Urdu poet Bashir Badr, who wrote 18,000 couplets, dies at 91 in Bhopal

Bashir Badr died at his residence in Bhopal on Thursday afternoon at around 12:15 pm. He was 91. According to his family, Badr had been suffering from dementia for a long time, a condition that gradually eroded his memory and left him unable to recognise even close acquaintances.

Badr began writing poetry at the age of seven. He briefly left formal education at sixteen when his father fell ill, but later returned and completed his BA, MA, and PhD from Aligarh Muslim University. His connection with AMU ran deep, his early poetry and couplets were added to the MA (Urdu) syllabus at AMU even before he had finished his own postgraduate studies.

The viva story, which became literary folklore, belongs to this period: a young Badr was asked to interpret a couplet he had written himself. He explained it anonymously. The professor disagreed and failed him. The student who couldn't convince an examiner about his own poem would go on to write over 18,000 couplets across more than seven collections, including Ikai, Aamad, Aahat, Image, Aas, Aasman, and Kulliyat-e-Bashir Badr.

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A poet for the people

Bashir wrote in conversational Urdu, reaching for neither ornate nor archaic phrasing. His spoke of what we all think about — love, longing, loss, betrayal, memory. With his collection Image, he pushed this further, stripping out heavy Persian and Arabic vocabulary entirely and grounding his ghazals in everyday speech.

He penned the famous couplet "Dushmani jam kar karo lekin ye gunjaish rahe, jab kabhi hum dost ho jayein to sharminda na hon" during the 1972 Shimla Agreement between India and Pakistan, a line that advised enemies to leave room, always, for future friendship.

His line "Ujale apni yaadon ke hamare saath rehne do" gave All India Radio's beloved Vividh Bharti show its title. His verses also appeared in the 2015 film Masaan, alongside works by Akbar Allahabadi, Chakbast, Mirza Ghalib, and Dushyant Kumar.

Fire, loss, and starting over

April 1987 marked the most devastating chapter in his personal life. Communal riots broke out in Meerut, and his house was burned down. Thousands of unpublished verses went with it. Filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj, who had been a student in Meerut during Badr's teaching years, reproduced from memory many of the couplets lost in the fire and returned them to the poet. Some of those verses later made their way into Bhardwaj's film Dedh Ishqiya. Badr eventually shifted to Bhopal, where he would spend the rest of his life.

He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 and in the same year received the Sahitya Akademi Award in Urdu for his poetry collection Aas. Javed Akhtar wrote on social media that with Badr's death, "our language Urdu has become a little poorer." It is the kind of thing people say, but in this case it is also simply true.