Last week, when I saw the news of the 91-year-old poet Bashir Badr’s demise on TV, the Badr lines that sprung to mind involved television itself. “Dil chhalak uthaa, aankh bhar aayi / Aaj TV pe woh khabar aayi” (The heart brimmed over, my eyes went moist when I saw the news on the TV). Even a ghazal newbie will immediately notice two seemingly out-of-place words in this couplet: “chhalak” and of course, the English-language compression “TV”. Badr uses the Hindi word “chhalak” and not its Urdu analogues “ubaal”, “labrez” et al, words used to indicate overflow, a sudden brimming over. Moreover “chhalak” is commonly used in the context of Awadhi (the language of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas), like the popular saying “adhjal gagri chhalkat jaaye” (empty vessels make the most noise).

Like Amir Khusrau blending Persian, Hindi and Urdu words in his poetry, Badr (1935-2026) too was a lifelong builder of bridges, uniting Hindi (or ‘Hinglish’) and Urdu, Hindus and Muslims, India and Pakistan. Small wonder, then, that he was among the most quoted poets in the Hindi and Urdu-speaking parts of the country. Badr also wrote two books of literary criticism focusing on the history of the ghazal. In 1999, he was awarded the Padmashri and the Sahitya Akademi Award in Urdu.

One of Badr’s greatest achievements was dragging the Urdu ghazal into the realm of modernity. No longer was the ghazal weighed down with centuries-old conventions and a register that was doggedly Persian-driven. Badr introduced “bolchaal ki bhaasha”, the language of the Everyman, with bits of street Hindi and borrowed English, into the fabric of the Urdu ghazal. And he did it in a seamless way that made readers and writers alike gasp with wonder.

In a romantic couplet describing the (unspecified) beloved, he writes, “Woh zaafraani pullover usi ka hissa hai / Koi jo doosra pehne, toh doosra hi lage” (That saffron pullover is a part of her, it looks all wrong on everyone else). Note the sly juxtaposition of “zaafraan”, a very old word for a very old thing (saffron), and “pullover”, a very new word for a super-new thing, relatively speaking. The newness of one dovetails beautifully with the oldness of the other. Gulzar, famously, is fond of this particular couplet and according to him, the beauty of the line lies in the specificity of “pullover” which cannot be used interchangeably with “sweater”, “coat”. Only a pullover can be described as a pullover, only the beloved is the beloved. This is how Badr created extraordinary poems using eminently ordinary words from Hindi and English.

The simple logic behind this English-Urdu juxtaposition (and Badr’s linguistic philosophy as a whole) is explained by Badr himself, in the foreword to the volume of his collected works, called Culture Yaksaan. Badr writes (translation’s my own): “The language of a ghazal is not the same as the language scholars use to analyse it. These two languages have different purposes, different souls. To separate the language of the ghazal from the simple and straightforward language-of-the-people would be unnatural and foolhardy.” According to Badr, a poet should not only be aware of the dominant register of their era, they should speak it as fluently as their own mother tongue. Otherwise, Badr warned, the poet’s work was destined to languish in “the deserted Urdu departments of forgotten universities”. Here, Badr was addressing his contemporaries as well as Urdu literary critics.

For much of his life, Badr was especially sensitive to the horrors of communal violence. A mob burned his house down during the 1987 communal riots of Meerut, destroying handwritten manuscripts. Director Vishal Bhardwaj, then a student in Meerut and a regular at Badr’s gatherings, later recovered parts of these manuscripts from memory and returned them to the master—he would use a couple of shers in a film he co-wrote decades later, Dedh Ishqiya. Badr would write several memorable couplets warning us about Hindu-Muslim violence, and how it had the potential to burn this country down.

In a sher condemning uncritical followers of both religions, he wrote, “Yahaan ek bacche ke khoon se jo likha hai use padhein / Tera kirtan abhi paap hai, abhi mera sajdaa haraam hai” (Please read these words written in a child’s blood, your kirtan is now sinful, my sajdaa forbidden). However, he could also be extremely utopian in his conciliatory Hindu-Muslim verses, going for broke in lines like—“Musafir hain hum bhi, musafir ho tum bhi, kisi mod par fir mulakaat hogi” (A traveller such as I, a traveller such as you, we will meet again at a bend in the road). This was essentially a very sensitive, soft-hearted man who refused to give up on humanity, an attitude exemplified by verses like “Woh dhoop ke chhappar hon yaa chaanv ki deewarein / ab joh bhi uthaayenge, mil jul ke uthaayenge” (Roofs and walls, rain or shine, whatever we build we will build together).

