Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

Agha Hasan Amanat — Amanat Lakhnavi (birth year disputed; died 1858) — is the man who put Urdu poetry on a stage. Attached to the court of Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Awadh, he wrote in 1853 Indar Sabha, the first complete Urdu stage play — a musical opera in verse, some 830 couplets and 72 songs, telling the love story of Sabz Pari and Gulfam in a blend of ghazal, thumri, holi and savan songs, chhand and chaubola. Staged at the Nawab's court, it became the seed of Urdu musical theatre — the ancestor of the Parsi stage and, through it, of the film song. Sayyid Mohammad Abdullah credited Amanat with beginning the geet tradition in Urdu. Beyond the play he was a Lucknow-school poet of the old mold: hundreds of ghazals and marsiyas in Urdu and Persian, in the flowery, artificial diction his age loved. He lost his speech at twenty and only partly recovered it — a poet who knew what silence was, and filled it with music. He died in 1858, the year the world his play had been written for came to an end.

Ameer Khusro (1253–1325), born Abul Hasan Yaminuddin Khusro in Patiyali (Etah, U.P.), is the first poet of Rekhta/Hindavi — the founding voice of Urdu — and an icon of the Delhi Sultanate. The son of a Turkic Central-Asian father and an Indian mother, he became a devoted disciple of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya and served as court poet under the sultans of Delhi. His primary works are in Persian — the Khamsa, the masnavis Hasht Bihisht and Nuh Sipihir, and the prose chronicle Khazain-ul-Futuh — but it is his Hindavi verse that made him immortal: the playful pahelis (riddles) woven into Indian folklore, and the qawwali kalams still sung seven centuries on. His ghazal "Ze-hal-e-miskin" — Persian and Hindavi alternating line by line — is regarded as the first ghazal ever written in Rekhta. Honoured as Tuti-e-Hind (Parrot of India) and called the father of qawwali, he fused Persian and Indian music, created the khayal and tarana forms, and is traditionally credited with the invention of the tabla and sitar. He died in Delhi in October 1325, months after his master, and lies buried beside Nizamuddin's grave.

Delhi's later classical voice — the dust of her lane, the sweat on her brow, and a bargain struck with the heart's pain. Anwar Dehlvi (1847–1885), born Sayyad Shujauddin — also styled Umrao Mirza — in Delhi, was one of the last prominent poets of the classical Delhi school, counted among the Delhi poets who came after Ghalib, Zauq and Momin. He was the younger brother of Zaheer Dehlvi, whose memoir of 1857 stands as an eyewitness account of the fall of Delhi. Anwar learned his craft first as a disciple of Zauq and then of Ghalib, and his ghazals carry the Delhi manner in its plainest, most musical form — love and separation, the beloved's lane, wine and the tavern, and the pain of the heart, taken as a bargain. The devastation of 1857 ruined him along with the city: he left Delhi and took refuge with the Raja of Jaipur, where he spent his last years and died in 1885. His verse survives chiefly in his Diwan-e-Anwar, also known as Nazm-e-Dilfroz, with Nazm-e-Dilfareb among his other books; and a handful of his couplets — the sweat on the beloved's brow, the dust of her lane, the secret one guards without knowing it — are still on people's lips today.

Ashraf Ali Khan Fughan (died 1772) was a prominent 18th-century poet of Delhi and a contemporary of Mir Taqi Mir. His birth year is not settled — 1725/6 is one given year, while other accounts place him vaguely in the early 1700s — so his birth year is recorded here as Unknown rather than choosing between them. His Diwan-e-Fughan survives in modern editions, and 15 of his ghazals survive. He is praised for fresh imagery, elegant diction, and a playful satire and wit that set him beside Mir and Sauda among the Delhi masters. One fuller life story — foster brother of Emperor Ahmad Shah Bahadur, pupil of Ali Quli Nadeem, bearer of the title Zarif-ul-Mulk, later in Murshidabad, Awadh and Azimabad (Patna) — is also told of him, though it remains uncertain; the title itself is also known as a name variant.

Baba Farid (1173–1266), born Fariduddin Masud, was the first great voice of Punjabi poetry and one of the founding saints of the Chishti order in India. He was born in 1173 at Kothewal, a village near Multan, to Jamal-ud-din Sulaiman and Maryam Bibi; the family traced its line to Kabul, and tradition says the child was named after the Persian poet Fariduddin Attar. He learned first from his mother and his father, then sought the path of the Sufis, becoming the disciple of Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki in Delhi. When his master died in 1235, Farid became his spiritual successor — but instead of taking the seat in Delhi, he left the capital, set up a centre of devotion at Hansi, and then settled at Ajodhan, the town that took a new name from him: Pakpattan, the Holy Ferry. There he lived simply and austerely, teaching all who came, and there the young Nizamuddin Auliya came to him and became his disciple and successor. Farid wrote in the people's own tongue. His short Punjabi verses — plain, severe, and tender at once — speak of the body as a guest-house that must one day be emptied, of the grave waiting at the road's end, and of a love that asks for nothing. They were carried by singers for three centuries before they were gathered into the Guru Granth Sahib, where they are still read and sung today. "Ganjshakar", treasury of sugar, was the name the people gave him, for the sweetness of his speech. He died at Pakpattan on 7 May 1266, and his shrine there is still one of Punjab's great places of pilgrimage, visited by Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus alike.

