Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

Balraj Komal (1928–2013) was one of the leading modern poets of the Urdu nazm in India. Born on 25 September 1928 at Sialkot, he fled to Delhi in the Partition of 1947, carrying the displacement into a lifetime of poetry. After retiring as an Education Officer with the Delhi Administration, he wrote full-time — poems, short stories and criticism — and served on the Delhi Urdu Akademi and the Sahitya Akademi's advisory board. His collection Parindon Bhara Aasman (Sky Full of Birds) won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1985; he also won the Uttar Pradesh Urdu Academy Award twice (1971, 1982) and received the Padma Shri in 2011. His nazms — above all 'A Girl Alone' (1948), a Partition-orphaned girl begging a stranger to become her family — made him a poet of displacement, tenderness and quiet revolt. He died in Delhi in 2013, aged 85.

Delhi's later voice — the doorstep vigil, the night with no dawn, and the gaze that cannot look away. Barq Dehlvi (July 1884 – 9 February 1936), whose real name was Munshi Maharaj Bahadur, was a later voice of Delhi's poetry, born into a Kayastha family of the old city whose men had served in high places at the Mughal court. His father, Munshi Har Narayan Das, was a poet of standing, and his maternal grandfather, Daulat Ram 'Ibrat', kept a diwan and had learned his craft from Zauq, the court poet of the last Mughal king. Barq learned his own craft under Agha Shair Qazalbash. He wrote ghazals, nazms and couplets, and in his early years plays as well — Krishna Avatar and Savitri were staged more than once. His books of verse were Krishna Darpan (1927), Matla-i-Anwar (1929) and Harf-e-Natamaam, published after his death in 1941. His ghazals carry the old Delhi manner into a new century: the doorstep where the lover waits, the night of separation with no dawn in sight, the beloved's face that holds the eye prisoner. He died at Panipat on 9 February 1936.

Bismil Azimabadi (1901–1978) was an Indian freedom-fighter poet from Patna, born Syed Shah Mohammad Hasan into a zamindar family of Azimabad. He took "Bismil" — the wounded one — as his pen name and became a disciple of Shad Azimabadi, frequenting the Qutub-khana Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu Library in Patna. He took part in the independence movement and is reported to have recited his poem "Sarfaroshi" at the Calcutta Congress session of 1920. Most of his poetry was lost; what survived was compiled after his death as *Hikayat-e-Hasti* (1980), and he left a short memoir, *Yaraan-i-Maikadah* (1976). He died in Patna on 20 June 1978. The Bihar Urdu Academy's Bismil Azimabadi Award keeps his name alive.

Delhi's scholar-poet — the world is a dream's thought, and Urdu is dearer than every tongue. Brij Mohan Dattatreya Kaifi (1866–1955), known as Kaifi Dehlavi, was a Delhi-born scholar-poet of Urdu who served the language for some sixty-five years — poet, novelist, dramatist, researcher and philologist, and the Delhi school's link between the age of Hali and the modern study of Urdu. Born on 13 December 1866 in Old Delhi into a Kashmiri Pandit family, he was schooled first in a traditional maktab, where he learned Persian under his maternal grandfather, a Persian scholar, and later took his BA from St Stephen's College, Delhi. He knew Arabic, Hindi and Sanskrit besides Persian and English, and was a pupil in poetry of Altaf Hussain Hali. In his student days he edited Khair Andesh, a Congress weekly. He worked for the princely state of Kapurthala, travelled to Europe until the First World War cut the journey short, and served for a time in Kashmir. He helped Lala Sri Ram with Khumkhana-i-Javed, a history of Urdu poetry and poets, completing its fifth volume in 1940 after Sri Ram's death; the sixth, found among his own papers, appeared in 1990. His own books ranged from the long poem Bharat Darpan (1905) and the story collection Khumkhana-i-Kaifi (1924) to the philological studies Manshooraat (1934) and Kaifiya (1942), which explored the peculiarities of Urdu usage and coined new terms. When Maulvi Abdul Haq moved the Anjuman-i Taraqqi-i Urdu to Delhi in 1938, Kaifi joined him and became one of his closest helpers, building branches and conferences across India at the height of the Hindi–Urdu controversy. He lived for many years in Lahore, where his son Pyare Mohan edited The Tribune, and later in Lyallpur; after Partition he returned to India, settling finally in Delhi. A book on his life and work was published in 1989. He died at Ghaziabad on 1 November 1955, aged eighty-eight.

Brij Narayan Chakbast (1882–1926), who wrote under the pen name Chakbast, was an Urdu poet of Lucknow and one of the founders of patriotic Urdu poetry in the modern age. Born into a Kashmiri Brahmin (Pandit) family at Faizabad on 19 January 1882 — the son of the poet Pandit Udit Narayan Chakbast — he moved to Lucknow as a boy after his father's death and made it his home for life. He earned his B.A. (1905) and LL.B. (1907) from Canning College, Lucknow, and rose to distinction at the Lucknow Bar. A lawyer by profession, he poured his public spirit into verse: he was a strong proponent of the Home Rule movement, helped found the Kashmiri Young Men's Association and the Bahadur Library, and chose the nazm as his chief form — *Subh-e-Watan* (Dawn of the Nation, 1926) made qaumiyat, love of nation, the subject of Urdu poetry without ever letting it collapse into mere propaganda. Secular to the bone, he wrote with equal reverence on Ram, Krishna, and Gokhale. He died suddenly on 12 February 1926 at Rae Bareli railway station, aged only 44, after a paralytic stroke. His philosophical sher *"Zindagi kya hai anasir mein zuhur-e-tartib / Maut kya hai inhin ajza ka pareshan hona"* — heard by millions at the opening of the film *Masaan* (2015) — returned him to public memory nearly a century later.

Syed Wahid-ud-din Ahmed (1863–1955), known to Urdu letters as Bekhud Dehlvi, was a classical ghazal poet of Delhi and among the finest disciples of Dagh Dehlvi. Born at Bharatpur (Rajasthan) on 21 March 1863 to the poet Syed Shams-ud-din 'Salim', he was brought to Delhi as a boy, where Altaf Hussain Hali schooled him in Arabic, Persian, and the craft of verse. In 1891 Hali made him Dagh's disciple, and he soon rose among the best of that illustrious circle — a lineage that also counted Iqbal's teacher among its masters. His ghazals — collected in Guftar-e-Bekhud and Shahsavar-e-Bekhud — are prized for linguistic dexterity and colloquial grace, carrying Dagh's living idiom into the twentieth century with a distinction all his own. His corpus also includes devotional verse, including a naat. He lived to ninety-two, dying in Delhi on 2 October 1955 — a living bridge from the Mughal twilight to independent India.