The Urdu Ghazal Podcast, Episode 16 -- Dr. Bashir Badr

Dr. Bashir Badr was born in Ayodhya in 1935. He received his college education at Aligarh Muslim University, where he earned his graduate and doctoral degrees. He spent most of his life as a college professor, first in Aligarh and then in Meerut. He now lives in Bhopal. He was awarded Padma Shri in 1999, and the same year, he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for one of his poetry collections. Widely published, Bashir Badr is a poet of ghazal, rich in romantic allusions and an appealing choice of words that work like magic in a mushaira with his high-pitched voice. His presence in mushaira is rare for ghazal-loving audiences, mainly when he uses his highly individualized trannum. He shows excellent mastery over using long behr and freshly minted metaphors, which have the flavor of petals of a newly blossomed rose. He is a romantic poet with a difference; love in his verse shows up wearing different apparel, and he places pangs of love’s suffering in the modern metropolitan context.

  For more about the Urdu Ghazal Poetry, please refer to:

Gopi Chand Narang, Translation by Surinder Deol. The Urdu Ghazal: A Gift of Composite Culture. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020.