Niaz Fatehpuri

Founder-editor of Nigar — the caged bird remembering its nest. Niaz Fatehpuri (1884–1966), born Mawlana Niyaz Muhammad Khan in 1884 at Nayi Ghat in Barabanki district, Uttar Pradesh, was an Urdu poet, fiction writer, critic and polemicist, and the founder-editor of the journal Nigar. Educated at the Madrasa Islamia in Fatehpur, the Madrasa Alia in Rampur and the Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama in Lucknow, he served briefly as a police sub-inspector before resigning in 1902, and worked in several posts before launching the monthly Nigar from Agra in 1922. Under his editorship Nigar became one of the most respected Urdu literary journals of the subcontinent, publishing from Lucknow and Bhopal as well as Agra, and he declared it an organ of rationalists and free-thinkers, using it to argue for reason in religion and literature and against clerical orthodoxy. He wrote more than fifty books — fiction, criticism, religion, philosophy and history among them — including Man-o-Yazdan, the story collections Jamalistan and Nigaristan (1939), the poetry collection Arz-e-Naghma (1962), and an Urdu translation of Tagore's Gitanjali. His short stories, often called poems in prose, earned a place beside the finest Urdu fiction of his time, and though he was better known as a fiction writer and critic, his first love was poetry, in the classical manner of Mir. In 1962 he received the Padma Bhushan for his services to Urdu, and in July that year he moved to Karachi, where he spent his last four years. He died of cancer in Karachi on 24 May 1966.