help him walk short distances inside the house. His home, deep inside a bylane in the heart of Kolkata, an old, unassuming, one-storey building, is easy to miss if one isn’t paying attention. The modest interiors of his residence give no indication of who Meerza is or his family’s legacy. They are the last remaining descendants from the ruling line of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, the last ruler of the kingdom of Awadh in India.
In November, The New York Times article titled “The Jungle Prince of Delhi ‘,brought focus back on the descendants of the Nawab after the story revealed that a family living in the ruins of a 14th-century hunting lodge in New Delhi for decades, claiming to be the descendants of the Awadh rulers, were actually imposters.
An ‘absurd’ story
Meerza and his family in Kolkata are familiar with the story of Wilayat Mahal, as are most people who have been associated with the former princely state of Awadh in various capacities or have spent time researching on Nawab Wajid Ali Shah. Wilayat, the woman at the centre of the deception, along with her son Ali Raza, also known as Cyrus, and her daughter Sakina, entertained journalists, mostly those from overseas, with her claims of ancestry, and the journalists, in turn, dedicated hours of time and spools of newsprint in telling their dramatic story.
“It was absurd,” says Meerza, recalling his meeting with Wilayat Mahal in the 1970s-80s. When Wilayat made her first appearance at the New Delhi railway station, Meerza and his brothers Anjum Quder and Nayyer Quder agreed that it was necessary to meet her to learn more about the basis of her claims. The family decided that Meerza would travel to Delhi for that purpose, having studied the family history most extensively. He doesn’t remember his first meeting with her very well—some four decades have passed since—but the second visit is more vivid in his memory.
A photograph of a painting of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah found in the Imambara Sibtainabad. Unlike the commonly seen paintings of the Nawab, here he is fully covered and is not depicted with one exposed nipple (Photo credits: Sudipta Mitra) _________________________
Sometime after his first meeting with Wilayat, Meerza took another trip to Delhi and met her at the Maurya Hotel, now called ITC Maurya. “She said many things about herself,” recalls Meerza. “With great difficulty, she met me because the place (the room they met in) was reserved for VIPs. The lady talked about nothing in particular.” It isn’t immediately clear why it was a challenge to meet Wilayat because Meerza’s age and health have impacted his speech.
A few of Meerza’s children and grandchildren who still live in Kolkata are gathered around him and his younger daughter Manzilat Fatima, 52, and son Kamran Ali Meerza, 46, express surprise at the revelation. Although Wilayat’s story is familiar to the family, this is the first time they have heard about their father’s second meeting with her. As he begins his tale, his voice becomes louder, emphatically denouncing the stories Wilayat and her children had spun over the years.
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“It was a dark place and the meeting was absurd,” Meerza continues. Wilayat wore a sharara, he recalls, just like women did centuries ago in Lucknow, in the royal courts, not a sari, perhaps to add more credence to the character she had been attempting to play. “She wasn’t wearing jewellery. It was absurd. She spoke to us in Urdu and sometimes in English.” During their conversation, not once did Wilayat disagree that Meerza’s family members were descendants of Wajid Ali Shah. “We were interested in knowing the background of the lady. Of course, we told her about us. She never denied that we were from Wajid Ali Shah’s family, but she presented herself as a representative of the family. I told her that she was not a representative and that she was talking (about) absurd things.”
Meerza remembers that Wilayat showed some newspaper cuttings, not legal documents, to lend credibility to her claims. “Whenever I said anything about the branch of Birjis Quder’s family, she never (responded). I said that whatever she was talking about the background of the family was absurd. That she was not talking correctly about the family.” In this meeting, Meerza says, there was no sign of Wilayat’s daughter Sakina. “Only her son was there. A little older than Kamran now,” says Meerza, gesturing towards his son. “I’m sorry that I met her.”
Kamran Ali Meerza browses through letters written by his family to the Indian government over the years, denouncing Wilayat Mahal’s claims of ancestry. (Photo: Shashi Ghosh) _________________________
After The New York Times story was published, Manzilat told her father that the world now knew what the family had been trying to tell people about Wilayat Mahal for decades. “What is there to say about that?” asks Meerza about the story. To Meerza and his family, and to many others who met Wilayat over the years, the revelation came as no surprise.
The Nawab’s 300 wives
“There is a saying that if you throw a stone in Lucknow, it will fall on a Nawab’s kothi (house). All fake. Most of them are fake,” says Manzilat. Nawab Wajid Ali Shah was a documented hedonist, who found joy and solace in music, women and extravagance and had some 300 wives, many of whom he divorced when the period of his decline started, presumably in an attempt to lessen his financial burden and responsibility. It is difficult to state the exact number of his descendants, but the figure would be somewhat in proportion to the number of Wajid Ali Shah’s consorts, in addition to his official spouses and the children he had with them.
The British officials who deposed and drove Wajid Ali Shah out of Awadh and imprisoned him in Calcutta in 1857, recorded the names of 185 officially recognised wives of the Nawab and his children. This list was published in the Awadh Pension Book of 1897 after the death of Wajid Ali Shah’s son and successor, Birjis Quder, the last official ruler of Awadh.
A type-written replica of a letter written in 1896 by EW Collins, Collector of 24 Perganas and Superintendent of Political Pensions to Nawab Mahtab Ara Begum informing her of the political pensions granted to her and her children by the British government. (Photo: Shashi Ghosh) ___________________________
The descendants mentioned in the Awadh Pension Book of 1897 were allotted political pensions, first given by the British government in India, a responsibility that later transferred to the government of independent India in 1947. The central government made no alterations to the names of the descendants mentioned in the Awadh Pension Book of 1897 and has continued paying the required monthly pension ever since. The Awadh Pension Book, however, hasn’t prevented pretenders in Lucknow and elsewhere from sprouting, claiming ancestry to the family, because few bother to check official documents to verify such claims.
Meerza’s family are direct descendants of Birjis Quder, the son of Wajid Ali Shah and his wife Begum Hazrat Mahal, a courtesan who became the second official wife of the Nawab. But it would be doing Hazrat Mahal a disservice if she were to be dismissed as a mere court dancer whose fortunes changed when she captured the Nawab’s fascination and favour.
