DID YOU KNOW ?

‘Taj Geet’ and ‘Imtiaz Pachisi’ are two extremely interesting children's books written for Imtiaz Ali Taj, in his childhood, by his mother Muhammadi Begum (1878-1908). She was a fiction writer and editor of the very first Urdu women's magazine, Tehzeeb-e-Niswan, which she published from Lahore with the help of her husband Syed Mumtaz Ali. She had written twenty-five small stories for Imtiaz, and herself used to read them to him. Upon being perfected with pictures, these stories were published as Imtiaz Pachisi, in 1904, when Imtiaz was four years old. This book became very popular. Then, she handwrote some interesting Nazms for her son and kept safe in the form of a notebook which was later published as ‘Taaj-Geet’; Taj was Imtiaz’s name at home. After the death of his mother, Imtiaz took over the editorship at Tehzeeb-e-Niswan. He garnered wide acclaim by writing the play ‘Anarkali’, which later became the impetus for the epic ‘Mughal-e-Azam.’ His wife Hijab Imtiaz Ali was also a distinguished fiction writer.