Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

Faiz Ahmed Faiz was a nominated Nobel Prize poet and Lenin Peace Prize laureate. He seamlessly blended the classical romantic imagery of the ghazal with revolutionary themes of social justice, anti-imperialism, and human rights.

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.

Fahmida Riaz (1946–2018), born 28 July 1946 at Meerut in a literary family, was Pakistan's poet of resistance — the woman's voice that refused, for fifty years, to be either decorative or silent. Her father, educationist Riaz-ud-Din Ahmed, was transferred to Sindh, so she grew up in Hyderabad, lost her father at four, and was raised by her mother; her first poem appeared in Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi's Funoon when she was fifteen. Her first collection, Patthar ki Zaban (1967), already spoke a young woman's desire with a directness Urdu had seldom heard; her second, Badan Dareeda (1973) — "the torn-bodied" — was denounced by conservatives as erotic and became a milestone of modern Urdu poetry for exactly that honesty. Under Zia-ul-Haq she was charged with sedition and spent seven years in exile in India, where she was poet-in-residence at Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, and learnt Hindi. On return she led the National Book Foundation, later headed the Urdu Dictionary Board in Karachi, and kept writing: Godaavari, Khatt-e Marmuz, novels, stories, and the first rhymed Urdu translation of Rumi's Masnavi, Khana e Aab O Gil, alongside translations of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai and Shaikh Ayaz from Sindhi. Her late poem "Tum bilkul hum jaisey nikley" (2014) — addressed across the border — made her, once more, the conscience of two countries at once. She received the Pride of Performance (2010) and the Sitara-e-Imtiaz, and died in Lahore on 21 November 2018.

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.

Lucknow's classical voice — the son of Inder Sabha's author, and eloquence itself. Fasahat Lucknowi (1857–1930), born Syed Abbas Hasan in Lucknow in 1857, was a representative of Lucknow's classical poetic tradition — and the elder son of the man who made Lucknow's name in Urdu letters. His father, Agha Hasan Amanat, wrote Inder Sabha, the first stage play in Urdu, and died in 1858, when Fasahat was still a small child. His upbringing and education were taken up by his elder brother, Syed Hasan Latafat, in whose literary company his own gift for verse was refined. In a short time he made his name as a poet of originality, refined and elegant language, and strong craftsmanship — the delicacy, vibrancy and subtle elegance of Lucknow's literary culture, kept alive in his ghazals. His poetry was first published under various names, so few readers knew it was his; it was later gathered and arranged as Diwan-e-Fasahat, with a preface by Abdul Halim Sharar and tributes from his contemporaries and students. He had a considerable circle of disciples, and he is counted among the prominent poets of his era. He died in Lucknow in 1930.

Fayyaz Hashmi (1920–2011) was a Pakistani poet and film lyricist, born in Calcutta in 1920 to the poet and stage-drama writer Syed Muhammad Hussain Hashmi 'Dilgeer'. He began writing songs as a teenager — his early hit "Tasveer teri dil mera behla na sakegi", sung by Talat Mahmood, made the singer famous — and served as resident lyricist of the Gramophone Company of India from 1943 to 1948. After Partition he moved to Lahore, where he helped organise Pakistan's music scene and promoted artists including Farida Khanum; his first Pakistani film songs were for Kunwari Bewa (1956). He is credited with 482 songs for 122 Pakistani films, and his lifetime song count is quoted at over 2,000. Alongside the film work he wrote ghazals, collected in Satah-e-Aaina (1982), winning the Graduate Award three times and the Nigar Award for best song in 1978. He died in Karachi on 29 November 2011.

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.

First Urdu Jnanpith laureate — the poet who gave the modern ghazal an Indian heart.

Shaukat Ali Khan (1879–1941), known to Urdu as Fani Badayuni — "Fani" meaning the mortal, the perishable — is the twentieth century's most uncompromising poet of despair. Born on 13 September 1879 at Islamnagar in the Badaun district of UP, he took his BA (1901) at Bareilly College and a law degree at Aligarh, but the practice of law never held him; a brief editorship of the magazine Tasneem, years of practice in Bareilly, Lucknow and Agra, and finally a head-teachership in Hyderabad (1932–1939) framed a life of narrowing fortunes. The deaths of his wife and his young daughter in the early 1930s sealed his inward turn — he wrote of himself as "a disgrace to my family, a burden on this earth." Called "Mayusi ka shayar" (the poet of despair) and "Sahib-e-gham," Fani took Mir's pathos and Ghalib's intellectual daring and distilled them into an unrelieved existential pessimism: life as a riddle neither to be solved nor explained. His collections Diwan-e Fani, Baqiyat-e Fani and Irfaniyat-e Fani preserve his later work; the early diwans were lost. He died in Hyderabad on 27 August 1941 and is buried there.