An undated hand-painted portrait of Birjis Quder. (Photo credit: Manzilat Fatima) ________________________
“She was a warrior and she was a purdah nasheen,” says Manzilat of her ancestor, who lived wearing a customary veil that she removed to launch into war with the British. When Wajid Ali Shah was dismissed and dispatched from Awadh, Begum Hazrat Mahal actively engaged in opposing the British during the Rebellion of 1857 on her own accord, without having been given any special political appointments by the deposed Nawab.
Her resistance against the British proved to be futile and she was compelled to flee Awadh. Taking her son Birjis Quder, she sought asylum in Nepal under the protection of King Jung Bahadur Kunwar Rana who demanded hefty financial compensation in return. The mother and son spent close to two decades in Nepal, but not much is known about their circumstances or where they found the finances to live in the country. Hazrat Mahal died away from her homeland, in a nameless grave in Kathmandu, forgotten till only recently.
The last Nawab of Awadh
Sometime in 1893, according to her father’s research, says Manzilat, Birjis Quder, now the ruler of Awadh in exile, was coaxed by the other wives and children of Wajid Ali Shah who had followed the Nawab to Calcutta, to join them in the city. “It was a conspiracy,” says Meerza, a statement he repeats several times during the interview with indianexpress.com. “It was a conspiracy among the other families of Wajid Ali Shah and the British because Birjis Quder was the last legal heir. The conspiracy was hatched and he was invited by deceit. They told him that he was the head of the family now and Birjis Quder was taken in by the sweet talk. So of all the places, he came to Calcutta. He could have also gone to Lucknow,” says Manzilat.
This rare photo depicts the main entrance of the family home of Birjis Quder and Mahtab Ara Begum in Metiabruz, Kolkata, now demolished. In the foreground, birds that appear to be storks are seen flocking near the entrance. (Photo credits: The private archives of Dr. Kaukab Quder Meerza and his family) ______________________
According to the story passed down in the family, Birjis Quder and his eldest sons Khurshid Quder and Jamal Ara were invited for dinner by the other families of Wajid Ali Shah on the night of August 14, 1893. All three died the next day, having been poisoned. When news reached of their murders, Birjis Quder’s wife, Mahtab Ara Begum, who was the granddaughter of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal Emperor of India, fled Metiabruz, the neighbourhood in Calcutta where they had been staying, while she was pregnant with Mehr Quder, along with her remaining daughter, Husn Ara and reached central Calcutta in search of a safe house.
“When news of the death arrived, she ran from Metiabruz, along with her precious potli of jewels. These things I don’t know (much about), but my father will know,” says Manzilat. The house where the family now live in is not only unique because of its residents, but the building itself is of little-known historical importance.
“Perhaps she didn’t buy this house that very night itself. But she put up in another place somewhere close by in some small room, while she was trying to find some protection. From that time onwards, we are here and it’s my father’s wish that as long as he is around, we cannot construct anything here,” says Manzilat, looking around the living room of their home. Mahtab Ara Begum’s son Mehr Quder had three sons and one daughter, including Manzilat’s father Kaukab Quder Meerza.
(From Left to Right) Prince Nayyar Quder, Prince Anjum Quder, Dr. Kaukab Quder Meerza pose for a photo with Meerza’s daughter Manzilat Fatima at Imambara Sibtainabad in Metiabruz, Kolkata, sometime during 1985-1986. (Photo credit: The private archives of Dr. Kaukab Quder Meerza and his family) ___________________
“The last pension holder is Dr. Kaukab Quder Meerza, the last living member of that generation,” says Sudipta Mitra, author of the book ‘Pearl by the River: Nawab Wajid Ali Shah’s Kingdom in Exile’, who has conducted research on the Nawab for more than a decade. The various provisions of this pension mean that Meerza is the last remaining recipient of this monthly pension that will not be transferred to Manzilat or her five siblings, Irfan Ali Meerza, Talat Fatima, Saltanat Fatima, Rafat Fatima and Kamran Ali Meerza. Prince Anjum Quder died in 1997, years after the death of his daughter Parveen. His two sons, Yusuf and Burhan live elsewhere in the country with their families and don’t spend much time in Kolkata these days. Prince Nayyer Quder never married. Unlike his brothers, Kaukab Quder Meerza never used the title of ‘Prince’ before his name, preferring to use the title of ‘Doctor’ to signify the Ph.D that he earned, explains Manzilat.
Mitra says this list and its provisions, left by the British, documenting the descendants of Wajid Ali Shah, not only provide a monthly pension to listed descendants, but it also serves to provide recognition to the descendants because it is the most authentic documentation available of the Awadh royal family tree. It also helps weed out pretenders like Wilayat Mahal and her children, who find no mention in either the Awadh Pension Book of 1897 or in other historical documentation and research on Awadh.
Asked about Wilayat Mahal, Mitra dismisses her entirely. “I did not find their names in the records and was hence not interested in them. They did it for publicity,” says Mitra.
Fake nawabs of Lucknow
The controversy surrounding claimants who say they are descendants of the Nawab or of the larger Awadh royal family is nothing new, but according to Mitra, there is very clear historical documentation that helps sift out fraudulent claims for those bothering to do the research. “When Wajid Ali Shah lived in Lucknow, there were many taluqdars who lived like kings themselves. So their descendants call themselves ‘royal’,” says Mitra of some such claimants. Mitra believes that although the Awadh Pension Book of 1897 is not the full and final record of all of the Nawab’s wives and children, it is the most authentic record available.
A photograph of a painting of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, depicting the Nawab with white hair. (Photo: Sudipta Mitra) ______________________
So why then did the Uttar Pradesh government or the Indian government not do anything to weed out the imposters? “The belief is that the imposters are harmless. They aren’t taking anything. They aren’t asking for anything,” says Manzilat. She points to some individuals who live in Lucknow and have made the make-believe their business where they attempt to cash in by claiming to recreate the Awadh of the Nawabs and Awadhi cuisine, purportedly representing food as it was cooked in royal kitchens, especially for foreign tourists. “It is difficult to deny Dr. Kaukab Quder Meerza’s ancestry,” says Mitra. “The government has recognised the family and that is why they get the pension.”
