Brij Mohan Dattatreya Kaifi

Delhi's scholar-poet — the world is a dream's thought, and Urdu is dearer than every tongue. Brij Mohan Dattatreya Kaifi (1866–1955), known as Kaifi Dehlavi, was a Delhi-born scholar-poet of Urdu who served the language for some sixty-five years — poet, novelist, dramatist, researcher and philologist, and the Delhi school's link between the age of Hali and the modern study of Urdu. Born on 13 December 1866 in Old Delhi into a Kashmiri Pandit family, he was schooled first in a traditional maktab, where he learned Persian under his maternal grandfather, a Persian scholar, and later took his BA from St Stephen's College, Delhi. He knew Arabic, Hindi and Sanskrit besides Persian and English, and was a pupil in poetry of Altaf Hussain Hali. In his student days he edited Khair Andesh, a Congress weekly. He worked for the princely state of Kapurthala, travelled to Europe until the First World War cut the journey short, and served for a time in Kashmir. He helped Lala Sri Ram with Khumkhana-i-Javed, a history of Urdu poetry and poets, completing its fifth volume in 1940 after Sri Ram's death; the sixth, found among his own papers, appeared in 1990. His own books ranged from the long poem Bharat Darpan (1905) and the story collection Khumkhana-i-Kaifi (1924) to the philological studies Manshooraat (1934) and Kaifiya (1942), which explored the peculiarities of Urdu usage and coined new terms. When Maulvi Abdul Haq moved the Anjuman-i Taraqqi-i Urdu to Delhi in 1938, Kaifi joined him and became one of his closest helpers, building branches and conferences across India at the height of the Hindi–Urdu controversy. He lived for many years in Lahore, where his son Pyare Mohan edited The Tribune, and later in Lyallpur; after Partition he returned to India, settling finally in Delhi. A book on his life and work was published in 1989. He died at Ghaziabad on 1 November 1955, aged eighty-eight.