Badr was extremely popular on both sides of the Indo-Pak border—not to mention, the sizeable Indian and Pakistani immigrant communities in the Middle East. His mushairas would draw packed crowds in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and even popular singers like Jagjit Singh started singing some of his ghazals while performing in the region. In the Vani Prakashan edition of Culture Yaksaan, the book’s editor Basant Pratap Singh describes a chance encounter in May 1997. While watching a game of cricket featuring the Pakistani cricket team, Singh ran into Mushtaq Mohammad, former Pakistani cricketer who had travelled to India as the manager of the Pakistani team. In the resultant conversation, Singh breaks into one of Badr’s couplets: “Kuch to mazbooriyaan rahin hongi—” and before he can finish it, Mohammad finishes it for him by saying “Yun koi bewafaa nahi hotaa”. In the editorial note, Singh admits that in all probability neither man knew that this was a Bashir Badr verse—and yet, the verses themselves were the perfect “shared language”. As Badr himself famously quipped during a mushaira, “In India and Pakistan, the language with the most number of followers is the ghazal.”

An Indian artist has only truly made it when their work is used to settle “siyaasi maamle” or political matters. On 6 February 2018, the Congress politician Mallikarjun Kharge quoted a famous Badr couplet while addressing Prime Minister Narendra Modi, urging him to exercise caution while attacking the Congress. “Dushmani jamkar karo lekin yeh gunjaish rahe / jab kabhi hum dost ho jaayein toh sharmindaa naa hon” (Be the best enemy you can, by all means / Leave just enough room so we’re not ashamed as friends). Not to be undone, the very next day Modi claimed tha his speech was marked by restraint, using another Badr couplet to hammer home his point: “Jee bohot chahta hai ki sach bolein / kya karein hauslaa nahi hotaa” (I want to speak the truth with all my heart, alas my courage deserts me).

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession, according to Robert Graves. By that definition Badr remained afflicted until his last days. His wife would recite the first line of a poem and somehow, the dementia-battling Badr, struggling to retain the most basic memories, would come up with the second. Until the very end, he just could not stop putting word after word after word—uniting people, building bridges.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.

Last week, when I saw the news of the 91-year-old poet Bashir Badr’s demise on TV, the Badr lines that sprung to mind involved television itself. “Dil chhalak uthaa, aankh bhar aayi / Aaj TV pe woh khabar aayi” (The heart brimmed over, my eyes went moist when I saw the news on the TV). Even a ghazal newbie will immediately notice two seemingly out-of-place words in this couplet: “chhalak” and of course, the English-language compression “TV”. Badr uses the Hindi word “chhalak” and not its Urdu analogues “ubaal”, “labrez” et al, words used to indicate overflow, a sudden brimming over. Moreover “chhalak” is commonly used in the context of Awadhi (the language of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas), like the popular saying “adhjal gagri chhalkat jaaye” (empty vessels make the most noise).

Like Amir Khusrau blending Persian, Hindi and Urdu words in his poetry, Badr (1935-2026) too was a lifelong builder of bridges, uniting Hindi (or ‘Hinglish’) and Urdu, Hindus and Muslims, India and Pakistan. Small wonder, then, that he was among the most quoted poets in the Hindi and Urdu-speaking parts of the country. Badr also wrote two books of literary criticism focusing on the history of the ghazal. In 1999, he was awarded the Padmashri and the Sahitya Akademi Award in Urdu.

One of Badr’s greatest achievements was dragging the Urdu ghazal into the realm of modernity. No longer was the ghazal weighed down with centuries-old conventions and a register that was doggedly Persian-driven. Badr introduced “bolchaal ki bhaasha”, the language of the Everyman, with bits of street Hindi and borrowed English, into the fabric of the Urdu ghazal. And he did it in a seamless way that made readers and writers alike gasp with wonder.

In a romantic couplet describing the (unspecified) beloved, he writes, “Woh zaafraani pullover usi ka hissa hai / Koi jo doosra pehne, toh doosra hi lage” (That saffron pullover is a part of her, it looks all wrong on everyone else). Note the sly juxtaposition of “zaafraan”, a very old word for a very old thing (saffron), and “pullover”, a very new word for a super-new thing, relatively speaking. The newness of one dovetails beautifully with the oldness of the other. Gulzar, famously, is fond of this particular couplet and according to him, the beauty of the line lies in the specificity of “pullover” which cannot be used interchangeably with “sweater”, “coat”. Only a pullover can be described as a pullover, only the beloved is the beloved. This is how Badr created extraordinary poems using eminently ordinary words from Hindi and English.

