Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

Saleem Ahmed (1927–1983), who wrote under the pen name Saleem, was born on 27 November 1927 at Barabanki in Uttar Pradesh. He studied at Meerut College, where the critic and teacher Karrar Hussain was among his mentors, and came to be known as one of the most unconventional voices in modern Urdu letters — a poet, a critic and a playwright. As a critic he stood against the grain of his age: he questioned the ghazal's long hold over Urdu poetry and argued against the modernism of his day, pressing instead for a poetry that faced the whole man and the whole of life. His own verse is spare and unsentimental — short, plain lines in which death, the seasons and the passing of time are looked at steadily, without flinching. His poetry collections — Bayaz, Ikai, Charagh-e-Neem Shab and Mashriq — were gathered after his death into Kulliyat-e-Saleem Ahmed (2003); his critical books include Iqbal Ek Shair (1978), Adhoori Jadeediyat (1987) and Nai Nazm Aur Poora Aadmi (1989). He died at Karachi on 1 September 1983, aged fifty-five.

Saqib Lucknawi (1869–1946), born Mirza Zakir Hussain Qizilbash in Akbarabad (Agra), was the model Lucknow-school poet of the neo-classical tradition — "the very model of a Lakhnavi shayar." Raised in a family of Persian descent, he was educated in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, and in English at St. John's College, Agra. After his father's death left the family in difficulty, he tried his hand at business in Lucknow, served as personal secretary to the Iranian consul in Calcutta, and finally — in 1908 — accepted a post at the court of the Raja of Mahmudabad in Sitapur, where he remained until his death. His succinct, polished couplets — many of which attained the status of Urdu proverbs — made him beloved; the filmmaker S.U. Sunny was so taken by "Bade shauq se sun raha tha zamana" that he used it as the recited motto of his films *Mela* (1948) and *Kohinoor* (1960). His diwan, *Tajalli-e-Shahab-e-Saqib*, was published in 1936. He died at Sitapur on 24 November 1946.

Shabnam Shakeel (1942–2013), born in Lahore, was a modern Urdu poet whose ghazals carry a deep feminist consciousness in a classical frame. She grew up in a literary home: her father, Syed Abid Ali Abid, was a poet and academician, and her childhood circle included Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum and Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Educated at Kinnaird College and Islamia College, Lahore, she took her M.A. in Urdu from Oriental College, Lahore, and lectured at several colleges. Her first book, *Tanqeedi Mazameen* (1965), was criticism; her poetry collections — *Shab Zaad* and *Masaafat Raigaan Thi* (2008) among them — speak in a woman's voice about love, failure, dignity and the road's dust, with the ghazal's discipline intact. Rekhta, which carries 53 of her ghazals, describes her as a poet who "deeply expresses feminist consciousness". Pakistan honoured her with the Pride of Performance. She died in Karachi on 2 March 2013, ten days short of her seventy-first birthday, and was buried in Islamabad.

Shad Azimabadi (1846–1927), born Syed Ali Mohammad in Azimabad (Patna), was a master of the ghazal and the marsiya and one of Bihar's greatest literary figures. Born into a wealthy and respected Syed family, he received a classical education in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, and trained under several masters of the age — chief among them Shah Ulfat Hussain Faryaad. The British government titled him Khan Bahadur, and he served Patna as Honorary Magistrate and Municipal Commissioner. The Urdu scholar Ali Jawad Zaidi called him "a saviour of the ghazal"; the critic Kalimuddin Ahmad placed him, with Mir and Ghalib, as the third pillar of the Urdu ghazal — a judgment Allama Iqbal himself shared in his admiration. His five volumes of verse blend feeling, thought and richness of expression. Beyond ghazals and marsiyas he wrote *Hayat-e-Faryaad* (his master's biography), the historical tract *Nawa-e-Watan*, and *Fikr-e-Baligh*, an account of marsiya poets. He died in Patna on 7 January 1927.

