India is changing, Abba, some for good, some for bad. There is an attempt to curb freedom of expression, to frighten people into silence, to not express dissent. You had faced various such challenges and you stood up to them boldly. Today it seems as though many artists are buckling under, buying tremulous peace. But when it seems dark and bleak I recall your words, ‘Do not succumb to despair, to this night a dawn there just has to be.’ When I see young men and women putting themselves out there to offer resistance, unbridled, unafraid, I recall your lines from ‘Charaaghan’:

. . . haan magar ek diya naam hai jiska ummeed

Jhilmilata hi chala jaata hai . . .

. . . yes, but there’s a light called hope

That keeps burning bright

Shabana Azmi

December 2018

Introduction

A child was born to a family of zamindars in the village of Mijwan in district Azamgarh (Uttar Pradesh) on 14 January 1919. He was named Saiyyed Athar Husain; in later years he would call himself Kaifi Azmi and carry a bit of his beloved Azamgarh with him all his life. Shortly after the child’s birth, his father Saiyyed Fateh Hussain Rizvi decided to leave the lands and fields in Mijwan in the care of his younger brother and move to Lucknow in search of a better life and education for his children. The ties with the village, however, would never snap; the father built a large house in the village from the money he earned in the city and the son spent the last fifteen years of his life in Mijwan, transforming the sleepy little hamlet into a model village, a task continued to this day by the third generation, thus keeping intact the link with the land and its people in an almost unbroken arc spanning close to a century.