Jagan Nath Azad

Jagan Nath Azad (1918–2004) was an Indian Urdu poet, writer and academician, and the foremost modern authority on the life and thought of Muhammad Iqbal. Born on 5 December 1918 at Isa Khel in Mianwali district, the son of the poet Tilok Chand Mehroom, he studied at Gordon College, Rawalpindi, and at Punjab University, Lahore, before a long career in journalism and government service in Delhi and Srinagar. After retiring in 1977 he became Professor and Head of Urdu at the University of Jammu. He wrote more than seventy books — poetry, criticism, biography and travelogue — including about a dozen studies of Iqbal in Urdu and English and an Urdu translation of Iqbal's Javed Nama. He is widely credited with writing Pakistan's first national anthem at Muhammad Ali Jinnah's request in 1947. He presided over the Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu (Hind) from 1993 until his death in New Delhi on 24 July 2004.