Akhlaq Mohammed Khan "Shahryar" (16 June 1936 – 13 February 2012) was one of modern Urdu poetry's defining voices and the fourth Urdu poet to receive the Jnanpith Award (2008). Born at Aonla in Bareilly district, Uttar Pradesh, he studied at Aligarh Muslim University, where he taught Urdu for decades — becoming professor in 1986 and retiring as chairman of the Urdu Department in 1996 — and co-edited the literary magazine Sher-o-Hikmat. His collections include Ism-e-Azam (1965), Satvan Dar (1969), Hijr ke Mausam (1978) and Khwab ka Dar Band Hai (1987), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award. He also wrote lyrics for Muzaffar Ali's films Gaman (1978) and Umrao Jaan (1981). He died in Aligarh on 13 February 2012.

Shahzad Ahmad (1932–2012) was a Pakistani Urdu poet, psychologist and translator, and a prominent voice of the new Urdu ghazal. Born on 16 April 1932 in Amritsar, he migrated to Pakistan after Partition and took an MSc in Psychology (1956) and an MA in Philosophy (1958) from Government College, Lahore. He wrote about thirty books of poetry — including Sadaf, Jalti Bhujti Aankhein, Tuta Hua Pal, Utray Meri Khak par Sitar and Bichar Jane Ki Rut — alongside books on psychology, and translated non-Urdu poetry into Urdu. As director of Lahore's Majlis-e-Taraqqi-e-Adab he tended one of Pakistan's oldest literary libraries, and in the 1990s he received the Pride of Performance for his contributions to Urdu literature. He died in Lahore on 1 August 2012.

Shailendra (1923–1966), born Shankardas Kesarilal on 30 August 1923 in Rawalpindi, was the people's poet of Hindi cinema — the lyricist Raj Kapoor called "Kaviraj", his Pushkin. His family came from Akhtiyarpur in Ara district, Bihar, and he grew up in Mathura. In 1947 he was an apprentice in the Indian Railways workshop at Matunga, Bombay, writing fiery poems for the Indian People's Theatre Association, when Raj Kapoor heard him recite "Jalta Hai Punjab", his cry against the Partition riots, at a mushaira. He refused at first to sell his poem to the films, then joined Raj Kapoor for Barsaat (1949), writing "Barsaat Mein, Humse Mile Tum Saajan" and "Patli Kamar Hai, Tirchi Nazar Hai" for five hundred rupees. What followed was eighteen years of songs in the plain speech of ordinary India — "Awara Hoon", "Mera Joota Hai Japani", "Sab Kuch Seekha Hamne", "Ye Mera Deewanapan Hai", "Tu Pyaar Ka Sagar Hai", "Piya Tose Naina Laage Re", "Din Dhal Jaye", "Aaj Phir Jeene Ki Tamanna Hai" — nearly eight hundred songs in about a hundred and seventy films, most of them with Shankar-Jaikishan, and others with Salil Chowdhury and S. D. Burman. He won the Filmfare Award for Best Lyricist three times — in 1958, 1959 and, after his death, in 1968 — and he was the first winner of the award when the category was created. He also produced the film Teesri Kasam (1966), from Phanishwar Nath Renu's story "Maare Gaye Gulfam", which won the National Award for Best Feature Film after his death. His non-film poems — "Jalta Hai Punjab" and his Partition verses — and his Bhojpuri songs, including work for the first Bhojpuri film, show the poet behind the lyricist. He died in Bombay on 14 December 1966, aged only 43. In 2016 a street in Mathura was named for him, and his "Mera Joota Hai Japani" was heard in the Hollywood film Deadpool the same year.

