Amanat Lakhnavi

Agha Hasan Amanat — Amanat Lakhnavi (birth year disputed; died 1858) — is the man who put Urdu poetry on a stage. Attached to the court of Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Awadh, he wrote in 1853 Indar Sabha, the first complete Urdu stage play — a musical opera in verse, some 830 couplets and 72 songs, telling the love story of Sabz Pari and Gulfam in a blend of ghazal, thumri, holi and savan songs, chhand and chaubola. Staged at the Nawab's court, it became the seed of Urdu musical theatre — the ancestor of the Parsi stage and, through it, of the film song. Sayyid Mohammad Abdullah credited Amanat with beginning the geet tradition in Urdu. Beyond the play he was a Lucknow-school poet of the old mold: hundreds of ghazals and marsiyas in Urdu and Persian, in the flowery, artificial diction his age loved. He lost his speech at twenty and only partly recovered it — a poet who knew what silence was, and filled it with music. He died in 1858, the year the world his play had been written for came to an end.