There is little doubt that Wilayat Mahal and her family were a nuisance for the Indian government. She was attracting crowds and journalists and was occupying the VIP room at the railway station, filled with her children, fripperies, dogs and carpets. During their second meeting at the Maurya Hotel in Delhi, Meerza remembers that there were talks going on between the Indian government and Wilayat that were perhaps not heading in the direction in which she would have liked. Although the government eventually gave Wilayat consent to live with her children and dogs in Malcha Mahal, the dilapidated 14th century hunting lodge in the middle of Delhi, Meerza says in no way should it be considered official recognition of her claims.
“She did not get any recognition from the government. Forcibly living in the (railway) station was not the right thing (to do),” says Meerza. Two years ago, after the death of Wilayat’s son Cyrus, when he was able to speak more clearly, Meerza told his family that the Indian government gave Malcha Mahal to Wilayat not to give recognition to them, but because they were creating nuisance in public. “In order to keep them quiet, the government gave them ruins and she accepted it. No royal would accept something like this,” says Manzilat. “She was also offered some flats in Lucknow but she refused to accept it.”
Battling historical inaccuracy
The family continues to battle misinformation about their ancestors, particularly Wajid Ali Shah, especially concerning the time the Nawab spent in Calcutta. Government apathy towards correcting historically inaccurate information frustrates the family, but they say there is little they can do. Nobody has conducted as much research on Nawab Wajid Ali Shah and his wife Begum Hazrat Mahal, the line from which the Kolkata family descend, as Dr Kaukab Quder Meerza, but few are listening.
A few years ago, says Manzilat, heritage walking tours in the city held in conjunction with the city government began claiming that the Bengal Nagpur Railway (BNR) House in Kolkata, a large mansion in the Garden Reach neighbourhood of the city, was where Wajid Ali Shah once stayed in during his time in the city. A plaque was also installed in the premises of the mansion stating that this fact had been verified by her father. Local newspapers and blogs began repeating those claims and the myth took a life of its own, including a mention on Wikipedia. “My father’s name has been used to claim that the BNR property was a place where Wajid Ali Shah stayed. But my father is the sole authority (on the family history), and there is no evidence that (the BNR building) was associated with Wajid Ali Shah,” says Manzilat.
After graduating from St. Xavier’s College in Kolkata with a Bachelors in Economics, Meerza went on to do a double Masters in Political Science and Urdu from Aligarh Muslim University. When he started a Ph.D at Aligarh, his advisor told him to consider conducting research on his own family’s history, on Wajid Ali Shah. The family believes the thesis written in Urdu is the most comprehensive documentation of Wajid Ali Shah and his wife Begum Hazrat Mahal, and Manzilat’s elder sister Talat Fatima, 62, is in the process of translating it to English.
Helping Satyajit Ray write ‘Shatranj Ke Khilari’
In October 1976, when Satyajit Ray began writing his screenplay for the film ‘Shatranj Ke Khilari’, set in the backdrop of Awadh during the First War of Independence of 1857, the filmmaker made a trip to the Imambara Sibtainabad in Calcutta to learn more about the subject. Wajid Ali Shah’s descendants in Kolkata are trustees of the Imambara and Anjum Qudr directed Ray to his younger brother Meerza, who was at that time teaching Urdu as a lecturer at Aligarh Muslim University and simultaneously researching on Nawabi Lucknow and specifically, Wajid Ali Shah.
Pictured here are the interiors of the Imambara Sibtainabad in Metiabruz, Kolkata. The descendants from the ruling line of Wajid Ali Shah are the trustees of this property. (Photo credits: Sudipta Mitra) _____________________
That was how Satyajit Ray came to engage with Meerza in a long-term correspondence through letters, to better understand the character of Wajid Ali Shah for his screenplay. Over the course of weeks, Ray and Meerza discussed less well-known aspects of the Nawab’s life and Nawabi Lucknow, and conducted in-person meetings where the director made trips to Aligarh where Meerza had been occupied with his teaching and research.
“In my screenplay, I show (Wajid Ali Shah) as a tragic figure who realises that he should not have sat on the throne but should have pursued an artistic career. Do you agree with this viewpoint?” asks Ray in one of his first few letters to Meerza. The purpose of the correspondence, Ray says in his letter, was to fill in gaps of information that the filmmaker had found in his own research on Wajid Ali Shah.
Meerza doesn’t bring up his correspondence with Ray during the interview. His son Kamran shares this information, remembering at least one visit that the filmmaker made to their Kolkata home when Kamran was still a young boy, and opens up a folder containing letters exchanged between his father and the filmmaker. ‘Shatranj Ke Khilari’ would have probably still been made even if Ray had never corresponded with Meerza, but would it have been the masterpiece that it is without Meerza’s contributions? It is difficult to speculate but perhaps for this very reason, Ray invested time and funds pursuing Meerza’s insight and knowledge of his ancestor, and travelled around the country while Meerza was dividing his time between Kolkata and Aligarh.
Two of Dr Kaukab Quder Meerza’s children (R-L) Kamran and Manzilat and Kamran’s children Mohammad Sulaiman Qudr Meerza (aged nine) and Zainab Fatema (aged 11), gather around to watch as Kamran’s wife, Nuzhat Zahra, helps her father-in-law translate the inscriptions written on the royal seals. (Photo: Shashi Ghosh) _____________________
Last remaining royal artefacts
The family doesn’t have many belongings of historical significance, in part due to the circumstances in which their ancestors fled for their lives. But two royal seals, carefully wrapped in a large square piece of red velvet fabric, are exceptions. One is a small rectangular metal seal with etchings of daggers and an inscription in Urdu that reads: ‘Nawab Hazrat Mahal Sahiba’. The etchings on Hazrat Mahal’s seal are unique because they feature daggers instead of floral motifs, signifying her role as a warrior queen who defended her kingdom against the foreign invasion of the British, explains Manzilat.
The second seal is slightly larger, featuring the royal coat of arms of Awadh, with elaborate etchings of floral motifs and an inscription in Arabic and Urdu. The calligraphy is elaborate and the family struggles to translate it; they’ve never done it before. Due to his age, Meerza finds it difficult to read the finely etched calligraphy of the seal. The family turns to Kamran’s wife Nuzhat Zahra, a 36-year-old lecturer in Urdu and a research scholar in the city, for help. Her Urdu language skills are better than those of her husband and his siblings.