Jalal's brief light — a desert lonely as its poet. Shakeb Jalali (1934–1966), born Syed Hassan Rizvi on 1 October 1934 at Jalal, a small village near Aligarh, was a Pakistani Urdu poet whose brief career left a deep mark on the ghazal after Independence. He was ten when his mother died in a road accident, and his father, shaken by the loss, died a few years later. He passed his high-school examination in 1950 and crossed to Pakistan the same year, settling with his sisters at Rawalpindi; he took his intermediate examination at Sialkot and his bachelor's degree with honours at Lahore, working in literary magazines and a local newspaper along the way. He began writing poetry in 1947, at fifteen, and gave the ghazal a modern tone all his own — plain, startling images of light and desert, of stones falling where no hand can gather them. He married in 1956 and left a son and a daughter. On 12 November 1966, at thirty-two, he died by his own hand beneath a train at Sargodha. His first collection, Roshni Ae Roshni — Light, O Light — was published six years after his death, in 1972, and his complete works followed in 2004.

Shakeel Badayuni (1916–1970), born Shakeel Ahmed on 3 August 1916 in Badayun, Uttar Pradesh, was the celebrated Urdu poet and film lyricist of the 1950s and 60s — Hindi cinema's definitive poet of love. Educated at home in Arabic, Urdu, Persian and Hindi, he graduated from Aligarh Muslim University (B.A., 1942), where mushaira successes and the encouragement of Jigar Moradabadi shaped his poetic voice. After a clerical job in Delhi's Supply department, he moved to Bombay in 1944 and broke through with Dard (1947), beginning the legendary partnership with composer Naushad that produced Baiju Bawra (1952), Mother India (1957) and Mughal-e-Azam (1960); he also wrote for Hemant Kumar and Ravi. His pen gave Hindi cinema Chaudhvin Ka Chand, Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam and Mere Mehboob, and immortal songs — 'Chaudhvin ka chand ho', 'Pyar kiya to darna kya', 'Suhaani raat dhal chuki', 'Kahin deep jale kahin dil', 'Husnwale tera jawab nahin' — the last three winning him three consecutive Filmfare Best Lyricist awards (1961, 1962, 1963), a record. Beyond films he published poetry collections including Ranaaiyan (1950), Sanam-o-Haram (1950), Ranginiyan (1961), Naghma-e-Firdaus (1968) and Shabistan. He died in Mumbai on 20 April 1970, aged 53; India Post honoured him with a commemorative stamp in 2013.

Shamim Karhani (1913–1975), born Syed Shamsuddin Haider on 8 June 1913 at Karhan, a village in the Azamgarh region of eastern Uttar Pradesh, was an Indian Urdu poet of the Progressive movement whose verse carried the freedom struggle into the ghazal and the nazm. Born into a landowning family — his father was Syed Muhammad Akhtar, his mother Ummat ul Zehra — he took his pen name from his native village, and his elder brother Syed Azam Husain Azam was also an Urdu poet and journalist. He was schooled at Aligarh Muslim University and completed the Maulvi Kamil Munshi qualification; he is said to have composed his first couplet at the age of eight. He taught at Azamgarh, spent a short spell as a lyricist in Bombay, and worked with the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic schools and the daily Qaumi Awaz before moving to Delhi in 1950, where he joined the Anglo Arabic Higher Secondary School as a Persian teacher and stayed until the end of his career. His first collection, Barq-o-Baaran, appeared in 1939; his political poems gathered in Taraney (1945) and Roshan Andhera (1946), the second devoted to the Quit India Movement; his ghazals were collected in Harf-i-Neem Shab (1972), with Aks-i-Gul (1962) and Zulfiqar (1964) between them. His revolutionary nazms and songs were sung in dawn processions in Lucknow and Varanasi during the independence movement, and he stood openly against the division of India — his poem "Pakistan chahne walon se" answered those who wanted Pakistan, and "Jagao na Bapu ko Neend Aa Gayi Hai", written after Gandhi's assassination in 1948, brought him before Nehru, who invited him to Lucknow and, at Teen Murti in 1950, asked him to compose an epic on the freedom movement, writing in his diary: "A poet should make his life itself a poem." He stood in the Progressive circle beside Faiz, Majaz, Sardar Jafri, Jan Nisar Akhtar, Makhdoom Mohiuddin and Ali Jawad Zaidi. His books won him honours from the Uttar Pradesh government (Aks-i-Gul, 1964), the Uttar Pradesh Urdu Academy (Harf-i-Neem Shab, 1972), the Saroop Narayan Urdu Nazm Award (1972) and the Government of India (Ranga Ke Geet). He also translated Hindi fiction and English poems for children into Urdu and taught Urdu prosody. He died in New Delhi on 19 March 1975, aged sixty-one.

