It is commonly understood that lack of patronage, among other reasons, led to the decline of Sanskrit in India in the second millennia. The great Tulsidas reportedly said, "Sanskrit hai koop jal aur Bhasha Bahta Neer", i.e Sanskrit is a stagnant water whereas Bhasha or the vernacular is a flowing river. However, as we know, Tulsidas was not untouched by Sanskrit, but rather so deeply informed by it that he re-fashioned Sanskrit poetics and themes in a new style.
Read >>A master of Urdu satire and humour, he was ever-ready with a delightful turn of phrase and kept us enthralled for more than half a century with his unparalleled wit. Explaining how he survived the dark decade of General Zia Ul Haq’s dictatorship, Mushtaq Ahmed Yusufi, who passed away last month, quoted the great French writer Joseph Emmanuel Sieyes. Abbé Sieyes, the Catholic priest, was once asked what was his significant contribution to the French revolution and he said, “J’ai Vecu” (I survived).
Read >>Dastangoi, the lost form of Urdu storytelling, completes 10 years of its revival this year. This revival has been made possible by two factors. The first, of course, is the greatest living Urdu writer and critic Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, who gifted us this form in the present times. The other is the deep and abiding love that our people have for the Urdu language. When our finance minister opens his budget speech with an Urdu sher in Parliament, we can safely say that the future of Urdu is still secure in this country.
Read >>He had little time for the polished spic-and-span, a design-heavy theatre that was being produced in the capitals of the country. Long before Jerzy Grotowski or Peter Brook came along there was Brecht, emphasizing the primacy of the actor on the stage and Habib Tanvir’s theatre was all about his actors. They were-are, rather- amazing actors. Completely at home at Raipur or Delhi or Edinburgh. They are intensely physical and mobile on stage, athletic, even acrobatic, and tremendous singers withal. Their comic timing is not easily surpassed by any group of actors in India, yet they can transform into great tragedians within minutes.
Read >>In August 2002, I had my first encounter with the Dastan-e Amir Hamza. Although I had been an avid reader of Urdu fiction and had even formally studied it for my M Phil dissertation I had never actually read a Dastan nor had I paid any heed to the genre. In that year S. R. Faruqi, the leading scholar of the form, asked me to help out somebody who was interested in making a film on the form. While the film never got made, I read the first volume of his marvelous study of the Dastan-e Amir Hamza. But it was not until 2004 that I actually attempted to engage seriously with it. I became a Sarai fellow that year with the intention of collecting material for a documentary on the tradition. It was only then that I actually approached the texts and when I did so, I found it an exhilarating experience, both as an Urdu lover as well as a theatre actor. The lines were literally crying out to be read aloud.
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