Birjis Quder and Hazrat Mahal’s descendants in Kolkata only have two royal seals belonging to the last Nawab and his wife in their possession. The small rectangular metal seal (left) belonging to Begum Hazrat Mahal has etchings of daggers and an inscription in Urdu that reads: ‘Nawab Hazrat Mahal Sahiba’. The larger seal (right) features the royal coat of arms of the kingdom of Awadh, and belongs to Birjis Quder. Birjis Quder’s royal seal bears inscriptions in Arabic on the top, followed by his royal titles in Urdu below, saying, “NarsuminnAllah Fatun Qareeb” (Help from Allah and a near victory) and “Sikander Iqbal Shah, Khudullah Mulkohu Mirza Birjis Quder Ramzan Ali” (His Highness Keeper of Allah’s heaven-like nation. Mirza Birjis Quder Mohammad Ramzan Ali.) (Photo credit: Shashi Ghosh) ______________________
Not much is known about the circumstances that Birjis Quder found himself in, in a foreign land, far away from his home and inheritance, or even his thoughts at watching the British loot and strip his father of everything that he ever had. But perhaps the sentiments of the last Nawab of Awadh can be found in the elaborate calligraphy of the inscription denoting an Arabic phrase, followed by his royal titles, alqaab, on his seal:
“NarsuminnAllah Fatun Qareeb”; Help from Allah and a near victory.
“Sikander Iqbal Shah, Khudullah Mulkohu Mirza Birjis Quder Mohammad Ramzan Ali”; His Highness keeper of Allah’s heaven-like nation. Mirza Birjis Quder Mohammad Ramzan Ali.
source: http://www.indianexpress.com / Indian Express / Home> Research / by Neha Banka / Kolkata – January 04th, 2020
“Alas, this world was never a companion to anyone; look at the people, the graveyards they have finally landed in.”
These lines from the poetry of Sufi poet, Rajab Hamid, are immortalised in Kashmir’s memory through the famous song Afsoos Dunya, sung in the powerful voice of the famous Ghulam Hassan Sofi. The rendition was recorded under the label, Music Tape Industry (MTI), back in the 1990s when audio cassettes were in vogue.
A small music label, the MTI has produced several songs that have made a mark in Kashmir. Allah Ti Hoo Hoo and Vaadh Sariyo by Gulzar Ahmad Ganie, Madan Waras Bah Pyaras by Abdul Rashid Hafiz, were among the songs that became an instant hit in the Valley.
As folk and sufi music became accessible–Kashmiris no longer needed to wait for these songs to be played on the radio–the demand for these records increased and MTI’s reach spread to several households across the Valley, that was simultaneously in the throes of a deadly conflict.
By the 2000s, the MTI diversified to produce music videos, updating their music styles and changing their formats to cater to the public’s taste and demands. Decades later, its journey has forayed into the online media but MTI doesn’t fail to ring in nostalgia of a bygone Kashmir.
Immortalising Kashmiri music
Zahoor Ahmad Shah started the MTI in 1988, when he was 33-years-old, after a song by sufi singer Abdul Gaffar Kanihami, recorded on a small tape recorder, became a huge success. The MTI, gauging the public response, focussed on the Sufi genre.
Their collection included traditional music forms like chakri, folklore sung by a singer with a hoarse voice and supported by a chorus, and wanvun that is traditionally sung by women at festive occasions like marriages. Over the years, the MTI added more genres and forms.
Among MTI’s songs that were popular with the older generation of Kashmiris were an album based on the poetry of Habba Khatoon, the original soundtrack for a movie of the same name, sung by Jameela Khan and songs like Lala Zula Zaliyo sung by Manzoor Shah–now part of weddings, sung by women performing folk dance for the bride or the groom. The song was also appropriated in a 2018 Bollywood movie set in Kashmir, Laila Majnu.
Over the years, MTI roped in most of Kashmir’s famous artists of the time—such as Ghulam Hassan Sofi, Rashid Hafiz, Manzoor Shah, Wahid Jeelani, Deepali Wattal, among others. “We used to work with the artists of Kashmir as well as with Jammu and Pahadi artists. “We even went to border and hilly areas to find the artists,” said Mr. Shah.
The motive was commercial but to also preserve the traditional music and language of Kashmir though its music. “When people used to listen to songs in different languages, I wanted them to listen to the songs in their own language as well,” said Mr. Shah.
Being the first music label in Kashmir, MTI filled a void and gave the artists of Kashmir a platform to record their own songs and reach a larger audience, making their songs available on-demand for the public and reducing the artist’s dependence on radio.
The devotional music MTI recorded also made Mr. Shah feel closer to divinity. “I miss the vibe of being closer to God while recording the sufi music. The vibe was magical. Also, when we started shooting the videos, we used to live in mountains and woods for days,” said Mr. Zahoor Shah.
Their audience comprised all age groups. “I would buy cassettes and listen to it on a device which would play cassettes,” said Aabid Rah, who was ten-years-old when he started listening to the plethora of MTI songs. “I still love listening to Gulzar Ganie, Rashid Hafiz, Hassan Sofi etcetera on their YouTube channel.”
Gradual downfall
With the emergence of newer technologies, MTI switched to CDs in the late 2000s. However, the emergence of flash drives also meant the label’s gradual downfall. “When we started the label, the market was audio then we had to upgrade according to trend and market demand,” said Shah Umer, son of Mr. Shah, who handles the business now.
Piracy became a global concern and the MTI was no exception. Now, it has become easier for music lovers to access music without paying for it, resulting in losses for MTI. “Our business was doing well but with new formats, it faced a sudden fall and then we decided to change our business,” said Mr. Umer Shah.
The father-son duo still remember the older times and miss the vibe of their studio. “I remember singers coming to our studios for one to two weeks and doing rehearsals for recording the audio. I have really good memories of that studio,” he said, adding that he has seen his father recording music in the studio all his childhood.
Mr. Umer Shah was always fond of music and loved being in the MTI’s studio, then located in Srinagar’s Bemina area, as a child. He started working in the studio when he was sixteen-years-old. “I used to spend all the time in the studio and go there from my school. I wanted to handle MTI so I left studies after passing class 12,” he said.
Slowly, guitar and rabab came together and created a different sound and feel but MTI, said Mr. Zahoor Shah, made music according to the taste of Kashmiris. “We never added spices to it but kept it as real as we could,” he said. “Our business was successful as people loved our content.”
