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Grand Urdu mushaira to bring together poets from India and Pakistan

DUBAI — A grand Urdu mushaira will be held later this year bringing back memories of Dubai’s golden era of ‘poetry festivals’ when some of the finest gatherings of poets from the subcontinent were witnessed here during the past two decades. This was stated by Shahida Jafri, organiser of the mushaira, yesterday.

“The mushaira, to be held in cooperation with Dream Advertising, will bring together some of the best lyricists from India and Pakistan in keeping with the tradition of the Dubai mushaira followed year after year since the early eighties,” she said.

“But it will not be a ‘Jashn’ (festival) in honour of any individual poet as was done earlier. This time, we will be paying tribute to the mushaira itself, the subcontinent’s great cultural heritage,” she observed. It will be dedicated to the late Saleem Jafri, the pioneer of Jashnia mushaira in the Gulf, specially in Dubai, and the late Museebur Rahman, the founder of Majlis-e-Farogh-e-Urdu Adab in Doha, Qatar.

The mushaira will be held on November 29 at the Renaissance Hotel. Among the poets expected to recite their works include Ahmed Faraz, Kishwar Naheed, Dr Pirzadah Qasim, Anwar Masood, Saleem Kausar, Azm Behzad, and Mohsin Changezi from Pakistan and Bashir Badr, Munawwar Rana, Manzar Bhopali, Popular Meeruthi and Azm Shakiri from India.