Faqir Muhammad Khan Goya

Faqir Muhammad Khan Goya (c. 1784 – c. 1850) was the soldier-poet Nawab of Malihabad, in Awadh. Born into an Afridi Pashtun family whose roots lay in the Khyber region, he mastered Urdu and Persian and followed the school of Imam Bakhsh Nasikh. He served as a soldier and commander under Yashwant Rao Holkar at Indore and under Ghaziuddin Haider, Nawab of Awadh, rising to Commander-in-Chief of the Awadh army, and founded the Tharri-Fatehnagar estate at Malihabad. His Diwan-e-Goya holds ghazals, qasidas, naats, nohas and salaams, and his Bustan-e-Hikmat (Nawal Kishore, 1887) renders the Persian Anwar-e-Suhaili into Urdu. He is remembered in Malihabad's literary line as the great-grandfather of Josh Malihabadi — the elder voice of the town whose poetry Josh would later carry to the world.