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| Karvaan Banta Gaya |
Among those who presented Anis’s poetry and marasi include: Ahmar Shehwaar, Asim Bajwa, Essan Hamdani,Dr. Tahir Mahmood and Tashie Zaheer’.
Hameeda Banu Chopra and Sohab Hamdani presented special maqalas on the life and work of the great poet.
Mir Babbar Ali Anis was born in Faizabad in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in 1803 and died in 1874. Poetry came to him as ancestral heritage, for his forbears, going back to his great grandfather, were eminent poets and men of letters. His father, Mir Khaliq, was a famous poet. Anis was the grandson of Mir Hasan who is remembered for his immortal Masnavi, Sehir-ul-Bayaan.
In keeping with the popular trend, he first tried his hand at the ghazal, but failing to make much headway in this sphere, he changed over, under the advice of his father, to the writing of marsias, in which domain he soon established a high reputation, equaled by his poetic compare, Salamat Ali Dabir. Besides being a master of the marsia, Anis was also a specialist of the rubai, the shortest complete poem in Urdu, containing only four lines.
According to Muhammad Hussain Azad, "The late Mīr Sahib must certainly have composed at least ten thousand elegies, and salāms beyond count. He composed as easily and casually as he spoke." Mir Anis has drawn upon the vocabulary of Arabic, Persian, Urdu/Hindi/Awadhi in such a good measure that he symbolizes the full spectrum of the cultural mosaic that Urdu has come to be.