However, for some long time listeners, the MTI had also begun losing its essence. According to Mr. Rah, earlier content was meaningful and “the lyrics went down the drain and MTI started producing anything and everything around 2007-2010. There were no more cassettes and the mixing and mastering was eventually replaced by auto-tune”.
Keeping the name alive
The MTI has reduced its footprint in the market and its outlet is now used to sell electronics. It also lost most of its original recordings in the devastating floods of 2014, the few that were not washed away with the water remain stacked in a corner of the electronics store. “I started a YouTube channel last year to keep the name of MTI alive,” said Mr. Umer Shah.
Besides, the MTI has also tied up with prominent music label T-Series and MTI’s collection till 2010 is available on another YouTube channel, T-series Kashmiri Music, said Mr. Umer Shah.
Their YouTube channel, called MTI Studios, has more than fifteen thousand subscribers, and continues to give Kashmiri artists a label and a platform, featuring new artists like Waseem Shafi, Kaiser Hussain, Zuhaib Bhat, Sanam Basit, and the famous Reshma among others.
On 27 May 2020, amid the lockdown prompted by the coronavirus pandemic, the MTI released, a duet by popular wedding singers Ms. Reshma and Mr. Basit, who shot to popularity after his Kashmiri rendition of Champion, “dedicated to the people depressed due to Covid-19”.
The song is a mashup of Ms. Reshma’s popular wedding song, Hay Hay Wesiyee, and other popular Kashmiri songs. The video’s aesthetic cinematography focuses on Ms. Reshma grooving to the music.
It has been more than three decades and MTI is still trying to keep their name and Kashmiri music alive. “We used to get good responses back then and the responses are still the same but I miss the old times,” said Mr. Shah Umer.
source: http://www.thekashmirwalla.com / The Kashmir Walla / Home> Culture> Music / by Gafira Qadir / July 07th, 2020
Sikandar Begum with her prime minister, left, and second minister. The photo was published in “A Pilgrimage to Mecca” (1870). (The Asiatic Society of Bombay via AN)
One of the most interesting aspects of Sikandar Begum’s account is her open criticism of Ottoman governance in Makkah
Imprecise library records obscured access to the original Urdu manuscript for decades
Warsaw :
History recently came to life in a manuscript with royal stamps discovered in the archives of SOAS University of London. The historic find? A tantalizing insight into the journey of the first ruler from the Indian subcontinent to set out for Hajj.
In November 1863, the ruler of the princely state of Bhopal, Sikandar Begum, began the sacred pilgrimage many other sovereigns of her time could not make for fear of losing power — in the 19th century, sea travel from India to Makkah meant long months of absence from the throne. Unlike them, Sikandar was safe. Her Hajj included a mission to compile a travelogue for those who guaranteed her reign.
Bhopal had gained independence from the declining Mughal Empire under Dost Mohammad Khan, a Pashtun warrior who, in the early 18th century, founded the Muslim state in today’s Madhya Pradesh. Under British rule, for more than a century the country was led by four women. Sikandar, who ruled from 1844 to 1868, was the most reform-oriented of them. She reorganized the army, appointed a consultative assembly and invested in free education for girls. She was also the first Indian ruler to replace Persian with vernacular Urdu as the official language.
In late January, SOAS librarians came across a title recorded in their archives’ catalogue as “‘Journal of a trip to Mecca’ by Skandar Baigam, Ra’isah’ of Bhopal. Bound manuscript in Urdu. Written at the suggestion of Major-General Sir Henry Marion Durand, 1883.”
“I was really intrigued that such a beautifully bound-in-silk manuscript with obvious royal stamps in its colophon could be linked to such an opaque and short library record,” SOAS Special Collections curator Dominique Akhoun-Schwarb told Arab News.
“It quickly became obvious that there was a bit more story and depth behind the note ‘written at the suggestion of Major-General Sir Henry Durand,’ when the author was a queen herself, a pioneer, since she was the first Indian ruler to have performed the Hajj and authored an account of her pilgrimage.”
The imprecise note had for decades obscured access to the text for researchers. A deformed transliteration of Sikandar’s name had compounded the issue.
Until the chance discovery a few months ago, all scholarship on the Bhopal ruler’s pilgrimage had to rely on two translations of the text as the original Urdu version had been missing for some 150 years. One was the abridgment of Sikandar’s account in Persian, compiled by her daughter, Shah Jahan Begum. The other one, “A Pilgrimage to Mecca, was an English translation by Emma Laura Willoughby-Osborne, wife of a British political agent in Bhopal, which was published in 1870, two years after Sikandar’s death. The two texts are quite different.
In the English version, Sikandar quotes a letter she received from Durand, the British colonial administrator mentioned in the SOAS record, and his wife: “He was anxious to hear what my impressions of Arabia generally, and of Mecca, in particular, might be. I replied that when I returned to Bhopal from the pilgrimage, I would comply with their request, and the present narrative is the result of that promise.”
The letter is nowhere to be found in the Persian text.
A preliminary reading by Arab News of the Urdu manuscript, which has been digitized by SOAS, reveals that Durand’s letter is mentioned in the very first pages of the text. The correspondence and accuracy of other parts, however, are not immediately obvious.
In the preface to “A Pilgrimage to Mecca,” Osborne said that the Urdu manuscript consisted of “rough notes” demanding some arrangement. According to Dr. Piotr Bachtin, from the Department of Iranian Studies of the University of Warsaw, who studied female pilgrimage of the era and translated the Persian version of Sikandar’s account, the English translator’s note immediately raises questions regarding Osborne’s interference in the text.
Osborne’s assurance that the only license she had allowed herself had been the “occasional transposition of a paragraph” seems to be an understatement. It appears that the text was heavily edited. Bachtin suggested that Sikandar might have been a “reporter” entrusted with a specific task and became an “incidental informer” in the service of the British Empire.
The most interesting aspect of the travelogue, which the manuscript may verify, was Sikandar’s political involvement with and open criticism of Ottoman governance in Makkah. One of the most prominent instances of Sikandar’s criticism is the following:
“The Sultan of Turkey gives thirty lakhs of rupees a year for the expenses incurred in keeping up the holy places at Mecca and Medina. But there is neither cleanliness in the city, nor are there any good arrangements made within the precincts of the shrines,” Sikandar wrote, adding that had the money been given to her, she would have made arrangements for a state of order and cleanliness. “I, in a few days, would effect a complete reformation!”
