Agha Hajju Sharaf

Lucknow's court poet — the ghazal that carried a fallen city to Kolkata. Agha Hajju Sharaf (1812–1887) was a classical Urdu poet of Lucknow, a disciple of Haidar Ali Aatish and a poet close to the royal house of Awadh. He lived through the fall of the Lucknow court: after the kingdom was annexed in 1856, he followed the exiled court to Kolkata, where he stayed with Hamid Ali Kaukab, the crown prince of Wajid Ali Shah. His best-known work is Afsana-e-Lucknow, a long masnavi written on Lucknow itself — its streets, its court and its vanishing world. His collected ghazals, Deewan-e-Sharaf, appeared in print in 1875, in his own lifetime; forty-two of his ghazals survive. His verse carries the Lucknow ghazal at its most polished — love, fate and the beloved's beauty in clear, musical Urdu — and it keeps the memory of a city that was already slipping away. He died in 1887, at about seventy-five.