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (1935–2020) was an Indian Urdu poet, author, critic and theorist, above all the critic who ushered modernism into Urdu literature. Born at Pratapgarh on 30 September 1935 and raised in Azamgarh and Gorakhpur, he took his M.A. in English from Allahabad University in 1955 and served in the Indian Postal Service from 1960 to 1994, rising to chief postmaster-general. In June 1966 he founded the modernist literary journal Shabkhoon, which he edited and published for nearly four decades. He formulated fresh models of literary appreciation that joined Western criticism to the aesthetics of Arabic, Persian and Urdu, most famously in his four-volume study of Mir Taqi Mir, Sher-e-Shor Angez. He also wrote the novel Kai Chand The Sar-e-Aasman (translated by himself as The Mirror of Beauty) and, with his nephew Mahmood Farooqui, revived the storytelling art of Dastangoi. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1986, the Saraswati Samman in 1996 and the Padma Shri in 2009, and died at Allahabad on 25 December 2020.

Shauq Bahraichi was a humor and satire poet from Bahraich in Uttar Pradesh, remembered as one of Urdu's most prominent poets of tanz-o-mizah. Born into a middle-class Shia Muslim family, he lost his father early, which cut short his higher education, and he took small jobs in the municipality. He began by singing ghazals and gradually worked in all forms of poetry, but his lasting mark is laconic, audacious verse that lampooned social evils, corrupt leaders and hollow pieties with sarcasm rather than sermonising. He was a critic of government and of a desolate society who turned poverty and public life into sharp comedy. His collection *Toofan* (also spelled *Thoofaan*) was collected and published after his death by Shameem Iqbal Khan and Mohammad Shafqat Nadvi.

Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum (1899–1978) was a Pakistani poet, scholar and translator, universally known by his pen name Tabassum. Born in Amritsar on 4 August 1899 to parents of Kashmiri ancestry, he earned a master's degree in Persian from Forman Christian College, Lahore, and spent his whole career at Government College Lahore, rising to head the Department of Persian Studies. He wrote in Urdu, Persian and Punjabi, created the beloved children's character Tot Batot, and translated many poetical works from Persian into Punjabi and Urdu, including Shakespeare's *A Midsummer Night's Dream* into Punjabi. He received Iran's Tamgha-e-Nishan-e-Sipas in 1966 and Pakistan's Sitara-i-Imtiaz, and died in Lahore on 7 February 1978.

Patna's storyteller — the friend's stone, and the fiction writer who began as a poet. Suhail Azimabadi (1911–1979), born Syed Mujibur Rahman on 16 July 1911 at Shahpur Bhadaul, Islampur, in Patna district, was a novelist, short-story writer, journalist and critic — one of the men who carried the Progressive movement into Bihar. His mother died when he was one year old, and he was raised in his maternal grandparents' home. As a student he wrote verse under the name "Sohail Jamili"; on the advice of Jameel Mazhari he gave up poetry for fiction, and fiction became his true identity. He edited Sathi, an Urdu daily from Patna, and in 1936 he set up the Patna branch of the Progressive Writers' Movement. He worked with Hamdard, a Calcutta daily, until the paper was banned in 1936 after an article of his, and he later served in All India Radio and spent five to seven years working for Urdu in the Chhota Nagpur region. His story collections — Alao (1942), Naye Puraane (1944), Rang Mahal (1960), Chaar Chehre (1977) — and his novel Be-Jar ke Pauday (1972) made him one of the best-known fiction writers of his generation; some hundred and twenty-five of his short stories survive. He died in Allahabad on 28 November 1979, aged 68, and is buried at Shah Ganj Qabristan in Patna.

