Qamar Dagar is Keeping Urdu Calligraphy Alive and Giving Words a Body

There are artists who choose their craft, and then there are those for whom the craft seems to have always been waiting. Qamar Dagarbelongs firmly to the latter. Born into the Dagar family, one of India’s most celebrated lineages in classical Dhrupad music, she grew up in a Delhi home where beauty was not decoration but a daily vocabulary. Musicians, poets, and Sufi masters moved through her childhood like seasons. It was, she recalls, an education that happened before she even knew she was receiving one. “Since I come from a family of musicians, this will certainly impact me in everything I do, especially when I am doing calligraphy,” she says. “I was imbibing a lot without realising it.”

One of the most formative of those influences was Hazrat Amir Abdullah Khan, a Sufi master and calligrapher who would stay with the family and work in their presence. Watching him fill blank sheets with Arabic script at astonishing speed and precision was, for the young Qamar, nothing short of miraculous. Her father, the legendary Dhrupad vocalist Saad Fayyazuddin Dagar, further shaped her sensibility by gifting his children a book of works by the great Iraqi-French calligrapher Hassan Massoudy. The effect was immediate and lasting. 

The script did not look like writing to her, it looked like something else entirely, something alive. Her brother, Wasifuddin Dagar, would later find a parallel way of expressing this synergy, using lines to depict the dynamism and abstraction of his musical alaap, proof that in the Dagar world, art forms are never truly separate.

Letters as Living Images

Qamar Dagar is today one of the most celebrated pictorial calligrapher a title earned through decades of work that refuses the boundaries of conventional script. Rather than practising linear calligraphy, the methodical reproduction of established styles or khat such as Nastaliq or Diwani, she has pioneered a form in which words become images of their own meaning. A word like Buzurg (elder) might unfurl into the silhouette of an ancient tree. Jashn (celebration) becomes a lamp, a gathering, a burst of colour. Usha (dawn) is rendered as a figure who arrives each morning to light up the world.

The process, she admits, resists easy explanation. “Sometimes it is the sound of a word, the meaning of a word, the letters that will be used, or sometimes just the words that have such depth, such beauty in them. What if I give a picture to a particular word?” She works fluidly across Hindi and Urdu, one script moving left to right, the other right to left, finding in their natural opposition a creative tension she considers beautiful. “It is like you can have different conversations,” she says. “I find it so fascinating.”

Her solo exhibitions have travelled to France and the United States, and in 2019 she participated in a group exhibition at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. A recent event at the India International Centre of which Dagar was a part, Ehsaas-e-Qalam Aur Pashm, curated by Manisha Gawade, who is also actively engaged in the preservation of the Pashmina tradition, brought together three distinct art forms under one roof in a concept widely praised for its originality.

The Trust, the Tradition, and the Human Hand

In 2017, President Pranab Mukherjee awarded Qamar Dagar the Nari Shakti Puraskar, India’s highest civilian honour for women, in recognition of her work both as a practitioner and as a preservationist. The award acknowledged not merely her art but her institution-building. She is the founder of the Qalamkaari Creative Calligraphy Trust, established with the explicit intent to make calligraphy more widely known and accessible, whilst ensuring that the human element at its heart remains intact.

The Trust organises festivals, workshops, and public events that bring together calligraphers from across traditions and scripts. There are spaces, festivals and workshops as such, where traditional Arabic calligraphers such as Janaab Mehmood Sheikh and Ghayaaauddin Sahab, masters who hand-write the Holy Quran, actively participate alongside contemporary practitioners. For Dagar, this convergence is deeply encouraging. It signals a future in which no tradition is isolated and no script is considered lesser.

She speaks warmly of fellow calligraphers she holds in high regard: Shri Narayana Bhattathiri in Malayalam, Shri Achyut Palav and Shri Santosh Kshirsagar in Devanagari and ancient scripts, Shri Muqtar Ahmed in traditional Arabic forms, Shri Poosapati Parmeshwar Raju in pictorial calligraphy, and practitioners such as Shri Nikheel Aphale, Ms Shipra Rohatgi, and Ms Salva Rasool. Work of equal vitality is being produced in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Odia, and Bengali. “We have much to offer in this field,” she says simply.

The conversation naturally took its space and Dagar started talking about the rise of artificial intelligence and its encroachment on creative practice, and her answer was characteristic: warm, firm, and unhurried. “I love this world and the human element. I want to hold on to it, and I want people to hold on to it. Because we are living human beings, and we need to have this kind of interaction.”

Art Beyond Ownership

For all its quiet radicalism, its blending of scripts, its dissolving of communal boundaries, its insistence on the pictorial within the calligraphic, Qamar Dagar is careful not to let her work be conscripted into political narratives. When asked whether her practice of fusing Hindi and Urdu scripts is a response to the social and political tensions of contemporary India, she is unequivocal. “What I am doing has got nothing to do with the political part of it, not at all. It was just my curious mind. These were the languages I knew. I wanted to bring them together, and that is where it ends.”

What she does embrace, however, is the idea of inclusivity, the possibility that a viewer who cannot read a word of Urdu might still understand it when it takes the form of a Sufi dancer, a lit diya, or a spreading canopy of branches. “I like this inclusiveness that art can bring to people’s lives. I absolutely love that. That is the way to live.” In an era of narrowing definitions and hardening borders, there is something quietly defiant about a woman who spends her days proving that language, at its most beautiful, belongs to everyone.