Dil Shahjahanpuri

Shahjahanpur's classical ghazal poet — love told straight, from its beginning to its end. Dil Shahjahanpuri (1875–1959), born Zameer Hasan Khan in Shahjahanpur in 1875, was a ghazal poet of the old classical line who lived his whole life in the small town whose name he carried. He learnt his craft as a disciple of Amir Meenai, one of the great masters of the nineteenth-century ghazal, and he kept that manner all his life — plain speech, clean rhyme, and love, separation and the wine-cup as his whole world. Two collections of his ghazals survive in print, Naghma-e-Dil and Tarana-e-Dil, and he also wrote a novel, Dard-e-Dil. A full study of his life and work appeared in 1988, nearly thirty years after his death, and it remains the one book devoted to him. He died in Shahjahanpur in 1959, in the town where he was born.