Hyderabad's Parsi priest-poet — every idol a memory of God, every house of worship one search. Bahram Ji (1828–1895), born on 2 December 1828 at Navsari in Gujarat, was a Parsi high priest and Urdu poet of Hyderabad. He received his religious training in his home town and was made a mobed — a Parsi priest — in 1843; after study at Poona under his father and elder brother, he came to Hyderabad, where he perfected his Urdu and Persian and his knowledge of Parsi theology. He served as Dastur, the high priest of the Parsis of Hyderabad and Secunderabad, and from 1863 also as a talluq-dar, a revenue official of the state; in 1875 he retired from the revenue post and returned wholly to the priesthood, using the community's funds generously for Parsi welfare. Alongside a life of religious duty he wrote poetry in Urdu and Persian, and his collected Urdu verse, the Deewan-e-Bahram, was published in 1943, long after his death. His ghazals carry a priest's open gaze: the Muslim and the Brahman, the mosque and the temple, the idol and the memory of God — all one search. He died at Hyderabad on 18 March 1895, aged 66.

Benares' Moon of India — the father of modern Hindi letters who wrote Urdu ghazals as Rasa. Bhartendu Harishchandra (1850–1885), born on 9 September 1850 at Benares, was the founder of modern Hindi literature and theatre — and a poet of Urdu who wrote under the pen name Rasa. Born into a wealthy family of Benares, he lost both his parents while still young, and his father Gopal Chandra was himself a poet. At fifteen he travelled with his family to the Jagannath temple at Puri, a journey that turned him toward the Bengal Renaissance and a life of writing. In 1880 the scholars of Kashi honoured him with the title Bharatendu — the Moon of India. He wrote in Hindi, Braj, Urdu, Sanskrit, Bengali and English, and he made the stage a mirror of his country: his plays Bharat Durdasha, Satya Harishchandra, Neel Devi and Andher Nagari spoke of a land in chains, while his journals Kavi Vachan Sudha, Harishchandra Magazine and Bala Bodhini carried reform, women's education and the Swadeshi cause. Beneath the public work he wrote Urdu ghazals in the classical manner — love and longing, the festival of Holi, devotion to Krishna, and the shortness of the world that keeps neither Alexander nor Jamshid. He died at Benares on 6 January 1885, aged only 34.

Bulleh Shah (c. 1680–1757), born Sayyid Abdullah Shah Qadri, was a Punjabi Sufi poet of Kasur, and one of the greatest voices Punjab has ever produced. He was born around 1680 — Uch is the place most often named, though some accounts give Pandoke, near Kasur, where his family settled when he was six. His father, Shah Muhammad Darwaish, was a village mosque preacher who taught him his first lessons while the boy worked as a herder; his higher learning came at Kasur, under Hafiz Ghulam Murtaza, and then at Lahore, where he became the disciple of the Qadiri Sufi Shah Inayat — a gardener of the Arain caste. That choice cost him everything respectable: a Sayyid bowing to a man of low caste shocked his family, and the town's clerics declared him a non-believer. He answered them in the people's own tongue. His kafis — short, song-like poems built on a refrain — ask the simplest and hardest questions: who am I, if I am neither believer nor unbeliever, neither Moses nor Pharaoh? More than 150 kafis and 94 other compositions survive, carried for over a century by singers before they were first printed. When he died at Kasur in 1757, the clerics who had condemned him refused to lead his funeral prayer; it was led instead by Syed Zahid Hamdani, and a shrine grew over his grave. Three centuries on, his verses are still sung — by qawwals, by rock bands, in village gatherings and concert halls — wherever Punjabis gather. He is remembered as the Poet of the People.

Chandu Lal Bahadur Shadan (birth year disputed, 1761–62 / 1763 / 1766 – 15 April 1845) was a Maharaja, statesman and poet of Hyderabad. Born in Hyderabad to a Khatri family from Rai Bareilly, he rose from a clerk of the vegetable market to become Prime Minister of Hyderabad State, serving from after Munir-ul-Mulk's death in 1832–33 until his resignation in 1844. He received the title of Maharaja from Sikandar Jah in 1819–20 and was famed for a generosity that drew poets and men of letters to his court — he even invited Zauq from Delhi, who declined. He studied Persian poetry with Qatil and Hafiz and Urdu poetry with Shah Nasir, and wrote extensively in Persian — a Kulliyat, a 4,025-couplet masnavi, three divans of ghazals — alongside Urdu verse, of which one divan has been published. He died at Hyderabad on 15 April 1845.

