Hashmi Bijapuri

Hashmi Bijapuri was a seventeenth-century Deccani poet of the Adil Shahi court at Bijapur, remembered as the first Rekhti poet and as the author of the masnavi *Yusuf Zelkha*. Writing in Dakhni Urdu before Rekhti had a name, he gave his ghazals a woman's voice and a woman's vocabulary, drawing his imagery from the domestic world of elite households rather than only from the conventional garden of the classical ghazal. His surviving Diwan, published in modern times as *Deewan-e-Hashmi*, therefore reads as a bridge: it keeps the ghazal's form while opening it to everyday speech, household detail, and a frankly female point of view. Later Lucknow poets made Rekhti famous, but Hashmi's Bijapur ghazals are its earliest full flowering, and they remain the key evidence for how Urdu poetry first learned to speak in a woman's idiom.