Shahryar- Makers of Indian Literature

Kunwar Akhlaq Mohammad Khan 'Shahryar' (1936-2012) is an important Urdu poet. He was Professor of Urdu at Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh and spent almost all his life in Aligarh. Known for his simple diction and a variety of themes, he also had a short but successful stint in Hindi films, writing lyrics for Gaman (1978), Umrao Jaan (1981), and Faasle (1985). He has six collections of poems to his credit and his first collection Ism-e Azam came out in 1965. His other collections Saatvan Dar (1969), Hijr ke Mausam (1978), Khwaab ka Dar Band Hai (1985), Neend ki Kirche (1995) and Shaam Hone Wali Hai (2004) further consolidated his position as a major voice in Urdu poetry. He was especially welcomed as a poet of "jadidiyat" (modernism). He was honoured with many prestigious awards which include Sahitya Akademi Award, Uttar Pradesh Urdu Akademi Award, Sahitya Manch Samman (Jalandhar), Adabi Sangam Samman (New York), Uttar Pradesh Film Critic Samman and Bahadur Shah Zafar Samman. Most importantly, he became the recipient of the 44th Jnanpith Award for 2008 for outstanding contribution to Indian literature (Urdu).

Mohammad Asim Siddiqui (b. 1963) is Professor of English at Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh. He is also the Managing Editor of the project of the Urdu translation of Complete Works of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (CWBA), a project of Dr. Ambedkar Foundation, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Government of India. He worked on American novelist Mark Twain for his doctoral thesis. He was a Fulbright Fellow at New York University in 2007. Siddiqui has coedited three books: Tradition and Modernity: Essays on Indian Writing in English (2003), The Holy and the Unholy: Critical Essays on Qaisra Shahraz's Fiction (2011), and Criticism and Counter Criticism (2013). He also writes regularly on arts, literature and culture in The Hindu, www.rediff.com and many journals, magazines, national dailies and news portals.

This monograph is an attempt to introduce an English reader to the poetry of Shahryar (1936-2012), one of the most important voices in a proper in modern Urdu poetry. The monograph includes a brief biographical sketch of the poet, which touches only on the important events in the poet's life, events which help place the man and his poetry perspective. The biographical part could have been much longer but the effort in the monograph all through has been to understand Shahryar's poetic genius which required a serious engagement with his poetry. Even in the biographical sketch it was considered fit to talk about some of Shahryar's poems which he wrote for some of the people he loved and cared about.

The chapters on his ghazals and nazms, the main body of this monograph, attempt to give an idea about the complexity and variety in Shahryar's poetry. Too often an assessment of a poet suffers from oversimplified views and selective readings. Thus Shahryar is usually talked about as a poet of dreams. It is true that the dream is a central metaphor in his poetry but there are many other strands and notes in his poetry which have hardly been discussed so far. Today the teaching and organization of literary studies has broadened and diversified to include subjects thought hithero non-literary. Thus, ecological and environmental criticism has unearthed literature's relationship with environment and climate change in a very illuminating manner. It is heartening to see Shahryar's environmental concerns in a number of his nazms, a point hardly stressed in Shahryar criticism. In the same way, his poetry also offers rich philosophical and sociological insights and reveals the poet's and not a social scientist's view of the world without compromising on the poetic dimension of his art.

**Contents and Sample Pages**