Hari Chand Akhtar

Lahore's laughing ghazal poet — the priest gets paradise, the poet gets hell. Pandit Harichand Akhtar (1901–1958), born on 15 April 1901 at Hoshiarpur in Punjab, was an Urdu ghazal poet and journalist whose sharp, laughing verse made him one of Lahore's best-loved literary voices. Born into a Brahmin family of the Kaushal line, with no literary tradition behind him, he was schooled at the Government High School, Jalandhar, and Foreman Christian College, Lahore, passed the Munshi Fazil examination, and took his master's degree in English from Punjab University, Lahore. He began writing verse under the pen name 'Sharma'; after meeting Hafeez Jalandhari and becoming his disciple, he took the pen name 'Akhtar'. He spent most of his working life in Lahore, writing for the newspaper Paras, owned and edited by Lala Karam Chand, and serving in the office of the Punjab Legislative Assembly. It was his life as a journalist that fed his satirical and humorous poetry: a conventional ghazal poet in form, he was unlike any other in manner — plain, direct, and always with a sting of wit, so that even his serious verse carries an undercurrent of sarcasm. His best-known ghazal, on the priest's paradise and the poet's hell, is still sung as a qawwali. After Partition he moved to Delhi, where he died in 1958, aged fifty-six. His scattered verse was gathered after his death by his friend Arsh Malsiyani into the volume Kufr-o-Iman.