Celebrity Profile

Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi was born in the middle of the First World War, the first disaster to have hit the western world. The world that Qasmi lives in now is so totally transformed that it seems even alien to those who grew up in that era. With the disappearance of the bi-polar world, the politics and economy has seen a total break up which again calls for a new international alignment.

Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi and his long journey as a writer and thinker in his career which has spanned many movements, revolutions, wars and artistic and cultural changes.

Qasmi heads the Majlis-e-Tarak-i-Abad, an autonomous body for the promotion of literature, and he has been in that post for more than two-and-a-half decades. Well into his eighties, he is still up with and in tune with what is happening around him in the literary, artistic and other fields of his interest. And these are many as is evident from a life which has been lived to the full and without any regrets.

The Progressive Writers Association, of which he became an integral part, was formed in the thirties and it soon became the sweeping movement to upstage the then prevalent themes and formalistic structures. A new era of realism had dawned. The first group of people to be inspired ranged from the veteran Prem Chand to Hasrat Mohani to writers who had just started to establish themselves, but a younger crop blooded by the new movement was soon to appear as significant voices in a chorus. It was not easy to have an individual voice but the remarkable thing about this movement was that, despite the unanimity of ideology, the freshness of the individuality became its dominant aspect. It had struck the right spot and unleashed the fountains of creativity among writers and intellectuals.

Qasmi was well-grounded in his own ethos and the call for freedom and the liberation of the masses was rooted in his own past. For him, Iqbal was a poetical and intellectual force to be benefitted from rather than to be challenged, as had been done by some of his contemporaries, and he was totally drawn into the feeling of helplessness that the Muslims experienced after the abolition of the Khilafat in Turkey. He looked up to the leaders of that movement, and his first creative outpouring was in the form of a poem for Muhammad Ali Jauhar in 1931. He was then inspired by Maulana Altaf Hussain Hali and more so by Zafar Ali Khan for their simple but rousing verses written directly for the Muslim community. It was a little later that he took to writing other forms of literature. He did eventually scatter himself in fiction, poetry, plays and journalism – all served as means to express an irrepressible nature and still had the energy for political activism. He had to pay a price of persecution for his words and actions as it also paved the way for his recognition.