Sikandar’s political commentary is completely missing from the Persian version of her text. “Only in the English translation did she openly criticize both the Pasha and the Sharif of Makkah, going as far as to say that she would have managed Makkah better herself!” Bachtin said, “However, we must remember that her book was commissioned by Sir Henry Marion Durand. For me, this paradoxical dynamic is particularly interesting.”
With the original manuscript now available to researchers, further study should soon reveal how much of the Hajj account was informed by the colonial circumstances Sikandar faced at home, and to what extent it was guided by her own ambitions to be a modern and reformist Muslim ruler.
source: http://www.arabnews.com /Arab News / Home> Latest News> Middle East / by Natalia Laskowska / August 02nd, 2020
Gulzar said Rahat Indori was in total rapport with the new generation and times.
Legendary poet Rahat Indori passed away on Tuesday. (Photo: Express Archive, Rahat Indori/Twitter)
Noted lyricist-poet Gulzar said the death of Urdu poet Rahat Indori, who passed away following a heart attack on Tuesday, is a loss which cannot be quantified.
Indori, 70, was admitted to a hospital on Tuesday morning in Indore after he tested positive for COVID-19.
“It is an unquantifiable loss. He was one of a kind. It’s as if somebody has left a void in our Urdu mushairas which can never be filled. Woh jagah ko khali kar ke chale gaye. It is not a big loss, it is a total loss,” he told PTI.
He remembered Indori as someone who would steal the thunder at mushairas (poetry symposium).
“Wo toh lutera tha mushairon ka. A happy-go-lucky man who was the ‘jaan’ (soul) of mushairas,” Gulzar said.
Gulzar said Indori was in total rapport with the new generation and times.
“He was very relevant. People of all ages used to wait for his turn at mushairas. One mostly comes across romantic shers in mushairas, but all his work that he read was about the sociopolitical and contemporary climate,” he added.
Asked when he last spoke to Indori, the 85-year-old legendary lyricist said it is difficult to recollect, but it seems as if they spoke just the other day.
Gulzar said his friend, filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra, who worked with Indori on Mission Kashmir, would often tell him about work, including his songs Bumbro and Dhuaan Dhuaan on the 2000 film.
“I would love it and talk to him (Indori). Jab bhi koi aacha sher sunn liya, phone kar liya, daad de di (Whenever I would hear a good sher by him, I’d call him up to congratulate him),” he remembered.
With a 50-year career in poetry, Indori was known for the lyrics of songs like Dekh Le from Chopra’s Munnabhai MBBS ”(2003), Chori Chori Jab Nazrein Mili from Kareeb (1998), and Koi Jaye to Le Aaye from Ghatak (1996 ), and Neend Churai Meri from Ishq (1997). His lyrics were used in 11 Bollywood films.
source: http://www.indianexpress.com / The Indian Express / Home> Entertainment> Bollywood / by PTI, Mumbai / August 12th, 2020
Khan Lateef Mohammed Khan, center, the editor-in-chief of the Munsif Daily, passed away Aug. 6 in Chicago. (Courtesy of Syed Ullah)
Lateef Mohammed Khan, who spent his life defending Urdu through journalism, books and lectures, died Aug. 6 at a local Chicago hospital. The 80-year-old worked in journalism for more than three decades, getting his start at the Munsif Daily, an Urdu language newspaper.
The Munsif Daily is an Urdu language newspaper published from Hyderabad in India. Its editor-in-chief was Khan Lateef Khan till yesterday. The Munsif Daily Is the largest circulated Urdu newspaper in South Asia. The paper was owned by Mahmood Ansari, when Masood Ansari fell seriously ill, the newspaper was sold to Khan Lateef Khan in 1996, who became editor-in-chief. He started the first Urdu satellite TV channel in India.
He was chairman of the Sultan ul Uloom Education Society. Khan was known for bringing in a revolutionary change in Urdu publications in the city by reintroducing the Munsif newspaper in color print 23 years ago.
Ali Khan, president and founder of Urdu Semaj Chicago, shared his condolences and said, “He was a legend in our community and a very genuine, gracious man in person and an acclaimed columnist. Sad to hear of his passing away today. This is a total loss for the whole community.”
Many renowned personalities including Dr. Qutub Uddin, Iftekhar Shareef, Azeem Quadeer, Saleem Abdul Rehman, Ishaan Ahmed, Kaleem Hasan, Omer Haqqani and many others paid tribute to his service.
Khan’s funeral services will be at the Muslim Community Center in Chicago after Friday prayers. He will be buried in Chicago.
source: http://www.dailyherald.com / Daily Herald / Home / by Syed Ullah / August 07th, 2020
Different strokes: Rafiullah Baig of the Handwriting Institute of India in Yediyur can pinpoint key personality traits based on handwriting. Photo: Karan Ananth |
With only a handwritten paragraph before him, Rafiullah Baig can tell you all about your key personality traits in just about ten minutes.
The words mean little to Baig, founder-president of the Handwriting Institute of India at Yediyur; he finds meaning in the pressure applied while writing, the size of alphabets, the slant, the variation and where a person starts and ends the stroke.
“It is an established science — a branch of psychology called graphology where the handwriting is analysed to gain insight into the subconscious,” said Baig.
Personality types
“The pressure of your writing is a direct indication of the intensity of your emotions. Writing of small size generally signifies a reserved and focused personality. Big writing is an indication of a vibrant personality. A leftward slant is a sign of an introvert. Straight letters indicate logical and analytical behaviour and a rightward slant indicates an emotional personality,” explained Baig.
Further, each letter is linked to a trait. “For example, crossing the ‘t’ at a lower level indicates low self esteem and a high ‘t’ bar indicates high self-esteem,” he said.
He then pulled out handwriting samples of Sir M. Visvesvaraya, Thomas Alva Edison, Mother Teresa and Albert Einstein to point out where they crossed their ‘t’s while writing — right on top.
“The letter ‘t’ alone could give you 22 different interpretations,” he added.
Like the body, alphabets can be divided into three categories: the upper, the middle and the lower. Letters ‘l’ and ‘t’ have upward strokes corresponding to the upper part of the body while ‘y’ and ‘p’ have lower strokes; ‘m’ and ‘o’ fall in the middle order.