Chhannu Lal Dilgeer (c. 1780 – 1848) was Lucknow's great marsiya poet — the man who gave up ghazal for Karbala. Born in Lucknow, the brother of Raja Jhau Lal, deputy prime minister under Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula, he first studied under Mirza Khani Nawazish and later under Nasikh, and was praised by Mushafi. He began as a ghazal poet under the takhallus Tarab, but, captivated by Karbala, he abandoned ghazal entirely — famously throwing his ghazal diwan into Moti Jheel, Lucknow — and devoted himself to marsiya and salam. He converted to Islam and took the name Ghulam Hussain. A speech impairment kept him from reciting his own marsiyas, but he innovated in composition, was popular under Ghazi-ud-Din Haider, and received Rs. 400 from Nawab Mohammad Ali Shah for a masnavi in praise of Hussainabad. He is credited with 417 marsiyas; his Majmua Marasi Mirza Dilgeer (Nawal Kishore Press) is preserved in the Tagore Library of Lucknow University. His most famous marsiya, Ghabraye Gi Zainab, on Zainab's arrival after Karbala, is still recited worldwide in majlis and Sham-e-Ghareeba. He died in 1848 and lies in Lucknow's "tilted grave".

Pandit Daya Shankar Naseem (1811–1845) — born Daya Shankar Kaul in Lucknow — was a 19th-century Awadh poet and disciple of Khwaja Haider Ali Atash. Born into a respected Kashmiri Pandit family, he served as a clerk in the Nawabi army's finance department under Nawabs Ghazi-ud-Din Haider and Naseer-ud-Din Haider, at the height of Lucknow's comforts and luxuries. He began, like Atash's other pupils, with the ghazal — but the ghazal could not contain his imagination. His enduring fame rests on the romantic masnavi *Gulzar-e-Naseem* (published 1844): the tale of Prince Taj-ul-Muluk and the fairy Gul Bakawali, versified from Persian prose — hailed as the masnavi that represents the Lucknow school of poetry, and prized above all for its language, the very idiom of dabistan-e-Lucknow. He died young, at about thirty-four; his authorship of the masnavi was once questioned and was defended by Brij Narayan Chakbast.

Delhi's first voice in Urdu — the founder who gave the ghazal the language of the bazaar. Faez Dehlvi (1690–1738), born Nawab Sadruddin Mohammad Khan in Delhi, was one of the earliest poets of northern India to leave behind a complete divan in Urdu, and a founder of Delhi's Urdu poetry before Mir. His forefathers had come from Iran and settled in Delhi, and his father, Mohammad Khalil Zabardast Khan, was a Mughal noble of high rank who served as a judge in Jaunpur and as an administrator in Awadh. Faez was brought up in a disciplined and cultured household, educated under his father's eye and by accomplished teachers, and learned Arabic and Persian alongside the living speech of Delhi's streets and bazaars. He wrote about nineteen thousand verses in Persian and some five hundred in Urdu — ghazals, masnavis and other poems — and in the Urdu verse he took the people's tongue, still new to poetry, and gave it the full ghazal: Persian compounds, similes and metaphors set beside plain dialect words, in a style praised for its simplicity and clarity. His ghazals sing mostly of love — divine love and the beauty of the beloved — and his Holi verses show a poet at home in the festivals and colours of India. His last years were shadowed by money troubles and by a troubled mind; he withdrew into seclusion and stopped meeting people. He died in Delhi in 1738 and was buried there. Only a part of his Persian work survives, but the five hundred Urdu verses that remain mark the moment when Delhi began to speak its poetry in its own tongue.

Faqir Muhammad Khan Goya (c. 1784 – c. 1850) was the soldier-poet Nawab of Malihabad, in Awadh. Born into an Afridi Pashtun family whose roots lay in the Khyber region, he mastered Urdu and Persian and followed the school of Imam Bakhsh Nasikh. He served as a soldier and commander under Yashwant Rao Holkar at Indore and under Ghaziuddin Haider, Nawab of Awadh, rising to Commander-in-Chief of the Awadh army, and founded the Tharri-Fatehnagar estate at Malihabad. His Diwan-e-Goya holds ghazals, qasidas, naats, nohas and salaams, and his Bustan-e-Hikmat (Nawal Kishore, 1887) renders the Persian Anwar-e-Suhaili into Urdu. He is remembered in Malihabad's literary line as the great-grandfather of Josh Malihabadi — the elder voice of the town whose poetry Josh would later carry to the world.

