Basharat Peer

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Basharat Peer
Basharat Peer bharat-s-tiwari-photography-IMG 9738 July 28, 2017.jpg
Peer in 2017
Bornc. 1977
Alma mater
OccupationJournalist, author, political commentator
Notable credit(s)
Spouse(s)
(
m. 2013)

Basharat Peer (Kashmiri: بشارت پیٖر, born 1977) is an Indian-American[lower-alpha 1] journalist, script writer, and author.[4]

Peer spent his early youth in the Kashmir Valley before shifting to Aligarh and then, Delhi for higher education.[5] In August 2006,[6] he relocated from India to New York City in the United States, where he is currently based as an opinion-editor at The New York Times.[7][8][9]

Early and personal life[edit]

Peer was born in Seer Hamdan in the Anantnag district of the erstwhile Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir into a Kashmiri Muslim family.[10] He did his early schooling from Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya Aishmuqam, an educational institution located near the city of Anantnag, and attended Aligarh Muslim University as well as the University of Delhi for higher education in the fields of political science and law, respectively. Peer also attended the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in the United States.[11]

Peer's father is a retired officer of the Jammu and Kashmir Administrative Service.[12] He married Ananya Vajpeyi—a Delhi-based academician of Hindu–Sikh[13] background—in 2013, following an eight-year-long courtship.[14][15]

Career[edit]

Peer started his career as a reporter at Rediff and Tehelka. In his early career he was based in Delhi. He has worked as an Assistant Editor at Foreign Affairs and was a Fellow at Open Society Institute, New York. He was a Roving Editor at The Hindu. He has written extensively on South Asian politics for Granta,[16] Foreign Affairs,[17] The Guardian,[18] FT Magazine,[19] The New Yorker,[20] The National[21] and The Caravan.[22]

He is the author of Curfewed Night, an eyewitness account of the Kashmir conflict, which won the Crossword Prize for Non-Fiction and was chosen among the Books of the Year by The Economist and The New Yorker.[23][24] Peer ran the "India Ink" blog on the digital edition of The New York Times.[25]

Notable work[edit]

Peer was the script writer along with Vishal Bhardwaj for the 2014 Bollywood film Haider, in which he also made a special appearance.[1][26] He is also known for his literary pieces. His open letter to Indians under the title of Letter to an unkonown Indian started a literary debate on kashmir dispute.[27]

Publications[edit]

  • Curfewed night. Noida: Random House India. 2008.
  • "Modern Mecca". A Reporter at Large. The New Yorker. 88 (9): 74–81, 84–87. 16 April 2012.

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. He regards himself as simply Kashmiri, with his nationality being a "matter of dispute", owing to the violent and long-running conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.[1][2][3]

References[edit]

  1. 1.0 1.1 Sircar, Subhadip (11 August 2010). "'My Nationality a Matter of Dispute': Basharat Peer". WSJ. Retrieved 18 April 2017.
  2. Peer, Basharat (2 March 2019). "Opinion | The Young Suicide Bomber Who Brought India and Pakistan to the Brink of War (Published 2019)". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 7 February 2021.
  3. Shamsie, Kamila (4 June 2010). "Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer | Book review". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 7 February 2021.
  4. Reporter, The Newspaper's Staff (25 February 2015). "Nothing as difficult as writing a book: Basharat Peer". DAWN.COM. Retrieved 17 March 2022.
  5. Nath, Shiven (23 September 2020). "Curfewed Night- Book Review". Modern Diplomacy. Retrieved 7 February 2021.
  6. Peer, Basharat (June 2007). "Style Over Substance". Columbia Journalism Review. Archived from the original on 7 February 2021. Retrieved 7 February 2021.
  7. "The Wail of Kashmir". Indian Express. 30 November 2008. Retrieved 14 May 2010.
  8. "How green was my valley". The Hindu. Chennai, India. 7 December 2008. Archived from the original on 28 February 2009. Retrieved 14 May 2010.
  9. "Basharat Peer is New York Times staff Editor". Kashmir Life. 22 December 2016.[permanent dead link]
  10. "Curfewed Night | Book review". the Guardian. 19 June 2010. Retrieved 7 February 2021.
  11. "'Curfewed Night' by Basharat Peer, M.A. '07, gets high praise from The New Yorker". Archived from the original on 10 December 2013. Retrieved 2013-06-29.
  12. Peer, Basharat; Basharat Peer (2 February 2010). Curfewed Night. Random House India. p. 52. ISBN 9788184000900.
  13. Vajpeyi, Ananya (27 June 2011). "THE INWARD EYE - Only Kabir's name can stand for India's vast poetic traditions". Telegraph India. Archived from the original on 7 February 2021. Retrieved 7 February 2021. I knew of Allahabad because that was the place associated with Harivansh Rai Bachchan, the older Hindi poet who had first helped my father to find his feet in Delhi in the early 1960s, and who, together with his wife Teji, had acted in loco parentis for my Brahmin father at his — at the time rather controversial — wedding to my Sikh mother.
  14. "Vogue India – On The Same Page" (PDF). Vogue India. 2014: 104–105. May 2014. Archived from the original (PDF) on 7 February 2021.
  15. Bhatia, Ritika (1 November 2014). "Basharat Peer: The man who scripted Haider". Business Standard India. Retrieved 7 February 2021.
  16. "Kashmir's Forever War". Granta. Archived from the original on 1 December 2013.
  17. Peermay/June 2012, Basharat (May–June 2012). "India's Broken Promise". Foreign Affairs. {{cite magazine}}: Cite magazine requires |magazine= (help)
  18. Peer, Basharat (5 July 2003). "Victims of December 13". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 5 July 2003.
  19. "Divided but not forgotten". Financial Times Magazine. Retrieved 16 November 2012.
  20. Peer, Basharat (13 May 2013). "Posts by Basharat Peer". The New Yorker.
  21. "Bound for success". The National. Retrieved 6 June 2009.
  22. "The Legacy of The Looming Tower". The Caravan. Retrieved 1 September 2010.
  23. Najar, Nida (24 February 2010). "Witnessing Kashmir's Invisible War". The New York Times.
  24. Shamsie, Kamila (5 June 2010). "Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir by Basharat Peer". The Guardian. London.
  25. "Prominent Kashmiri journalist Basharat Peer to take over 'Times' blog India Ink | Capital New York". Archived from the original on 22 June 2013. Retrieved 29 June 2013.
  26. "Up Close with Haider's scriptwriter, Basharat Peer". Hindustan Times. 10 October 2014. Retrieved 19 August 2019.
  27. Peer, Baharat. "Letter to an Unknown Indian". Retrieved 15 October 2022.

External links[edit]

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