100 Years of Nasir Kazmi: A Celebration

Friday, 12 December 2025 | 6:00- 8:00 PM | SS Auditorium, Academic Block, LUMS

The Gurmani Centre hosted an event to celebrate the centenary of Nasir Kazmi, one of modern Urdu poetry’s most cherished voices. The session offered engagement with Nasir Kazmi’s poetry, moving beyond the familiar themes of migration, melancholy, solitude, and insomnia to focus more closely on his poetics and craft. Particular attention was paid to the gradual simplicity of Nasir’s diction, his proximity to prose, and his affinity with Mir’s ability to transform ordinary, even seemingly non-poetic language into poetry. The discussion also explored Nasir Kazmi’s deep engagement with music and painting as unfinished artistic pursuits that he ultimately realized within his poetry, especially through what was described as painterly utterance and poetic silence, where meaning is not abolished but momentarily suspended, allowing the poem to function as a receptive form for the reader’s perception.

The musical dimension of Nasir Kazmi’s poetry was brought to life through a performance by the LUMS Music Society, which sang selected ghazals by the poet and received enthusiastic applause from the audience. This was followed by the playing of two rare archival audio recordings of Nasir Kazmi’s voice from the Lutfullah Sound Archives, offering a rare auditory encounter with the poet himself. Subsequently, Dr Nasir Abbas Nayyar spoke on Nasir Kazmi’s poetic method, situating his work within broader literary and aesthetic traditions, including the idea of poetry as a crafted form rather than mere expression. The session concluded with presidential remarks by Dr Khurshid Rizvi, who reflected in particular on Nasir Kazmi’s capacity to create poems that function like ‘empty vessels’—simple, complete images that remain open to multiple emotional and interpretive possibilities.