Fidvi Lahori (1729–1780) was born Mukund Lal into a Hindu Bania family of Lahore. He converted to Islam and took the name Mirza Fidai Beg, with "Fidvi" — one who sacrifices himself, a devotee — as his takhallus. After several years in Isfahan, he came to Delhi and became a pupil of Sabir Ali Sabir. A qasida he wrote for Ahmad Shah won him a horse, a sword and a thousand rupees. He served at the courts of Nawab Muhammad Yar Khan and later Nawab Zabita Khan. His poetic rivalry with Mirza Sauda was famous: Sauda lampooned him in satires, one of them in Punjabi, that survive in Sauda's kulliyat. Little of Fidvi's own Diwan has survived, but one of his couplets — on the lover's funeral going out with pomp — has passed into proverb. He died in 1780, in Lahore according to most accounts, though Mashafi says Moradabad.

Ghawwasi was a seventeenth-century Dakhni poet of the Deccan, also known as Gawwasi Bedri and in literary histories as Mulla Ghawwasi, court poet of Golconda under Sultan Abdullah Qutb Shah. His fame rests on the romance masnavi Saif al-Muluk wa Badi' al-Jamal — the tale of Prince Saif al-Muluk and Badi' al-Jamal — begun under Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah and completed in 1035 AH (1625–26), in over two thousand verses; literary histories also credit him with a Tutinama. As a court poet he was trusted enough to be sent as an envoy to Bijapur in 1045 AH, when the Adil Shahi court sent its own envoy to Golconda. His surviving ghazals, in plain Dakhni, turn on the saqi's cup, the beloved who is the heart's comfort, and a proud final claim: that no one has grasped Ghawwasi's manner. The takhallus itself — the diver — suits a poet of romance, descending for pearls.

Mir Ghulam Ali Azad Bilgrami (1704–1786) was born at Bilgram, in Awadh, into a family of scholars, and became one of the great learned men of eighteenth-century India — a poet in Arabic and Persian, a biographer of poets, and a historian of his own town and age. Taught first by his grandfather, the scholar-poet Mir Abdul Jalil Bilgrami, he travelled widely in his youth — Delhi, Lahore, Multan, Sind — and in 1737 set out for the Hijaz, where he spent two years studying the traditions of the Prophet in Mecca and Medina. On his return he settled at Aurangabad in the Deccan, where he lived the rest of his long life, its first seven years in seclusion at a saint's tomb, refusing court service and reserving his praise-poetry for the Prophet and the saints — the devotion that earned him the title Hassan of Hind, the Hassan of India. His Arabic diwan alone contains more than three thousand couplets, and beside it stand a Persian diwan and long masnavis; but his lasting gift to literature is his biographical writing. In three great Persian dictionaries of poets — Yad-e-Bayza, with lives of 532 poets; Sarv-e-Azad, with 143 poets of India, among them eight early Urdu poets; and Khizana-e-Amira, written in 1762–63, with 135 poets — he preserved the lives and verses of men he often knew himself, and in Ma'asir al-Kiram he wrote the history of Bilgram, its saints and learned men. His Subhat al-Marjan, the Coral Rosary, written in Arabic in 1763–64, wove together Indian and Arabic learning and praised India as the first home of Adam. He died at Aurangabad in 1786, aged eighty-two, and was buried at Khuldabad, near the shrine of Amir Hasan Dihlavi.

The witty chronicler-poet of old Delhi and Lucknow, whose maqtas still sting and heal.

Lucknow's "fire" of the ghazal — idiom-rich verse, Nasikh's great rival.

Hashmi Bijapuri was a seventeenth-century Deccani poet of the Adil Shahi court at Bijapur, remembered as the first Rekhti poet and as the author of the masnavi *Yusuf Zelkha*. Writing in Dakhni Urdu before Rekhti had a name, he gave his ghazals a woman's voice and a woman's vocabulary, drawing his imagery from the domestic world of elite households rather than only from the conventional garden of the classical ghazal. His surviving Diwan, published in modern times as *Deewan-e-Hashmi*, therefore reads as a bridge: it keeps the ghazal's form while opening it to everyday speech, household detail, and a frankly female point of view. Later Lucknow poets made Rekhti famous, but Hashmi's Bijapur ghazals are its earliest full flowering, and they remain the key evidence for how Urdu poetry first learned to speak in a woman's idiom.

Mirza Hatim Ali Beg — known by his pen name Mehr — was a classical Urdu poet of the nineteenth century and a contemporary and friend of Mirza Ghalib. He began writing poetry at about fourteen and soon won notice for his fluency, his smooth diction, and his command of language; he was also skilled in composing chronograms. By profession he was a High Court lawyer, and after the upheaval of 1857 he was rewarded for his loyalty to the government with robes of honour and the grant of two villages, whose income let him live the rest of his life in comfort. He also served as an honorary magistrate in Agra. His works include Diwan-e-Mehr, Para-e-Arooz, Ayagh-e-Farangistan, Almas-e-Darakhshan, and several masnavis, among them Masnavi Shua-e-Mehr and Masnavi Dagh-e-Figar. Ghalib admired his Shuaa-e-Mehr and corresponded with him. Mehr died in 1879. His ghazals survive as a fluent, witty voice from the last generation of the Delhi tradition before the old order passed.

