In keeping with its mission to enhance the Hindi Urdu educational experience at the undergraduate level, the Flagship hosts a speaker series featuring some of the leading scholars and artists working in the Hindi-Urdu medium today. All lectures are free, open to the public, and are preceded by a half-hour informal reception for the speaker. In addition to seminars, the series also features various workshops and classroom sessions with the speakers. Please contact the Flagship if you have questions on individual speakers. The schedule for the 2008 series is below:
Tuesday, Mar 4th 2008 |
Ali Husain Mir |
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Tuesday, Mar 18th 2008 |
Frances Pritchett |
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Tuesday, April 1st 2008 |
Mehr Farooqi |
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Mar 23 - April 24, 2008 |
Susham Bedi |
Video: Interview with Bedi |
Sep 24-25, 2008 |
Shamshur Rahman Faruqi |
Video: Seminar on Ja'far Zatalli |
Oct 8, 2008 |
Oct 8: Urdu satire reading, 6 pm, Meyerson Conf Room, WCH 4.118 |
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Nov 4, 2008 |
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra |
Nov 4: Reading Kabir |
Note: Quicktime (free plug-in) is required to view videos. |
Associate Professor, William Paterson University
Bollywood Lyricist and Script Writer
Ali Husain Mir, a Bollywood lyricist and script writer and a professor of Management at William Paterson University, is the author of Anthems of Resistance, the definitive book on the All India Progressive Writers' Movement; he is also an acclaimed lyricist and script-writer for Hindi and Urdu films (Iqbal, Dor....). Mir's oeuvre engages issues of religious minorities and secularism in South Asia.
Watch a video of Mir's seminar "Romance and Revolution in Bollywood Songs" or a personal interview about his life and the state of the Urdu language. Both were filmed during Mir's recent visit to the Flagship program.
Columbia University
Dr. Frances Pritchett is Professor of Modern Indic Languages in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. She teaches courses on Indian civilization, Urdu literature and Islam in South Asia. Pritchett’s publications include Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics, The Romance Tradition in Urdu: The Dastan of Amir Hamzah, Urdu Meter: A Practical Handbook, and Urdu Literature: A Bibliography of English Language Sources.
University of Virginia
Mehr Afshan Farooqi is Assistant Professor of Urdu at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. "The Secret of Letters: Chronograms in Urdu Literary Culture," which appeared in Edebiyat: The Journal of Middle Eastern Literatures, is her most recent publication. She is currently translating a voluminous selection of women's writings in Urdu, spanning the last several centuries, for Oxford University Press. Prior to joining the University of Virginia, Dr. Farooqi taught Hindi, Urdu, and Persian language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She completed both her undergraduate and graduate studies at Allahabad University in India and has numerous publication translations to her credit. She is currently working on an analytical introduction, edition and translation of the Candayan of Maulana Daíud in Awadhi. This research is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Institute of Indian Studies.
Columbia University
Susham Bedi is a leading South Asian poet and fiction writer. She writes predominantly about the experiences of Indians in the South Asian diaspora, focusing on psychological and interior cultural conflicts. Unlike other prominent Indian American novelists she writes mainly in Hindi rather than English. She has been widely translated into English, French, Dutch and other languages by artists, academics, and students. She was an actress in India in the 1960s and early 1970s. More recently in the United States she has appeared on such shows as "True Crime: The Zach Warner Chronicles", "Third Watch", and "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit", and in movies such as "The Guru" (2002) and "ABCD" (1999). She is the mother of the actress Purva Bedi. In January, 2006 she was honored by Sahitya Academy in Delhi for her contributions to Hindi literature.
Select short stories by Bedi are available in Hindi online via Abhivyakti and NYU Hindi.
University of Pennsylvannia
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi is an eminent Urdu critic, poet and theorist, who has nurtured a whole generation of Urdu writers since the 1960s. He is regarded as the founder of the new movement in Urdu literature. With rare skill and clarity, he absorbed western principles of literary criticism and subsequently applied them to Urdu literature, but only after adapting them to address literary aesthetics native to Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. An expert in classical prosody and ‘ilm-e bayan (the science of poetic discourse), he has contributed to modern literary discourse with a profundity rarely seen in contemporary Urdu critics. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards. Most recently he was awarded the prestigious Saraswathi Samman for his pioneering work She`r-e Shor-Angez. In this four-volume study of the great eighteenth-century poet Mir Taqi Mir, Faruqi uses a refreshingly eclectic approach and a variety of insightful critical tools to interpret Mir’s art.
Fran Pritchett also has a useful site related to Faruqi's works in English, a transcript of an indepth interview with Faruqi is also available online.
Siasat Daily
Mujtaba Hussain is a prolific and critically acclaimed Urdu journalist and creative writer. Over the past forty years he has produced fifteen volumes of incisive, humorous journalism and creative writing. His work has been widely translated into English, Hindi and various other regional languages of India. In 2007, he received a Padma Shree, India's prestigious presidential award, for his contributions to Urdu literature.
Kushwant Singh describes Hussain as "rare among Indian writers of humour. While he is unable to say anything unkind about others, he is equally unable to say anything in his own praise. His piece Apnee Yaad Mein is a sort of self written in memoriam, He recalls his younger days in Hyderabad, his love of wandering about on full moonlit nights, playing Kabaddi on the first night of his marriage when his friends forced him to go home to his bride. He was commissioned to write light pieces for Siasat on the sudden death of the man who wrote the column. He never looked back. He has reason to rest on his laurels: Whenever the subject of humour in Urdu writing comes up, the first name that is mentioned is of Mujtaba Hussain of Hyderabad."
University of Allahabad
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in Lahore in 1947 and educated at the universities of Allahabad and Bombay. Since 1968 he has taught at the University of Allahabad, where he is currently Professor of English. He has been a visiting writer at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (1971-73), a Homi Bhabha Fellow (1981-83), and has spent periods of residence at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, N.Y. (1972) and at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center, Bellagio (2003). He has won The Gettysburg Review Award for Non Fiction (1994). A History of Indian Literature in English (2003), an edited volume published by Columbia University Press, was awarded the Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title of the Year. He is married and has one son.
Click here to download poems by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.