Kaifi Azmi

Kaifi Azmi (1919-2002) was an Urdu poet, film lyricist and lifelong communist whose social work was concentrated on one place: Mijwan, the village in Azamgarh district of eastern Uttar Pradesh where he was born. A brain haemorrhage in February 1973 left his left arm and leg permanently disabled. Rather than retire in Bombay, where his film career was established, he moved back to Mijwan and spent the rest of his life trying to lift a village that at the time had no development to speak of and not even a postal code.

He founded the Mijwan Welfare Society and, through it, a series of institutions intended to give the village what it lacked: the Kaifi Azmi Kanya Uchatar Madhyamik Vidyalaya, a girls' higher secondary school; a girls' primary school; a computer training centre, in a village that until then had only a few hours of electricity a day; and a sewing and embroidery centre where women were taught stitching and chikankari. The society also sponsored a farmers' club to introduce new cultivation techniques and micro-credit, and a women's self-help group for small savings. His argument was straightforward — that in a country where the great majority lived in villages, no real national progress was possible without empowering them — and he was blunt about the timescale, saying that anyone working for change should accept that it might not arrive in their lifetime and work for it regardless.

Mijwan Welfare Society continues under his daughter, the actor Shabana Azmi, with its embroidery work marketed through designers including Manish Malhotra as a livelihood route for village women. Azmi received the Padma Shri in 1974, the Sahitya Akademi Award for his collection Awaara Sajde, and later the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship. He returned the Padma Shri in the 1980s after the then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh disparaged Urdu speakers.[2][3][4]