Muhammad Mazharuddin Ibn-e-Nishati was a seventeenth-century Dakhni court poet of Golconda under Sultan Abdullah Qutb Shah, remembered for a single great work: the masnavi Phulban ("Flower Garden"), composed in 1656. In about 3,500 lines and 2,000 couplets, Phulban retells in Dakhni Urdu the Persian Basatin ("Gardens") of Ahmad Zubairi, a fourteenth-century work from the reign of Muhammad bin Tughluq. It is a romance of adventures, anecdote leading into anecdote, opening with a tale told by a dervish to the king of a mythical city of gold, and following, among others, Princess Samanbar's search for Prince Humayun. Literary histories place Nishati among the major poets of the first Dakhni period, beside Wajhi, Ghawwasi and Nusrati. His surviving ghazal, in the same Dakhni, is a poet's boast in garden language: his garden is ever fresh, his bouquet always in bloom, and every verse stands out in delicacy like the brow of the beauties.

Shaikh Imdad Ali, known by his takhallus Bahr, was a nineteenth-century poet and scholar of Lucknow and a disciple of Imam Bakhsh Nasikh. Born around 1810, he devoted his life to language itself: he was praised for his precision of expression, his linguistic research, and his art of presentation, and his prose work *Bahrul Bayan* takes up the rules of Urdu. Patronage took him briefly to Rampur, where Nawab Kalb Ali Khan honoured his learning with a salary, but he returned to Lucknow and lived on a small stipend from the daughter of Nawab Amjad Ali Shah. He never compiled his Diwan in his lifetime; after his death in 1878 his friend Syed Muhammad Khan Rand gathered it, and the sole manuscript of *Bahrul Bayan* survives in the Raza Library, Rampur. Bahr's ghazals are those of a craftsman — witty, exact, and fond of turning a familiar image until it surprises.

Lucknow's dazzling wit — the poet-linguist who gave Urdu its first grammar and its most playful tales.

Mirza Jafar Ali Hasrat was an eighteenth-century Lucknow poet and a prominent contemporary of Mir Taqi Mir, known for his depiction of physicality in romantic poetry. He belonged to the early Lucknow school, at a moment when Urdu ghazal was finding a voice distinct from Delhi's, and his influence is visible in his most famous disciple, Qalandar Bakhsh Jurat, who carried the same frank, bodily idiom further. Hasrat's own surviving work is small — one ghazal and two celebrated couplets, with a *Kulliyat-e-Hasrat* published in 1966 — but its note is unmistakable: a lover who accepts the beloved's cruelty as the beloved's pleasure, and who would rather be kept in the cage than freed without wings. That combination of devotion and defiance, tenderness and bodily directness, marks him as a Lucknow voice in his own right, not merely as Mir's contemporary.

Joshish Azimabadi (1737–1801) was a classical Urdu poet of Azimabad — the 18th-century name for Patna in Bihar — and a prominent contemporary of Mir Taqi Mir. He wrote "at far-off Azimabad in Delhi style," proof that the Delhi ghazal had travelled well beyond the capital by the mid-1700s and found a serious practitioner in the east. Little else about his life is preserved: no given name, teacher or court attachment is reliably recorded, and his work survives principally through his diwan, Deewan-e-Joshish, in a 1976 Bihar Urdu Academy edition. What the couplets show is a poet equally at home in love's dishevelled complaint and in Sufi argument. He turns the beloved's tress into a mirror of his own distraught state, blesses a cruel beloved with ironic courtesy, and, in his most philosophical verses, dissolves the quarrel of temple and sanctuary into one truth: the Kaaba and the idol-house are one, and the only road worth taking leads to the house of the heart.

Khwaja Ghulam Farid (1845–1901) was a Sufi poet and saint of the Saraiki country, born at Chachran Sharif in the old Bahawalpur state, on the banks of the Indus. The son of Khwaja Khuda Bakhsh, he lost both parents while still a boy and was raised and taught by his elder brother, Fakhr Jahan. He belonged to the Chishti-Nizami order, and became the custodian of the shrine at Kot Mithan, across the river from his birthplace. In 1876 he made the pilgrimage to Makkah. He was called the poet of seven tongues — Saraiki, Urdu, Persian, Sindhi, Punjabi, Braj Bhasha and Arabic — but his fame rests on his Saraiki verse: the kafis of the Diwan-e-Farid, sung still at shrines and festivals, where the desert of Rohi, the tall red date-palms, the cranes in flight and the long wait for the Beloved carry a longing that is at once earthly and divine. He also left an Urdu divan of ghazals and prose works in Persian. He died in 1901 at Chachran and was buried at Kot Mithan, where his shrine still draws devotees from across the Saraiki country, and his yearly urs keeps his kafis alive in song.