The founding voice of the modern Urdu nazm — a patriot's pen, a mourner's heart, and sher that turned dust into philosophy. Suroor Jahanabadi (December 1873 – 3 December 1910), born Munshi Durga Sahai in Jahanabad, a town of the Pilibhit district (then the North-Western Provinces), was one of the chief architects of the modern Urdu nazm. Studious from childhood, he learned Arabic and Persian and taught himself elementary English; he signed his early verse "Wahshat" before settling on the takhallus "Suroor". He worked in the editorial department of *Zamana*, the Kanpur literary magazine, and his ghazals and nazms found their way into prestigious journals — *Adeeb*, *Makhzan*, *Ismat*, *Urdu-e-Mualla*. While he wrote ghazals, he chose the nazm as his favourite form, and critics credit him with authenticating the new Urdu nazm through his thematic concern and stylistic innovations. His poetry uses Hindi and indigenous words freely and draws imagery from Hindu mythology; much of it is written in six-line musaddas stanzas. He wrote patriotic poems — *Khak-e-Watan*, *Madar-e-Hind*, *Hasrat-e-Watan* — and historical ones — *Padmani*, *Sitaji-ki-Giria-o-Zari*, *Nur Jahan ka Mazar*. The deaths of his wife and his only son broke him; he drank heavily and died at thirty-seven. His collections — *Khumkhana-e-Suroor* and *Jam-e-Suroor* (1911), *Khumkada-e-Suroor* (1931, posthumous) — keep his work alive.

Syed Muhammad Jafari (1905–1976) was a humorist and satirist of Lahore, a poet who made laughter do the work of reform. The son of Mohammad Ali, principal of Government College, Lahore, he passed his Munshi Fazil examination at fourteen and his matriculation at seventeen, took a B.Sc. (Honours) in Chemistry from Islamia College, Lahore, and then turned to the arts for an M.A. and M.O.L. in Persian from Oriental College, Lahore. The great humorist Pitras Bukhari was one of his teachers, and he also trained in painting and fine art at the Mayo College of Arts. He served first in the Department of Education and then in the Department of Publicity and Information, retiring in 1966. He wrote nearly nine hundred nazms on political and social subjects, and wove the lines of Ghalib and Iqbal into his own verse. His satire was sharp and unsparing — corruption in public and private life, elections, politics, the promises of the great powers — yet free of rancour and personal malice: the joke was always aimed at the fault, never at the man. His collections include Teer-e-Neem Kash, and his best-known book of humorous verse, Shokhi-e-Tahreer, was published after his death by his sons. He died in 1976. No birthplace is recorded for him; Lahore was the city of his education, his service and his verse.

Syed Sulaiman Nadvi (1884–1953) was a historian, biographer and scholar of Islam from Desna, a village in Bihar, whose life's work was the life of the Prophet — the great Sirat-un-Nabi, begun by his teacher Shibli Nomani and completed by Nadvi in six volumes. Born on 22 November 1884 into a learned Sayyid family — his father, Hakim Syed Abul Hasan, was a Sufi — he was schooled in Urdu and Persian in his village and nearby towns, then joined the Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama at Lucknow in 1901 and graduated in 1906. He worked on the seminary's journal An-Nadwa, taught Arabic literature and theology there from 1908, and for two years assisted Shibli himself on the Sirat; in 1910 he joined Abul Kalam Azad's Al-Hilal as assistant editor and lead writer. When Shibli died in 1914 leaving the Sirat unfinished, Nadvi took up the work and carried it through, volume by volume, until 1938. In 1914 he founded the Darul Musannifeen — the House of Writers, the Shibli Academy — at Azamgarh, and became the founding editor of its journal Ma'arif in 1916; from 1923 he chaired the seminary's education committee for over twenty years. His other books range across history, biography and literature: the eight Madras lectures on the Prophet's life, published as Khutbat-e-Madras; a study of Omar Khayyam (1933); a life of Aisha; the life of his teacher, Hayat-i-Shibli; and his essays, Naqoosh-e-Sulaimani. His Urdu poems were gathered after his death as Armaghan-e-Sulaiman. Iqbal, who consulted him on religious questions, called him Ustad-ul-Kul — Teacher of All — and Aligarh Muslim University conferred an honorary doctorate on him. In 1946 he served as chief justice of Bhopal. In June 1950 he moved to Pakistan and settled in Karachi, where he chaired the board advising on the Islamic provisions of the constitution. He died in Karachi on 22 November 1953, his sixty-ninth birthday, and Pakistan Post honoured him with a commemorative stamp in 1992.

