Shabana Azmi and the Mud House in Mijwan
Shabana Azmi has been linked to the mud house in Mijwan where her father Kaifi Azmi was born. The village, the house and the work around it.
Most star homes in the news are in Mumbai. One of the more unusual ones is a thatched, mud-walled house in a village in Uttar Pradesh. It is where the poet Kaifi Azmi was born, and his daughter, the actor Shabana Azmi, has been linked to its preservation. This piece sets out what has been reported about the house, the village and the work built around it.
The village
Mijwan is in Azamgarh district in eastern Uttar Pradesh. According to Kaifi Azmi's Wikipedia biography, the Urdu poet, born on 14 January 1919, came from a family in the village. An article on the official Kaifi Azmi site, republished from The Citizen, says he was born into a feudal family of landlords and called Syed Athar Husain as a child, one of the youngest of several brothers and sisters.
He left to study at a seminary in Lucknow, joined the Communist Party of India as a young man and moved to Mumbai in 1947, where he wrote songs for Hindi films. The same article says he suffered a stroke in 1973 that left the left side of his body paralysed. It describes a longing to return to the village, and says he came back to Mijwan in the mid-1970s to live among the people who work the land.
A birthplace occupied by someone else
The return was not simple. The article says that once he came back, he found that the house where he was born was occupied by another family. There was no road he could use to reach the neighbour's home where he stayed as a guest until he built another house. That house is called Fateh Manzil, named after his father, Syed Fateh Husain, and it became a gathering point for the village.
The mud house
According to the same article, Shabana Azmi has bought the thatched, mud-walled house where her father was born and may restore the premises into a museum without knocking it down. A Times of India headline from the period reads, "Shabana Azmi wants to convert her ancestral home in UP into a museum". We could read the headline and a summary only, not the full report, so the plan should be treated as an intention reported at that time and not as a finished project.
What the house sits within
The house is part of a larger story. Kaifi founded the Mijwan Welfare Society in 1994, and the article says its schools and training centres include the Kaifi Azmi School and College, a computer training centre and a tailoring and sewing centre. Girls travel to classes on bicycles donated by the society. In 2018, Power Brands honoured Shabana Azmi with an award that cited her work for women's education and empowerment through the Mijwan Welfare Society, according to her Wikipedia biography.
The tailoring centre is an example of how the work developed. The article says it was adopted in 2010 by the designer Manish Malhotra and had nearly 400 women on its rolls, who embroider and sew mainly for his label. The article also says the women earn a fairly decent income, a claim we could not check.
Why a house like this matters
Heritage is usually discussed in terms of forts and palaces. A mud house is easy to lose, because it needs constant upkeep and has no formal protection unless someone chooses to keep it.
What we could not confirm
We could not confirm whether the museum has been created, whether the house has been restored, or whether it is open to visitors. The article we read was published around the poet's centenary and its figures are dated. We did not verify the purchase through any property record, and the Times of India piece was available to us only as a headline.
Sources
*Cover photo: Simon Fraser University, University Communications, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).*