The Sufi saint of Delhi's classical school — the poet who made pain a prayer.

Lala Madhav Ram Jauhar — pen name Jauhar — was a classical Urdu poet of the nineteenth century and a contemporary of Mirza Ghalib. He held a highly respected post in the court of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, placing him at the heart of Delhi's literary world in its final Mughal years. A Hindu poet writing fluent, graceful Urdu, he became known for ghazals of love, longing, and the beloved's glance — couplets in which a signal before the gathering, a withheld meeting, or a hidden love that cannot stay hidden carries the whole poem. About forty of his ghazals and 174 of his couplets survive, along with his prose work Insha-e-Madhoram. He lived through the passing of the Mughal order into British rule, and his verse keeps the courtly grace of that world while speaking plainly of separation and unmet desire. Jauhar died in 1889. His couplets remain widely quoted, including one carried into the film Prem Kahani (1975).

Lutf Ali (1716–1794) was a poet of Bahawalpur, and the author of the *Saifalnāma* — the tale of Prince Saif-ul-Muluk that the Saraiki country still reads and sings. He was born in 1716 in the village of Mao, in what is now the Rahim Yar Khan District of Punjab. Little is known of his life beyond the poem itself: he was a learned man of Bahawalpur — "Maulvi" is the title he carries — writing in the Saraiki speech of the Multan–Bahawalpur country. In 1781 he completed his *Saifalnāma*, also called *Sayf al-Mulūk*, the Sword of Kings: the story of Prince Saif-ul-Muluk, son of the King of Egypt, who falls in love with the fairy Badi-ul-Jamal from her picture on a cloth and sets out across seas and deserts to find her — a tale drawn from the Thousand and One Nights, told in long narrative verse in the manner of the Persian masnavi. The poem became the popular telling of the tale in the Saraiki country, and it has stayed in print and in song ever since — an Urdu rendering of it appeared in 1964. He died in 1794, thirteen years after finishing his poem, in the Bahawalpur country where he had lived and written.

Mah Laqa Bai "Chanda" (7 April 1768 – August 1824), born Chanda Bibi in Aurangabad, was a tawaif-turned-court-poet of Hyderabad — the first woman Urdu poet with a published diwan. Daughter of the courtesan Raj Kunwar (who had migrated from Rajputana) and Bahadur Khan, a Mughal mansabdar, she was raised by her childless aunt Mehtaab Ma, the favoured courtesan of Nawab Rukn-ud-Daula, who gave her an elite education. The second Nizam, Mir Nizam Ali Khan (Asaf Jah II), conferred the title "Mah Laqa Bai" (Visage of the Moon) and appointed her to the *omarah*, the highest nobility; she advised on state policy, accompanied him to three battles in male attire, and was celebrated as a thumri singer and Deccani Kathak dancer — the first woman of the region to recite in a mushaira. Her diwan, *Gulzar-e-Mahlaqa* (39 ghazals of 5 couplets each), was printed in 1824 after her death — the first published diwan by any woman Urdu poet; her own 1798 manuscript *Diwan-e-Chanda* (125 ghazals, gifted to Captain Malcolm in 1799) survives in the British Museum. She died in Hyderabad in 1824 and lies in the mausoleum she built at Moula-Ali, restored in 2010. She is also held, by some scholars, to be the inspiration behind Mirza Hadi Ruswa's *Umrao Jaan Ada* (1899).

Meer Syed Ali Ghamgeen Dehlvi was a Sufi poet of Delhi for whom Mirza Ghalib held great devotion. His dates must be read with care: 1753–1851 is sometimes given, a span of ninety-eight years, but his birth year is disputed and is recorded here as Unknown, with 1851 carried as the death year. What is solid is the work: 10 ghazals and 9 sher from him survive, with books including Makhzan-ul-Asrar (his diwan of ghazals), Makashafat-ul-Asrar, and a Diwan-e-Rubaiyat, and later studies of his life and poetry, including a volume on the Persian correspondence between Ghalib and Ghamgeen. His verse is Sufi to the core: the journey within the self, wine as spiritual symbol, death, and the beloved's voice heard at the final hour.