Syed Zameer Jafri (1916–1999) was a Pakistani poet, humorist, columnist and retired army officer, the best-known name in Urdu humorous poetry. Born on 1 January 1916 at Chak Abdul Khaliq, near Dina in district Jhelum, he began his working life as a journalist, then served in the Pakistan Army Education Corps — in the Far East during the Second World War and in the wars of 1947–48 and 1965 — retiring as a Major in 1965. He then became the first Director of Public Relations of the Capital Development Authority in Islamabad. Across some 78 books of poetry and prose in Urdu, Punjabi and English, above all the humorous collection Ma Fi-Zamir, he made laughter a vehicle for patriotism, common sense and love of mankind. He received the Tamgha-e-Quaid-e-Azam in 1967 and the Pride of Performance in 1984, and the Presidential Iqbal Award for his Urdu poetry in 2001. He died in New York on 12 May 1999.

Hoshiarpur's lyricist — the heart's tales reach the lips only as sighs. Tufail Hoshiarpuri (1914–1993), born on 17 July 1914 at Hoshiarpur in Punjab, was a Pakistani Urdu poet and film song lyricist whose ghazals and whose film songs both travelled far beyond his own name. He began by reading patriotic poems at Muslim League gatherings, and wrote songs for films in British India before Partition; after 1947 he became one of Pakistan's best-loved lyricists — his words carried by the qawwali "Sanson Ki Mala Pe" in Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's voice, and by the breakthrough hit "Ni Suhay Chooray Waliye" from the film Shammi (1950). Alongside the film work he kept writing ghazals, dohe, rubai and naat, and his services to Urdu letters were honoured with the Pride of Performance. He died at Lahore on 4 January 1993, aged 78.

Syed Waheed Akhtar was an Indian Urdu poet, critic, orator and philosopher, and one of the leading Muslim scholars of the twentieth century. Born in Aurangabad to a family that had migrated from Nasirabad–Jais in Raebareli district, he spent his childhood in Aurangabad, studied at Osmania University, Hyderabad, where he completed his Ph.D., and was then appointed lecturer at Aligarh Muslim University, where he settled for the rest of his life and retired in 1995 as Professor of Philosophy. In his early years he used the takhallus Barq. His poetry collections include Shab Ka Razmiyah, Paththaron Ka Mughanni and Zanjeer Ka Naghma, and his Karbala Ta Karbala (1991) carried the marsia into a new age; he also wrote a major research study of Khwaja Mir Dard. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi described him as a modernist whom many also counted as a progressive, who argued that modernism was really an extension of progressivism. He died on 13 December 1996.

Wahshat Raza Ali Kalkatvi (1881–1956) was a prominent later–classical Urdu poet from Bengal. Born on 18 November 1881 in Hooghly to Maulvi Shamshad Ali, who had moved there from Delhi, he was schooled at Madrasa Aaliya in Calcutta and became a poetry apprentice of Abul Qasim Mohammad Shams in 1898. After higher education he served as Chief Maulvi in the Persian department of the Imperial Record Department, Calcutta, and when Islamia College started in 1926 he became a professor of Urdu there. In 1931 the British Government honoured him with the title of Khan Bahadur. His collections include Diwan-e-Wahshat and Taraana-e-Vahshat (1950), and the progressive poet Parvez Shahdi was his disciple. After independence he migrated to Pakistan, where he died in 1956.

