Mirza Shauq Lakhnavi

Mirza Shauq Lakhnavi (d. 1871) was a poet of Lucknow, born in the city in the late eighteenth century — his exact birth year is not settled — and he lived his whole life there, through the last decades of Nawabi rule and the fall of the old order. His real name was Tasadduq Husain Khan; "Shauq", longing, was the name he wrote under. He began with ghazals, but his fame rests on his masnavis, above all Zahr-e-Ishq, the Poison of Love, written between 1855 and 1862: a love story told in his own voice, of a poet who falls for a merchant's daughter glimpsed from a neighbouring rooftop, and of a parting that ends in her death by poison and his own attempt to follow her. Plain-spoken where the court ghazal was ornate, drawing on the everyday speech of Lucknow and its idioms and proverbs, the masnavi moved its first audiences to tears — its stage performance was stopped, its printing banned, and the ban was only lifted in 1919 — yet handwritten copies passed from reader to reader, and its popularity came to overshadow the most celebrated masnavis of the age. His other masnavis, Bahar-e-Ishq, Fareb-e-Ishq and Lazzat-e-Ishq, belong to the same world of love told as a lived story. Only a handful of his ghazals survive beside them, but they carry the same voice: plain, direct, and unafraid of grief, of death, and of its own sins.