Jamia to welcome Pakistani artistes

TNN / Feb 21, 2006, 00:14 IST

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Jamia is all set to host a 50-member delegation of Pak poets, artistes, writers and painters for a three-day "Pen for Peace" conference.

NEW DELHI: Jamia is all set to pen down peace notes with its arms open to host a 50-member delegation of Pakistani poets, artistes, writers and painters for a three-day "Pen for Peace" conference starting from Tuesday.
The delegates from various provinces of Pakistan, like Balochistan, Sind, Punjab and the Northwest Frontier Province, will be participating in a series of events like cultural programmes, book-reading sessions in various regional languages like Balochi, Sindhi and Siraiki, and a mushaira with their Indian counterparts.
The event is being organised under the outreach programme of the Centre for Jawaharlal Nehru Studies.
Said Rakshanda Jalil, coordinator for the programme: "We have consciously kept away from bringing the more common names in Indo-Pak exchanges, like Farida Khanum, Mehendi Hassan and Feryal Gohar, because the idea was to make this a genuine people-to-people contact.

The delegation will comprise of relatively unknown names in India who have been doing exceptional work in their respective fields. On the music front for example, it would be interesting to chart the course of Hindustani classical music in post-partition Pakistan, where there were few Hindu teachers."
Among the visitors would be authors Zeenat Sana and Anwar Fitrat, Hindustani classical singer Sheikh Bada us-Zaman, poet Sajjad Ahmed Babar, Ashfaq Salim Mirza.
Among the Pakistani poets who will take part in the mushaira are Saeed Ahmed, Malik Munir Akhtar, Saba Ekram and Fatema Hassan.
The Indian participants would include names like Gulzar Dehlvi, Indira Varma and Obaid Siddiqui.
In addition to the events, the university will also hold an open-air exhibition of books, photographs and calligraphies from Pakistan.
The books, 150-odd, mostly in Urdu, by various Pakistani publishers including Sang-e-mil, are of special interest as there is, as yet, no official trade in books. The Jamia library will receive all the books on display as gifts.
"It is sad but true that despite all the talk about cultural exchange, trade has been limited to items like katha, pan and onions.
Few of their books come into India except when small retailers return with Pakistani publications.
The interest in not very high, contrary to that in Pakistan where the active interest in books by Indian authors has fuelled a thriving industry of pirated Indian books," Jalil added.

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