Mian Muhammad Bakhsh (1830–1907) was a Punjabi Sufi saint-poet of the Qadri order, and the last great voice of classical Punjabi Sufi poetry. He was born in 1830 at Khari Sharif, near Mirpur, into a family of the Gujjar people, of the Dedhar clan — his father was Mian Shams-ul-Din Qadri, and he counted himself a fourth-generation spiritual descendant of Pir-e-Shah Ghazi Qalandar Damriyan Wali, whose shrine stands at Khari Sharif. He wrote in the Pothohari speech of his country, a Punjabi rich in Persian and Arabic words, and in all he is credited with some fifteen works — retellings of Sohni Mahiwal, Shireen Farhad and Mirza Sahiban among them, and a commentary on the Arabic *Qasidat-ul-Burda*. His great work is *Saif-ul-Malook*, which he himself called *Safar-ul-Ishq*, the Journey of Love: the story of Prince Saif-ul-Malook, son of the King of Egypt, who falls in love with the fairy Badi-ul-Jamal from her picture on a cloth and sets out to find her — a tale drawn from the Thousand and One Nights, told in the manner of the Persian masnavi, in more than 9,000 verses across 64 chapters. He finished it in the month of Ramadan, 1279 AH (1863), when he was thirty-three years old, and it has been the most loved telling of the tale ever since — read, recited and sung across the northern Punjab and Kashmir, and still in print more than a century after it first appeared. He died in 1907, on the 7th of Dhu al-Hijjah 1324 AH, after a stroke that struck him at prayer, and was buried at Khari Sharif, where his shrine remains a place of devotion and of song.

Mir Hasan (1727–1786), born Mir Ghulam Hasan in Delhi's Syed Wada, was the foremost masnavi poet of Urdu — and the grandfather of Mir Babar Ali Anis, the future king of the marsiya. Trained first by Khwaja Mir Dard, he came of age in a Delhi that was breaking apart: his family moved to Faizabad in Awadh as the invasions pressed, and he later settled at Lucknow, where the displaced Delhi school rebuilt itself under the Nawabs. There he composed, in 1784, the work that made him immortal: Sehr-ul-Bayan, the masnavi romance of Benazir and Badr-e-Munir — a love story told with such sweetness of language that it became the model Urdu narrative poem. Around it stand his other masnavis — Gulzar-e-Iram, the verse-account of the Delhi to Awadh migration; Ramuz-ul-Arifin, a Sufi masnavi; Khwan-e-Nemat, on the dishes of Asaf-ud-Daula's dastarkhwan — plus a ghazal divan and a Persian tazkira of Urdu poets, Tazkira-i-Shuara-i-Urdu. Four of his sons were poets; through Anis, his grandson, his bloodline carried the masnavi's music into the marsiya's age. He died at Lucknow in 1786.

Mir Muhammad Ja'far Zatalli (birth year disputed — c. 1658/59, Narnaul in the Delhi Subah; died 1713, Delhi) is often called the first satirist of the Urdu language. Born into a Shia Sayyid family of Narnaul (in present-day Haryana), he lived through the reigns of Aurangzeb, Bahadur Shah I and Farrukhsiyar, served princes and amirs — including Prince Kam Bakhsh — and turned his pen into a weapon. His art was hajw: scathing lampoon of the nobles, maulvis, kotwals and officials of a decaying empire, written in rekhta — a crude, living mixture of Urdu and Persian that the refined called nonsense and he made his own (his takhallus Zatalli means exactly that: "the babbler of nonsense"). His verse spares nothing and nobody, and much of it is too profane for the public page — which is why this entry leads with the life, not the lines. The life ended the way the satire demanded: after he parodied Emperor Farrukhsiyar's coronation coin in verse, the emperor had him strangled with a shoelace — tasma-kashi — in Delhi in 1713. His Zatal Nama survives in nineteenth-century lithograph editions, and in him Urdu poetry learns its first, dangerous lesson: that the pen can laugh at a throne.

Mirza Abdul-Qadir Bedil (1642–1720), born at Azimabad (present-day Patna) into a Chaghatay Barlas family, was the foremost Persian poet of the Indian style (Sabk-e-Hindi) and a Sufi thinker of the school of wahdat al-wujud — the unity of being. Orphaned young and raised by his uncle, he taught himself Persian, philosophy, medicine, astrology and music, and spent most of his life in Delhi, where his gatherings drew scholars, Sufis and poets. He refused court patronage and panegyric, writing instead for truth as he saw it, on the side of the common people against a corrupt clergy. His sixteen books hold nearly 147,000 verses — ghazals, rubais and four great philosophical masnavis (Muhit-e-Azam, Tilism-e-Hairat, Tur-e-Marifat, Irfan), plus the prose autobiography Chahar Unsur. His verse is famously difficult: dense, paradoxical, riddle-like, building meaning out of startling compounds and metaphors. That difficulty became his gift to Urdu poetry — Ghalib learnt his "meaning-creating" art from Bedil and called him, in effect, Ghalib's Ghalib; Iqbal too read him deeply. He died at Delhi in 1720, where his shrine-garden, Bagh-e-Bedil, still stands.

