Hafeez Hoshiarpuri

The voice behind the century's ghazal — love that never grows few, and the friend who is hard to find. Hafeez Hoshiarpuri (1912–1973), born Shaikh Abdul Hafeez Saleem on 5 January 1912 at Hoshiarpur in Punjab, was one of the most refined ghazal poets of his generation. He was educated at Government College Lahore, where he studied alongside Faiz Ahmad Faiz; in October 1929 the teacher Sufi Tabassum first heard them both at a college mushaira. He began as a teacher, then entered government service, and after Partition made his life in Pakistan. He was one of the founders of Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq, a researcher and a teacher of philosophy, and a master of tarikh-goee — the art of the chronogram, hiding a date inside a verse. He was the ustad of Nasir Kazmi, who learned the ghazal at his feet and went on to become one of the great names of Urdu poetry. His own ghazals are smooth and lyrical, balancing romance with reflection, and his most famous — "Mohabbat karne wale kam na honge", written in the 1920s — has been sung by Mehdi Hassan, Farida Khanum and Jagjit Singh, and a century after it was written, by Arooj Aftab, whose rendition won the Grammy Award for Best Global Music Performance in 2022. His collection Maqam-e-Ghazal appeared after his death. He died in Karachi on 10 January 1973, aged 61.