Wazir Agha (1922–2010) was a Pakistani Urdu poet, critic and essayist, and one of modern Urdu's most prominent critics. Born in Wazir Kot in the Sargodha district, he learned Persian from his father and Punjabi from his mother, graduated from Government College Jhang, took a master's in economics from Government College Lahore, and earned a PhD from the University of Punjab in 1956 for research on humour and satire in Urdu literature. From 1960 to 1963 he co-edited Adbi Duniya, and from 1965 he edited the monthly Auraq for many decades. He wrote more than forty prose books, including the landmark critical study Urdu Shairi ka Mizaj, and experimented in poetry with ballads, sonnets and free verse, his poems often carrying an element of story. He received the Sitara-e-Imtiaz and was a Life Fellow of the Pakistan Academy of Letters.

The journalist-poet of the freedom movement — *Zamindar*'s editor, whose nazms were acts of resistance. Maulana Zafar Ali Khan (1873–1956), born in Kot Marath in Sialkot district, was the journalist-poet of India's freedom movement. Educated at Mission High School Wazirabad and Aligarh's Anglo Mohammedan College (BA), he took over the Daily *Zamindar* of Lahore in 1908 — the paper his father Maulvi Sirajuddin Ahmad had founded in 1903 — and made it northern India's most influential Urdu daily. His poetry was a mode of resistance: nationalist nazms that opposed the British, supported the Khilafat Movement, and rejected Gandhi's non-violence in favour of direct confrontation. The price was five years' rigorous imprisonment under Punjab's Governor Michael O'Dwyer. His diwans — *Baharistan* (1937), *Nigaristan*, *Chamanistan* (1944), *Raharistan* — carry the same fire, alongside essays, a play (*Jang-e-Rus-o-Japan*), and a celebrated Urdu translation of Kipling's *Jungle Book*. His naats, including "Woh Shama Ujala Jis Ne Kiya" sung by Mehdi Hassan, are classics of the genre. A founding member of the Majlis-e-Ahrar-e-Islam and a close associate of Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar, he was honoured after Partition with a Pakistan Post commemorative stamp. He died on 27 November 1956.

Zaheer Kashmiri (1919–1994) was a Pakistani Urdu poet, critic and film writer, a leading voice of the Progressive Writers' Movement. Born Peer Dastgeer Zaheer on 21 August 1919 at Amritsar, into a family that had migrated generations earlier from Srinagar, Kashmir, he took an MA in English and began writing poetry at eleven. He became editor of Savera, the Progressive Writers Association's literary magazine — serving on its board alongside Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi — and wrote the landmark essay "Meri Zindagi, Mera Fann" (Savera, 1951). Reaching Lahore around Partition, he worked in films — story and direction of Teen Phool (1961), stories for Anjam (1957) and Sheikh Chili (1958), lyrics for seven films — and from 1959 wrote a column in the daily Ehsaan under the pen name Majnu. His poetry collections include Azmat-e-Aadam (1955), Taghazzul, Chiragh-e-Aakhir-e-Shab, Raqs-e-Junoon (1982) and Auraaq-e-Musawwir; his critical work Adab Ke Maaddi Nazariye argued for a materialist reading of literature. His ghazal turns the classical idiom toward the progressive cause: the lover's lamp becomes the last lamp of the night, burning so that after it there is light, not darkness. He died in Lahore on 12 December 1994; the Pride of Performance was conferred on him after his death.

