Moti Lal Saqi

Moti Lal Saqi (1936 - 21 May 1999) was an Indian poet, writer, folk-lorist and researcher.

Born in 1936 at Bijbehara, Kashmir, Moti Lal Saqi enriched Kashmiri language and literature in several ways, and emerged as a major poet and critic in the language while still in his youth. From the lyrical romanticism of "Modury Khwab" (Sweet Dreams), his first collection of poems, to the spiritual restlessness and an inward quest for higher values based on faith reflected in "Mansar", for which he won the Sahitya Academi award, and "Mrigvan", Saqi underwent a significant change in his sensibility as a poet and established an idiom distinctly his own. The traumatic experience of uprootment from his native soil in 1990 found a poignant expression in many of his poems, his long poem "Marsi" (Elergy) being a most disturbing document of the tragedy of the Pandits ' displacement. His latest collection Niry Nagma (Songs of the Green Meadows) shows his intense nostalgia for Kashmir and points to the torture of having to live in a forced exile away from the valley's myriad charms and attractions.