Ilyas Rashidi

Ilyas Rashidi was born in Delhi, British India in 1925, he worked with his brothers, Mohammad Usman Azad and Mohammad Umar Farooqi, for the Delhi-based Urdu newspaper Anjam (owned by Umar) which shifted to Karachi after India's partition in 1947. He launched Nigar from Karachi, Pakistan, modelling it after the Indian film magazine Filmfare.^[1]

Ilyas had purchased a children's magazine Monthly Nigar from his friend Ibne Hassan Nigar, and re-branded it as a weekly film magazine in 1948.^[2]

The Ilyas Rashidi Lifetime Achievement Gold Medal is presented annually at the Nigar Awards in his memory. In January 2017, a press conference was held at a local hotel in Karachi to announce the scheduled date of 16 March 2017 for the 47th Nigar Awards.^[2]

Ilyas Rashidi died in 1997 in Karachi, Pakistan.^[1] He was also affectionately called Baba-e-Filmi Sahafat (Pioneer of Film Journalism) in Pakistan. His son, Aslam Ilyas Rashidi temporarily suspended the annual awarding of Nigar Awards from 2005 to 2012 due to a then ongoing decline in Pakistani film industry during that period.^[4][1]

In 2012, Aslam Ilyas Rashidi announced plans to revive the Nigar Awards for films and stated that this time it would also include awards for the Pakistani television industry.^[1][4]