By Hina Kiyani
ISLAMABAD: Renowned Urdu poet and scholar Jaun Elia was remembered on the occasion of his birth anniversary on Thursday.
Born on December 14, 1931, in an illustrious family in Amroha, Uttar Pradesh, he was the youngest of his siblings. His father Allama Shafiq Hasan Elia was deeply involved in art and literature and also an astrologer and a poet.
This literary environment modelled him along the same lines and he wrote his first Urdu couplet when he was just 8. He was fluent in Arabic, English, Persian, Sanskrit and Hebrew.
He migrated to Pakistan in 1957 and started living in Karachi. His first poetic collection Shayad was published in 1991, when he was 60. The second collection of his poetry Ya’ani was published posthumously in 2003.
Later his companion, Khalid Ansari, compiled and published his three consecutive collections, Gumaan in 2004, Lekin in 2006 and Goya in 2008. He died after a protracted illness on November 8, 2002 in Karachi.
