Qayem Chandpuri

Qayem Chandpuri (1722–1793), born Sheikh Qayam-ud-din at Chandpur in Bijnor district, was one of the prominent poets of the eighteenth-century Delhi school — the contemporary, and the self-declared rival, of Mir Taqi Mir, Mirza Sauda and Khwaja Mir Dard. He began as a disciple of Mir Dard and then of Mir himself, but made his own road: a plain, simple, idiomatic rekhta, stripped of ornament, that claimed dignity for the spoken tongue. Delhi in his lifetime was a city of invasions and upheaval — he wrote shahr-ashobs on the turmoil of Shah Alam II's Delhi — and his long years at Rampur, and a spell at Lucknow under Raja Ticket Roy's patronage, gave him the full canvas of the declining Mughal world. Alongside the divan, he left a prose tazkira, Tazkira-e-Makhzan-e-Nikaat, keeping the record of his age's poets. His famous boast — that he gave rekhta itself "the robe of acceptance" — is the claim of a whole school: that Urdu, the plain tongue, needs no apology before any master.