It is after years of practice that Baig can judge a piece of writing and talk at length about the person who wrote it. Apart from a basic function of personality assessment, the science, he explained, could also be used in therapy, crime investigation, recruitment and health. “The kind of therapy differs with different age groups. We help children write clearly, legibly and fast. With adults, the focus is on personality development.” Psychiatrists, Baig explained, work closely with handwriting analysts to influence, change, and heal illnesses of the mind. “But what we cannot understand from the writing is sex, age, right or left handedness and it cannot treat a disease completely,” he added.
Prescriptions and personality
So why do doctors have such bad handwriting? Largely illegible and unreadable are doctors’ prescriptions but Baig said it was a misconception that they write illegibly.
“We were wondering the same and did research that involved close to 3,000 doctors. The writing on the prescription is unreadable because first, the names of drugs and their spellings are unknown and second, doctors would like to keep the name of a drug secret to prevent misuse,” he said. “Outside of their profession, doctors write very artistically.”
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Benglauru / by Archana Nathan / April 18th, 2012
Sadia Dehlvi, master storyteller who chronicled capital, dies at 62
Dehlvi was also a close friend of celebrated author Khushwant Singh, who dedicated his book Not a Nice Man to Know to her. (File)
Of all the roles that 62-year-old Sadia Dehlvi played in her life, the one she mastered was that of a storyteller. From her childhood memories, she dug out stories of “nihari Sundays” at home, the jinns that inhabited Shama Kothi where the Dehlvis lived, and the family’s contribution to society in the form of the iconic Urdu and Hindi magazines called Shama and Sushma.
On Wednesday night, Dehlvi — author, activist and food connoisseur — passed away after a long battle with cancer. She had been admitted to the hospital for a few days, and on August 1, her son Arman Ali Dehlvi posted a “cancer treatment fundraiser request” for his mother on social media. A close friend of Dehlvi’s said she passed away at home on Wednesday night.
Activist John Dayal, who also knew Dehlvi’s father, told The Indian Express , “I wished her on her birthday in June, she was fighting cancer so bravely. Her family contributed immensely to the syncretic culture of the city, and so did she. She popularised Mughal cuisine with her writing.”
City chronicler Rana Safvi recalled several meetings with Dehlvi at the Nizamuddin Dargah. Safvi said, “I love her writing, especially her book The Sufi Courtyard: Dargahs of Delhi. I used to often see her at the Dargah… With her gone, the dargahs will feel empty.”
Apart from The Sufi Courtyard, Dehlvi also wrote Sufism: The Heart of Islam in 2009, and Jasmine and Jinns: Memories and Recipes of My Delhi in 2017. She also scripted the hugely popular TV show, Amma and Family, starring Zohra Sehgal. Dehlvi founded Al Kauser, the restaurant in Chanakyapuri, with her mother in 1979.
In 2017, she had told The Indian Express, “Al Kauser was the first roadside kebab shop in New Delhi. It became quite the rage in the ’80s and ’90s. The kitchen was in our house.”
The Dehlvis, who were essentially traders, moved to Delhi in the early-17th Century and took the name “Dehlvi”, which means “the one from Dehli (Delhi),” said writer Sohail Hashmi. “The family started publishing Shama, one of the first Urdu magazines on Hindi cinema, which also served as a quasi-literary magazine. Then came Sushma, a magazine in Hindi. Actor Dilip Kumar was a patron of the magazines,” he said.
Dehlvi was also a close friend of celebrated author Khushwant Singh, who dedicated his book Not a Nice Man to Know to her.
Later, Dehlvi produced a television serial called Not A Nice Man to Know, in which Singh was the anchor.
source: http://www.indianexpress.com / The Indian Express / Home> Books and Literature / by Somya Lakhani / New Delhi / August 06th, 2020
For an ephemeral form such as live theatre, where the works of most masters, especially theatre directors, disappear in the mist with their passing, it’s heartening that Ebrahim Alkazi’s legacy has been preserved for a posterity he had emphatically staked a claim to more than a half-century ago.
The grand old man of Indian theatre has passed into eternal incandescence, joining the extended roster of eminent luminaries who have left us this year. The extraordinary Ebrahim Alkazi wore many hats – unparalleled theatre doyen, a driven connoisseur of the arts, cultural ambassador – and leaves behind a staggering legacy as one of the most distinctive architects of 20th-century Indian theatre. He was 94, and the high point of his career in the performing arts was arguably his 15-year tenure as the director of the National School of Drama (NSD), from 1962 to 1977. Such was his trailblazing contribution to theatre and its practice, that the Sangeet Natak Akademi accorded him their highest honour, the Akademi Ratna, for lifetime achievement in 1967. No person below the age of 50 is ordinarily considered for this: Alkazi was just 42 when he received it, and remains one of its youngest recipients.
Alkazi grew up in a household of nine children. His family migrated from sun-kissed Unaizah in Saudi Arabia to salubrious Pune, where he was born in 1925, coming of age during World War II. He juggled Arabic tutelage and lessons on the Quran at home with convent education in English and French at the historically significant St Vincent’s High School. “That [blend] had its limitations but it opened up a whole world for me, almost half of mankind,” he told television anchor Syed Mohd Irfan. It was a charmed childhood in which books were never out of reach. From staging one-act plays at school, Alkazi moved to mature productions like Salomé and Othello at St Xavier’s College, with the charismatic Oxford-returned Sultan ‘Bobby’ Padamsee’s Theatre Group. The latter’s untimely demise in 1946 saw Alkazi take over the reins of the group; he later married Padamsee’s sister, Roshen.
(Left): Alkazi as Oedipus in Oedipus Rex | Theater Group’s production, Bombay, 1954
In the 1950s, after a somewhat unsatisfactory stint as an acting student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, he returned to an India on the cusp of a first-wave cultural renaissance. “[RADA was] a rather closed institution, one which had not opened itself out to living theatre movements in other parts of the world,” he said in The Journal of South Asian Literature. That said, his own output as director with Theatre Group, and later Theatre Unit, was primarily productions of European and American plays in English. Working out of a bustling Mumbai terrace, his erstwhile collaborators included Gerson da Cunha, Satyadev Dubey, Usha Amin and Alaknanda Samarth.
