Yagana Changezi

Mirza Wajid Hussain (1884–1956), who wrote first as "Yaas" (despair) and then as "Yagana" (the matchless) — finally Yagana Changezi — was born in 1884 at Azimabad, now Patna, into a family that traced its line to Iranian migrants in the Mughal army. Mentored in poetry by Shad Azimabadi, he tutored the Nawab of Awadh's grandson at Matyaburj, Calcutta, before settling in Lucknow — the city that would both make and break him. Egotistical, uncompromising and brutally outspoken, he caused scandal after scandal: he attacked the veneration of Ghalib in his prose work Ghalib-Shikan (1934), questioned Iqbal, and made controversial statements on religion that once got him attacked by a mob. Declared an apostate and humiliated by Lucknow's literary circles, he spent his last years in illness and loneliness, dying on 2 February 1956. His tone — direct, curt, stinging — made him an interrogator of life and art rather than a singer of love: "more than writing about the myriad manifestations of love, he wrote about the manifestations of life". His collections Nishtar-e Yaas (1914), Aayat-e Wijdani (1927), Tarana (1933) and Ganjina (1948) were rescued for posterity in Mushfiq Khwaja's Kulliyat-i Yagana (2003).