Ali Husain Mir

• Featuring: Ali Husain Mir, Herman van Olphen, Syed Akbar Hyder
• Language(s): Hinglish, Urdu
• Topics: Activism, Bollywood, Culture, Film, Hindi, Hinglish, Language, Literature, Poetry, Politics, Society, Urdu

Ali Husain Mir is a Bollywood lyricist and script writer and a professor of Management at William Paterson University. Mir visited the Hindi Urdu Flagship at the University of Texas at Austin to speak to Flagship students about his career in Urdu literature and Bollywood production. For this interview, Mir sat down with HUF directors, Syed Akbar Hyder and Herman van Olphen, to discuss his background in Urdu and the state of the language in modern India.

Mir 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.