The Shama affair worth remembering

How the Urdu magazine Shama peaked to popularity and disappeared

In the years gone by, the fountain at the Fawwara intersection in Chandni Chowk seldom worked. Yet, few complained. Most people came to Fawwara for their daily news, for here sat a newspaper seller who sold practically every language newspaper in the country.

Besides English, Hindi and Urdu dailies, one could get Punjabi, Marathi and Bengali papers too. He did not sell many magazines, the sole exception being Shama, the Urdu monthly that presented a heady cocktail of Urdu literature, Indian culture and Hindi cinema. Shama, like water, charted its own course.

Founded by Yusuf Dehlvi in 1939, some bought Shama to read Urdu writers. The who’s who of Urdu litterateurs, including Rajinder Singh Bedi, Sahir Ludhianvi, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder, graced its pages. There were pieces by connoisseurs of Indian culture as well, talking of traditions, little and large, and values, shifting or timeless.

Shama was appreciated in literary circles at a time when Delhi had a lively literary circuit with its mushairas, book readings, debates and even street theatre. Yet it would have remained a niche publication but for a couple of masterstrokes by Yusuf Dehlvi’s sons – the widely read Yunus Dehlvi and the widely popular Idrees Dehlvi – who turned what was otherwise a haloed literary publication into a family magazine.

Idrees had strong film connections. In a column he wrote under the pen name of Musafir, he talked of little things in the life of film stars: the films they signed, the films they opted out of, the flops they gave or the jubilee hits they notched up. He talked too of their relationships, their moments of stolen pleasure. He backed it all up with photographs of film shooting, movie storylines and lyrics of popular songs.

Readers lapped it up. Within no time, fans of Meena Kumari and Madhubala, Sadhana and Sharmila Tagore, Sridevi and Jayaprada started collecting the photos of their matinee idols.

Emboldened by the success, Shama started its own annual film awards with a graceful function at Ashok hotel’s convention hall. Soon, the biggest stars of Hindi cinema started frequenting Shama Kothi on Sardar Patel Marg in New Delhi, the residence of the Dehlvis named after the magazine. From Dilip Kumar and Sunil Dutt to Dev Anand, Rajendra Kumar, Rajesh Khanna and Dharmendra, they would all come over.