Mirza Ali Lutf (d. 1813) was an early Urdu prose writer and poet of the age of Fort William College, Calcutta, remembered above all as the author of Gulshan-e-Hind — the first biographical treasury of Urdu poets, written in 1801 at the suggestion of John Gilchrist, the college's head. He rendered Ali Ibrahim Khan's Persian Gulzar-e-Ibrahim into Urdu, giving the new Urdu prose its first literary history, and he also turned Saadi's Pand-Nama into Urdu verse and wrote the masnavi Nairang-e-Ishq. His own poetry, in what survives, is small — ten ghazals and fifteen couplets — and it is the plain-spoken ghazal of a traveller: the rind answering the preacher, the road from the temple winding to the Kaaba, and a wanderer who left Hindustan not knowing whether the dark men of the Deccan or the fair men of England would be his end. No birth year is settled for him, and no birthplace is recorded; his working life ran between Hyderabad, where Gulshan-e-Hind was written, and Calcutta.

Mirza Jan Tapish — real name Mirza Mohammad Ismail — was a Delhi-born poet and lexicographer whose life ran through the hinge of British India. His father, Mirza Yusuf Begh, had come from Bukhara and settled in Delhi, where Tapish was born and where he learnt Persian, Urdu and Sanskrit. In 1799 he was imprisoned with Shamsuddowlah for an alleged conspiracy to unsettle the British and sent to jail in Calcutta; freed in 1806 or 1807, he joined Fort William College as a scribe of Persian documents and a reviser of other translators' books, and became one of Calcutta's men of letters. His first book, Shamsul Bayan fi Mustalahat-e-Hindostan (1792), is a Persian dictionary of Urdu idioms, proverbs and technical terms, named for his friend Shamsuddowlah; he translated Enayetullah's Persian Masnavi Bahar-i-Danish into Urdu in 1801; and his own Urdu poems, the Kulliyat-i-Tapish, were published by Fort William College in 1812. The tazkiras praise his neatness, his clarity of language (fasahat) and the freshness of his subjects. He died in Kolkata in 1814.

Delhi's exile who gave Calcutta its Shakuntala — the Fort William munshi who carried the Quran into Urdu print. Mir Kazim Ali Jawan (birth year unknown – 1816) was a Delhi-born man of letters who became one of the founders of Urdu prose. His real name was Mir Kazim Ali; Jawan — "the young one" — was the name he wrote under. When ruin gripped Delhi he left the city, as so many did, and after wandering through several places he reached Lucknow, where he spent long years and came to be counted among its famous poets. He knew Brij Bhasha as well as Arabic and Persian, and the Resident at Lucknow, Colonel Scott, was so impressed by his abilities that he recommended him to Fort William College in Calcutta. There Jawan spent the rest of his life in writing and compiling, among the munshis who were giving Urdu prose its first plain, workable shape. Three books of his survive: his Urdu rendering of Kalidasa's Shakuntala, the Shakuntala Natak of 1801; Barah Masa, also called Dastoor-e-Hind, on the festivals of India through the year; and Singhasan Battisi. He also carried the Quran into Urdu in 1802, one of the earliest landmarks in the printed Urdu Quran. He died in 1816, in Calcutta, the city that had become his home.

Delhi's Persian voice of ten thousand verses — the Indian-style master who walked his own road. Mirza Muhammad Fakhir Makin Dehlavi (birth year unknown – 1757) was a Persian poet of Delhi, of Iranian descent, whose verse belongs to the Indian style. Makin — "the dweller" — was his pen name, and Delhi the city of his life. Some ten thousand of his Persian verses survive, and they show a poet committed to the manner of the Indian-style masters while keeping his own road: of all the Persian poets of India, he leans least on the poets of Iran, and his work carries its own independent music. Little else of his life has come down — no birthplace beyond his Delhi name, and no firm record of the year of his death beyond 1757. He stands in the directory, then, as the record stands: a considerable Persian voice of eighteenth-century Delhi, remembered for the scale and independence of his verse.

Mirza Muhammad Hasan Qateel (c. 1758–1818) was born Diwani Singh, into a Punjabi Khatri family of Delhi, and became the most influential Persian teacher of his age in India. Educated in Persian and Urdu, he came at eighteen under the influence of his tutor, the Shi'a poet Mirza Baqir Shahid Isfahani, embraced Twelver Shi'a Islam, and took the name Mirza Muhammad Hasan Qateel. After service in the army of Najaf Khan, he moved to Lucknow in 1784, where he became the city's leading philologist and teacher of Persian. A polyglot — Persian, Urdu, Turkish and Arabic — he wrote nearly twenty books, above all the Persian grammars Chahar Sharbat and Nahr al-Fasahat, which were copied across India as primers and drew a famous line between Indian Persian and the Iranian Persian he held as standard. With Insha Allah Khan Insha he wrote Darya-e-Latafat, the first book on Urdu metre and prosody. His Urdu ghazals, in the manner of Hafiz, survive only scattered in tazkiras. He died in Lucknow in 1817 or 1818 and is buried at Qaisar Bagh.