Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

The last Mughal Emperor of India and a poignant master of Urdu ghazals. Exiled to Rangoon after the 1857 war of independence, his elegies mourn the tragic loss of home, empire, and liberty.

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.