One show particularly memorable was Alkazi’s 1959 production of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, based on a blue-blooded woman’s tryst with her intensely impassive valet, in which he starred opposite Samarth. In Shanta Gokhale’s The Scenes We Made, Samarth remembers the play as a series of heightened, distanced, restrained images: “the final exit, an excruciatingly slow, steady walk on high heels through a guillotine-like door on to a ramp horizontal to the lit cyclorama.” Alkazi’s signature tools and approaches were crystallised during this phase. “I acquired administrative skills, learnt to employ ancient Indian arts like Iyengar Yoga and Kathakali in the practice of theatre, communicated a sense of social responsibility to my troupers who learnt to value their group activity as professional, meaningful, relevant, transformative,” he told journalist Sunil Mehra, of this decade-long inning of innovation and consolidation.
(Right): Alkazi in Shanta Gokhale’s The Scenes We Made.
Alkazi was hand-picked by the government to lead the Akademi’s newly formed drama school in Delhi, but after declining several times, he finally took over as NSD’s director in 1962, succeeding Satu Sen, the pioneering lights technician from Bengal. “They gave me a carte blanche to take charge, laying out the red carpet,” he remembered. Under Alkazi, the foundation for the NSD’s multi-pronged pedagogical programme was set in stone. It presented a coalescing of a Western approach to drama with India’s ‘theatre of roots’. And, as a director with a constant supply of dedicated actors, students and alumni (some of whom joined the school’s professional repertory company) alike, he was able to add substantially to his own distinguished oeuvre.
Some of his best-known works were staged in historical monuments and attracted audiences from a wide cross-section of society, from ticket-paying middle-class audiences to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who was astounded by this rooted-yet-global brand of Indian theatre. His prized troika of productions include Mohan Rakesh’s Ashadh Ka Ek Din, Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq and Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug, one of his earliest NSD stagings in which he commandeered what was essentially a radio play to create a spectacle in the mould of classical Greek theatre, with the bolstered ruins of Feroze Shah Kotla providing a staging of multiple levels, and unmistakable political echoes. The play placed Alkazi firmly on the national stage, even if the plays didn’t really cross over. When asked by Irfan about why the works did not ‘reach the people’ they were ostensibly intended for, he replied dismissively: “That’s their fault. We toured a lot with it.” Even in its large open-air spaces, the notion of the NSD as an insulated echo chamber set root in the Alkazi era.
Alkazi directing Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug at the ruins of Feroze Shah Kotla.
Among the many illustrious graduates of the NSD who benefited directly from his tutelage, were actors like Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Pankaj Kapur, Rohini Hattangadi and Surekha Sikri; and directors like Sai Paranjpe, Prasanna, Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry and Om Shivpuri — all stalwarts of the theatre business spanning generations and sensibilities. In his memoir, And Then One Day, Shah writes, “In Alkazi I had at last found an inspiring teacher, one who liked and appreciated me and didn’t make me feel like a fool, one who was interested in helping me improve my mind, and pushed hard to make me realise the potential he perceived in me.”
In the initial years, Alkazi had his students dig up the backyard of the rented house in New Delhi’s Kailash Colony, that the school operated from, to create a performing stage. Later, he designed two new theatres at the NSD’s present location at the Bahawalpur House, the former residence of the Nawab of Bahawalpur in Delhi. A 200-seater studio theatre, and the open-air Meghdoot Theatre, under a banyan tree, both of which are now housed in a complex christened the E Alkazi Rangpeeth in 2017, to mark 50 years of their inception.
In 1977, Alkazi resigned from the directorship of the school that had become synonymous with his identity. In Anil Dharker’s Icons, da Cunha describes the ‘abdication’ as “a casualty of the bureaucracy and the lobbies he had successfully skirted for many years [also known as] the notorious Delhi Syndrome.” There was an emergent tribe of detractors who enumerated the chinks in his armour, from an unmistakable hubris to an autocratic administrative flair to the creative belligerence and brute stamina that he brought to the rehearsal room, albeit in the kind of controlled environment that his protégés and imitators were loathed to replicate. Shah places his mentor’s processes in the context in an interview, “Any theatre activity is not a democratic process. There has to be a leader, so the charge that Alkazi was autocratic is baseless. Rather than his so-called elitism and arrogance, his students have inherited his discipline, dedication and ability to work himself to the bone. NSD has never quite been the same, his successors unable to shrug off the ghost of Alkazi that hovers around all the time.”
In Mehra’s 1996 article, director Anuradha Kapur says, “Undeniably, he professionalised theatre. One’s differences may be ideological vis-a-vis his characters’ sexual politics, motivations. But then he was a creature of his time.” On his perceived non-combativeness during the Emergency, Alkazi said, “Cheap sloganeering is not the work of academic institutions,” calling attention instead to the political subtext of the plays he staged around then. In 1975, he had said, “I think there is a very close connection between politics and theatre, between social conditions and theatre. I think theatre needs to play an even more active part in shaping the way people live, in creating a progressive form of government which is meaningful to large numbers of people.”
Of course, the closing of a chapter marked the beginning of another innings that took up much of the maestro’s later decades. With Roshen, he founded the Art Heritage Gallery in Delhi the same year he bid adieu to theatre (although there would be an ill-fated comeback). The full extent of his journey was the subject of a travelling exhibition and book, The Theatre of E. Alkazi – A Modernist Approach To Indian Theatre, put together by his daughter, theatre director Amal Allana, and her husband, the stage designer Nissar Allana. As this writer had written about the showcase, “Panels emblazoned The Alkazi Times present the signposts of Alkazi’s life as news clippings, interspersed with actual microfiche footage — ascensions of kings and prime ministers, declarations of war and independence, and even snapshots from theatre history. It is certainly monumental in scale, full of information about Alkazi’s genealogy, childhood, education and illustrious career. While there is the slightest whiff of propaganda, it is whittled down by Allana’s skills as a self-effacing raconteur during the talks. Her accounts are peppered with heart-warming personal anecdotes that give us a measure of the real person behind the bronzed persona.”
For such an ephemeral form as live theatre, the works of most masters, especially theatre directors, disappear in the mist with their passing. It’s heartening that Alkazi’s legacy has been preserved for a posterity he had emphatically staked a claim to more than a half-century ago.
— All images via Facebook
source: http//www.firstpost.com / Firstpost / Home> Art & Culture> News / by Vikram Phukan / August 05th, 2020
