By Nikhat Fatima, Siyasat.net
Beautiful both on the outside and inside Sadia Dehlvi had a huge fan following and her death on August 5, 2020 has saddened many a heart.
Lover of Urdu, Delhi tehzeeb, food, books, music and what not; she donned several hats and was a treasure trove of knowledge having penned books on cookery, Sufism, scripted documentaries and ever produced them. She was an activist, a journalist, a chef, a writer among the many things.
Hailing from an illustrious family in Delhi who were pioneers of modern Urdu journalism, Sadia wrote columns for these magazines. Her grandfather Hafiz Yusuf Dehlvi founded the ‘Shama’ a Urdu monthly magazine on films in 1938. It was a magazine that was in almost every urdu speaking and reading household all across India. Some other popular magazines he published were Sushma, Bano, and Khilauna.
After him Sadia worked hard to keep the magazines in circulation but lost the battle to decreasing readership and low profits. However she continued writing columns and also writing television serials. She wrote in both Urdu and English.
Sadia Dehlvi also founded Al Kauser in 1979, which is the Chanakyapuri restaurant famous for its kebabs, with her mother. She tied with ITC to celebrate the capital’s authentic cuisine over a six-day dinner buffet festival – Delhi Table spread.
She wrote ‘Jasmine & Jinns: Memories and recipes of my Delhi’ on the culinary history of Delhi in 2017.
Among her several programs and documentaries, “Amma and family” is well known. Produced in 1995, it had veteran Zohra Sehgal in the lead and became popular. Other shows she produced were zindagi kitni khubsurat hai and a show with Kushwant Singh called ‘Not a nice man to know’.
Kushwant Singh, the popular author was her close friend and he dedicated his book by the same name ‘Not a nice man to know’ to Sadia. He wrote” “To Sadia Dehlvi, who gave me more affection and notoriety than I deserve,”.
She was inclined towards Sufism being a devotee of Chishti order of Sufism. She often visited the dargahs of Ajmer Sharif and Nizamuddin Auliya. She wrote book on Sufism titled: — Sufism: The Heart of Islam and The Sufi Courtyard: Dargahs of Delhi. Both which were well received and published by Harper Collins
.
She married a Pakistani citizen Reza Pervaiz and lived in Karachi for some years.
Sadia died at 63, died at her home in Nizamuddin East after a long battle with cancer.
Whether it was her columns on Delhi and its rich legacy or on Sufism they touched a chord with the reader making them yearn for more.
Having read her columns on sufism from Hyderabad, I felt as if I knew her. Such was her personality – magnetic. She was one of her kind. (Photo courtesy Facebook)
(Siyasat.net is Ahmedabad,Gujarat,India based website)
