Noted Urdu poet Anand Mohan Zutshi Gulzar Dehlvi passes away aged 93, days after recovering from COVID-19

Veteran Urdu poet Anand Mohan Zutshi ‘Gulzar’ Dehlvi passed away on the afternoon of 12 June, five days after he recovered from COVID-19. He died at his Noida home, and was a month shy of turning 94 this July. “His corona test came negative on 7 June and we brought him home. Today he had lunch and at around 2.30 pm he passed away,” his son Anoop Zutshi told the Press Trust of India. “He was quite old, and the infection had left him very weak. So doctors are thinking it was possibly a cardiac arrest,” he added. A freedom fighter and a premier ‘inquilabi’ poet, Dehlvi was admitted to a private hospital on 1 June after testing positive for coronavirus. Born in old Delhi’s Gali Kashmeerian in 1926, he was also the editor of Science ki Duniya, the first Urdu science magazine published by Government of India in 1975. Dehlvi was an alumnus of Ramjas and BVJ Sanskrit School. Later, he did his Masters in Arts from Delhi’s Hindu College and he retired from the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research sometime around the early 1990s. An ardent lover of the Urdu language, Dehlvi has been a part of a number of mushairas including Jashn-e-Rekhta in 2015 and Jigar Fest in 218. He has also played a huge role in establishing many Urd schools across India. He was known to be a follower of India’s ganga-jamani tehzeeb (a term used to define a syncretic Hindu-Muslim culture) and always stood for secularism. In an interview with the Indian Express in 2019, Dehlvi said, “I am a post-holder in the oldest Ramlila committee of Delhi, and of the Hazrat Nizamuddin dargah. I observe Holi, Diwali, Janmashtami, Shivratri, and all three Eids. This is what India is, and this is the only way it can survive. Giving in to communal rhetoric will end up fragmenting India, just as the British had once fragmented it.” (With inputs from the Press of India)