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Hind Islami Tahjeeb Ke Rang 
Aqeedat Ke Rang

PERFORMANCES:  Agra Bazar : A Play

Synopsis
In Agra, depression prevails over the bazaar and nothing sells. A cucumber-seller feels that if he could get a poem written about the qualities of his produce, it would sell better. He approaches several poets but they turn down his request. Finally he goes to the poet Nazir who promptly obliges him. He returns singing Nazir’s song about cucumbers and customers flock for his product. Other vendors – the Ladduwala, the Tarboozwala etc. – follow suit and soon the whole bazaar is humming with Nazir’s songs.

Around this main plot is woven the story of a young vagabond who pursues a courtesan and comes to a sticky end at the hands of his rival, a police inspector, whom he had earlier shamed in this game of love.

Director’s Note
The play is woven around Nazir Akbarabadi’s humanistic poetry, and humanism is the theme of the play. Nazir, a truly proletarian poet, often wrote on demand for vendors and traders, beggars and vagabonds, never caring to compile or publish what he wrote. His colloquialism and slang cut him off from the mainstream of Urdu poetry; his work was discovered generations after his death by a chance encounter of a literary man who was attracted by a beggar’s song. Some material was recovered from Nazir’s grand daughter and published in book form, though much of the total corpus is now lost.

Nazir never appears in Agra Bazar as no authentic account of his life is available. All we know is that the poet earned a modest living by giving tuitions to young children, refusing invitations and commissions from well-wishers like the Nawab of Lucknow.

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