Maharaja Sir Kishan Prasad Shad

Maharaja Sir Kishan Prasad Shad (1864 – 13 May 1940) of Hyderabad was a poet first and a prime minister second — or, as Hyderabad liked to say, a poet who happened to rule. A childhood friend of Nizam Mahbub Ali Khan and heir to a family that traced itself to Raja Todar Mal, he became Peshkar of Hyderabad State in 1892 and its Dewan (Prime Minister) in 1901, taking the title Yamin-us-Saltanat, "right hand of the realm", and the rank of Maharaja. In his first tenure he raised the state's revenues, organised relief after the great Musi Flood of 1908, and left the treasury fuller than he found it; after resigning in 1912 he was called back by Nizam Osman Ali Khan in November 1926 and served until March 1937, passing the Mulki regulations that reserved posts for Hyderabad's own people. He was knighted KCIE in 1903 and GCIE in 1910. Through all of it he remained a disciple of Dagh Dehlvi, writing Urdu and Persian poetry under the takhallus "Shad" — happy — in a Sufi key: ghazal, naat and marsiya, collected in Bagh-e-Shad (1890) and later volumes, and shared in his own magazine Mahbub al-Kalam. His house was a morning court of poets, painters and musicians from across India, Persia and Arabia, and his life — seven wives, Hindu and Muslim, each following her own faith — was itself an argument for the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb he championed. At his death in Hyderabad on 13 May 1940, the Nizam said society had witnessed "the departure of the last vestige of the Mughal Empire".