The simple logic behind this English-Urdu juxtaposition (and Badr’s linguistic philosophy as a whole) is explained by Badr himself, in the foreword to the volume of his collected works, called Culture Yaksaan. Badr writes (translation’s my own): “The language of a ghazal is not the same as the language scholars use to analyse it. These two languages have different purposes, different souls. To separate the language of the ghazal from the simple and straightforward language-of-the-people would be unnatural and foolhardy.” According to Badr, a poet should not only be aware of the dominant register of their era, they should speak it as fluently as their own mother tongue. Otherwise, Badr warned, the poet’s work was destined to languish in “the deserted Urdu departments of forgotten universities”. Here, Badr was addressing his contemporaries as well as Urdu literary critics.

For much of his life, Badr was especially sensitive to the horrors of communal violence. A mob burned his house down during the 1987 communal riots of Meerut, destroying handwritten manuscripts. Director Vishal Bhardwaj, then a student in Meerut and a regular at Badr’s gatherings, later recovered parts of these manuscripts from memory and returned them to the master—he would use a couple of shers in a film he co-wrote decades later, Dedh Ishqiya. Badr would write several memorable couplets warning us about Hindu-Muslim violence, and how it had the potential to burn this country down.

In a sher condemning uncritical followers of both religions, he wrote, “Yahaan ek bacche ke khoon se jo likha hai use padhein / Tera kirtan abhi paap hai, abhi mera sajdaa haraam hai” (Please read these words written in a child’s blood, your kirtan is now sinful, my sajdaa forbidden). However, he could also be extremely utopian in his conciliatory Hindu-Muslim verses, going for broke in lines like—“Musafir hain hum bhi, musafir ho tum bhi, kisi mod par fir mulakaat hogi” (A traveller such as I, a traveller such as you, we will meet again at a bend in the road). This was essentially a very sensitive, soft-hearted man who refused to give up on humanity, an attitude exemplified by verses like “Woh dhoop ke chhappar hon yaa chaanv ki deewarein / ab joh bhi uthaayenge, mil jul ke uthaayenge” (Roofs and walls, rain or shine, whatever we build we will build together).

Badr was extremely popular on both sides of the Indo-Pak border—not to mention, the sizeable Indian and Pakistani immigrant communities in the Middle East. His mushairas would draw packed crowds in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and even popular singers like Jagjit Singh started singing some of his ghazals while performing in the region. In the Vani Prakashan edition of Culture Yaksaan, the book’s editor Basant Pratap Singh describes a chance encounter in May 1997. While watching a game of cricket featuring the Pakistani cricket team, Singh ran into Mushtaq Mohammad, former Pakistani cricketer who had travelled to India as the manager of the Pakistani team. In the resultant conversation, Singh breaks into one of Badr’s couplets: “Kuch to mazbooriyaan rahin hongi—” and before he can finish it, Mohammad finishes it for him by saying “Yun koi bewafaa nahi hotaa”. In the editorial note, Singh admits that in all probability neither man knew that this was a Bashir Badr verse—and yet, the verses themselves were the perfect “shared language”. As Badr himself famously quipped during a mushaira, “In India and Pakistan, the language with the most number of followers is the ghazal.”

An Indian artist has only truly made it when their work is used to settle “siyaasi maamle” or political matters. On 6 February 2018, the Congress politician Mallikarjun Kharge quoted a famous Badr couplet while addressing Prime Minister Narendra Modi, urging him to exercise caution while attacking the Congress. “Dushmani jamkar karo lekin yeh gunjaish rahe / jab kabhi hum dost ho jaayein toh sharmindaa naa hon” (Be the best enemy you can, by all means / Leave just enough room so we’re not ashamed as friends). Not to be undone, the very next day Modi claimed tha his speech was marked by restraint, using another Badr couplet to hammer home his point: “Jee bohot chahta hai ki sach bolein / kya karein hauslaa nahi hotaa” (I want to speak the truth with all my heart, alas my courage deserts me).

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession, according to Robert Graves. By that definition Badr remained afflicted until his last days. His wife would recite the first line of a poem and somehow, the dementia-battling Badr, struggling to retain the most basic memories, would come up with the second. Until the very end, he just could not stop putting word after word after word—uniting people, building bridges.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.