Tilok Chand Mahroom

The Indus village boy who became Urdu's poet of the unanswered prayer. Tilok Chand Mahroom (1887–1966), born on 1 July 1887 at Mousa Noor Zaman Shah, a village in tehsil Isa Khel of Mianwali district in Punjab, was an Indian Urdu poet admired as much for his simple life and his refusal of religious division as for his verse. Born into a Hindu family and raised among Muslims, he passed his matriculation with first-class honours from the Diamond Jubilee School, Bannu, in 1907, trained as a teacher at the Central Training College, Lahore, and took his bachelor's degree. He began teaching in 1908 at the Mission School, Dera Ismail Khan, became headmaster of the Cantonment Board Middle School in 1933, lectured in Urdu and Persian at Gordon College, Rawalpindi, and was the first headmaster of the F.G. Technical High School at Tariqabad (Lalkurti), Rawalpindi. He had begun writing verse as a schoolboy — a nazm on service to parents at twelve or thirteen, and an elegy on Queen Victoria in 1901 — and while still a student his poems were appearing in the journals Makhzan of Lahore and Zamana of Kanpur. His first major collection, Ganj-e-Ma'ani, appeared in 1932, holding 175 nazms alongside rubais, qasidas, sehras and elegies; later collections included Rubaiyat, Karvan-e-Watan, Nairang-e-Maani, Bacchon Ki Duniya and Bahaar-e-Tifli, and the long nazm Ashk-e-Hasrat, part of Toofan-e-Gham, became his best-known work. His patriotic verse stands in the line of Suroor Jahanabadi and Brij Mohan Chakbast, and his poems for children carry the same patriotic fire. With the riots of Partition he left Rawalpindi in December 1947 and settled in Delhi, where he became Professor of Urdu at Camp College and served until his retirement in December 1957. He died in Delhi on 6 January 1966, after five weeks of illness, aged seventy-eight. His son, the poet and Iqbal scholar Jagan Nath Azad, gave his father's library to the Allama Iqbal Library at the University of Kashmir, where it is kept as the Tilok Chand Mehroom Collection.