Her name meant ‘the delight of eyes’. The daughter of an illustrious couple, Sajjad Hyder Yaldaram and Nazar Zehra, brought Urdu fiction at  par with writings in other major languages of the world.

Raza Rumi links to an audio clip from the BBC and also links to a few obituaries on Ainee Apa.

This is a great interview, with Ainee Apa at her best: quick witted, sharp and entertaining. During the interview she makes fun of the light weight journalism and then remarks on how a writer or an artist gets stuck by an image. She talks of an image from the Iraq war – a 15 second long clip – where a woman is questioning as to why is she a victim of a war.

Alok reminisces about reading her most well known novel Aag Ka Darya in his college years.

What I gathered from my own limited reading of the book was that she wanted to show the continuity in Indian culture and history right from its origins thousands of years ago to the present, modern age. In this way I think she challenges other interpretations of Indian history which find breaks, specially the most pernicious of them all which divided India into hindu, muslim and british epochs (the original orientalist classic by James Mill).