Renowned Urdu poet and Padam Shri awardee Bashir Badar passed away at the age of 91 at his residence, Bashir Manzil in Bhopal, after a long illness, his family said.
His wife, Rahat Badr, said in a post on social media: “Bashir Sahib has left us. Prayers.” He is survived by his wife and two children.
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According to this family, he breathed his last in the room where he used to hold poetry evenings.
But due to his dementia, Badr withdrew from the marches, but he continued to meet his fans even after he lost his memory, his family said.
Born in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh on 15 February 1935, he was educated in Etawah and Aligarh, later served in Meerut, and eventually settled in Bhopal at Bashir Manzil in Fatehgarh district of Bhopal.
Badr received his BA and PhD from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), where he taught Urdu for several years before heading the Urdu Department at Meerut College for 17 years.
His early poetic works were included in the curricula of the Arab Maghreb University even before he completed his graduate studies. He was known for his modern Urdu poetry and wrote nearly 10,000 Urdu poems and published seven collections of ghazals. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1989.
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Poet Anjum Barabankvi said: Today we lost the greatest poet of the Nai Ghazal movement in the entire world.
She added: “Bashir Badr was a pioneer in the field of fashion and gave the gazelle a new language and status.”
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