Latest revision as of 11:17, 6 October 2020

[edit] A brief biography

Manimugdha Sharma, June 13, 2020: The Times of India

“Dehli ki tehzeeb ki aakhri shamma bujh gayi (The final torch-bearer of Delhi’s culture is gone),” said a commentator on social media.

Deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia said that the late poet and freedom fighter “personified Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb”. “Like his name, his personality, style and charm were unique. Even at the age of 93, he participated with zeal and enthusiasm in every mushaira of the Urdu Academy. They don’t make people like him anymore,” Sisodia told TOI. The minister’s sentiment was echoed by Sanjiv Saraf, the founder of Rekhta Foundation. “He was an authentic paragon of Delhi’s composite culture and language. He was passionate and intensely committed to Urdu, and spent his life in nurturing the language. The passing of the last iconic figure marks the end of an era in Urdu poetry,” Saraf told TOI from the US.

His colleague at Rekhta and Jamia Millia Islamia professor Abdur Rasheed quoted Dehlvi’s own lines to express his loss: “ Ae maseeha-dam tere hote huwe kya ho gaya, baithe bithlaye mareez-i ishq thanda ho gaya (O Messiah, what has happened that on your watch the lovesick is no more).” Born and brought up at Galli Kashmiriyan in the Walled City — a locality traditionally populated by Kashmiri Pandits — Dehlvi got involved with the Freedom Struggle at a young age. That spirit of revolution inspired his poetry and work. In 1975, he became the editor of ‘Science Ki Dunya’, CSIR’s first Urdu science magazine.

That’s where historian S Irfan Habib came in contact with him. “He was a delightful and eclectic personality, the life of canteen conversations and mehfils,” Habib recalled. “He spoke chaste Urdu but was equally at ease with street expletives. This made people approach him warily, never knowing when the expletives would flow out. He was the quintessential Dilliwala and many of us revered him for that.” Habib added, “He was also immersed in Sufism and had a very close association with the Nizamuddin dargah. He spoke of Nizamuddin Auliya and Amir Khusro as a disciple would speak of his master. ‘Meri kaffiri ko qubool kiya Hazrat ne (Nizamuddin has accepted me though I am a non-Muslim),’ he would say to us.”