Aligarh : 

A group of mostly librarians went from Aligarh Muslim University to Mijwan village in Azamgarh district recently to take possession of the 5,000 books from Urdu poet Kaifi Azmi’s collection that were being donated to the university by actor Shabana Azmi, the poet’s daughter.

What the group was stumped by was the mint condition of the books. There was little work to be done, the group said, as the books were all neatly covered and stocked in an almairah. The spines of the books were sturdy, the authors and titles all neatly marked.

Kaifi Azmi was born to a landed family in Mijwan village in January 1919. By the time he died in 2002, he was renowned as a poet, communist and member of the Progressive Writers’ Movement. Donating a collection of 5,000 books from her father’s library to the university, his daughterShabana Azmi said, “People who had come to collect the books were surprised at the upkeep of his personal library. They were astounded that someone hailing from such a small place like Mijwan could have such a vast and neatly maintained collection of books.”

Maulana Azad Library at AMU has received donations from at least 50 people so far. “Kaifi sahab’s personal library was so unique, it is hard to find a personal library so well maintained,” Amjad Ali of the Maulana Azad Library.

On Wednesday, the university released a catalogue of the books acquired from the Kaifi Azmicollection. The university also held a symposium titled, ‘Life in Creative Pursuits’ organized in collaboration with the Sahitya Academy.

In the collection were books of Urdu poetry and literature, books in Persian, Urdu periodicals, accounts of history and books authored at the peak of the Progressive Writers’ Movement that could prove to have significant research value. Among the Urdu periodicals are issues of Khuda Bakhsh, Naqoosh, Nigar and Shair.

Speaking of her father, Shabana Azmi said she always remembered him as someone who marched to his own drum. She admitted to being a little ashamed of him as a child: “He didn’t go to ‘office’ or wear the normal trousers and shirt like other ‘respectable’ fathers. He wore his cotton kurta-pyjama 24 hours of the day, he spoke no English. Worse, I didn’t call him ‘Daddy’ like other children. He was ‘Abba’! I learned quickly to avoid referring to him in front of my school friends. I lied that he did ‘business’. Imagine letting my school friends know he was a poet. What on earth did that mean? A euphemism for someone who did no work?”

The renowned actress remembered that when it was time for her to seek admission to school, her parents Kaifi and Shaukat sent other people to ‘represent’ them as her parents, so she could more easily be accepted as a student in an English-medium school. It was only with media reports that her school friends realised that she was actually poet Kaifi Azmi’s daughter, the thespian recounted.

Shabana Azmi’s husband, lyricist Javed Akhtar, said, “Kaifi spoke for the masses. He fought, through his writing, against injustice. His work has never been more relevant than now, when one thinks of the hardships people experience. He wrote about the downtrodden after living with them. He wrote of women’s rights. That did not mean he had different standards for the women in his own home. That is why he had a daughter like Shabana Azmi.”

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Agra / by Eram Agha, TNN / August 20th, 2015