Bhikampur's caged nightingale — the young poet who wrote women's freedom into Urdu verse. Zahida Khatun Sherwani (1894–1922), who wrote as Zay Khay Sheen — the letters Z-Kh-S — was an Urdu poet and a pioneering voice for women's rights, who died at twenty-seven. Born on 18 December 1894 at Bhikampur in the Aligarh district, the younger daughter of Nawab Sir Muzammilullah Khan Sherwani, a leading figure of the Aligarh movement, she began writing verse at ten and sending poems and articles to women's magazines. Because her society did not permit women to write poetry, she published first as Nuzhat and then, from 1912, as Zay Khay Sheen. Her ghazals and nazms carried a woman's feeling and a reformer's anger together: a nazm on the Kanpur mosque tragedy in 1913, verses on the Tripoli and Balkan wars, a Sipas-Nama-e-Urdu presented at the opening of Osmania University in 1918, and her celebrated masnavi Aaina-e-Haram (1921), a plea for women's rights. Her two collections are Aaina-e-Haram and Firdaus-e-Takhayyul. She died at Bhikampur on 2 February 1922, aged twenty-seven, and her verse was gathered and published by her cousin Aneesa Khatoon Sherwani.

Zia Fatehabadi (1913–1986) — born Mehr Lal Soni on 9 February 1913 at Kapurthala, Punjab — was a modern Urdu poet of the ghazal and the nazm, and a disciple of Seemab Akbarabadi in the line of Dagh. His family came from Fatehabad, near Tarn Taran, the town whose name he carried; "Zia", meaning Light, was the pen name his teacher chose for him. He wrote his first ghazal in 1925, still a schoolboy in Jaipur, and became Seemab's disciple in 1930, remaining true to his ustad all his life and working to keep his legacy alive. His first collection, Tullu (Dawn), appeared in 1933 while he was still at college, followed by Noor-e-Mashriq (The Light of the East) in 1937. He took a B.A. with honours in Persian in 1933 and an M.A. in English in 1935, then joined the Reserve Bank of India in 1936, serving for thirty-five years and retiring as Deputy Chief Officer in 1971. He married Raj Kumari in 1942 and made Delhi his home after retirement. Across six decades he produced nineteen works — eleven collections of poetry, among them Nai Subah (1952), Gard-e-Raah (1963), Husn-e-Ghazal (1964), Dhoop aur Chandni (1977), Rang-o-Noor (1981) and Soch ka Safar (1982) — alongside qataat, rubaiyat, geets, sonnets, essays and letters. He never sought public recognition or state awards, and kept a low profile all his life; his verse is plain, musical and hopeful, written in the common man's language, with light and dawn as its abiding images. He died in Delhi on 19 August 1986, after a long illness.

Zia Jalandhari (1923–2012) was a Pakistani Urdu poet, broadcaster and television chief, and a pioneering member of the Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq, the Circle of Connoisseurs. Born Syed Zia Nisar Ahmad on 2 February 1923 in Jalandhar, his family moved to Lahore, where he took an MA in English Literature from Government College and lectured in English at Islamia College. He began his broadcasting career at All India Radio and joined Radio Pakistan in 1948, later serving as Managing Director of Pakistan Television. His poetry — in collections such as Narsa (1966), Sar-e-Sham (1968), Dam-e-Subh (2003) and the Kulliyat-e-Ziya (2007) — carries the Halqa's modernist inwardness: plain speech, moral clarity and the world seen through the beloved's eyes. He received the Pride of Performance in 2006 and a National Literary Award for Dam-e-Subh, and died in Islamabad on 13 March 2012.

Nida Fazli was a Sahitya Akademi Award winning poet and lyricist who bridged Urdu and Hindi with deep humanist sensitivity, Doha compositions, and colloquial everyday philosophy.

The last voice of Mughal Delhi — ghazals of effortless simplicity that charmed commoner and court alike.

The poet who turned Urdu poetry toward reform — Musaddas-e-Hali, Urdu's first critic, and Ghalib's first biographer.

Shaair-e-Inqilab — the poet whose slogan was "revolution, revolution, and revolution."

The "Keats of Urdu poetry" — who made revolution sing, and gave the lonely city its anthem.

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.

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.

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).

Asghar Husain (1884–1936), known by his pen name Asghar Gondvi, was a pre-modern Urdu ghazal poet of rare philosophical depth. Born in the Gorakhpur district in 1884, his family settled in Gonda, where he lived most of his life and from which he took his name. With little formal schooling, he taught himself Urdu, Arabic, Persian, and English, and worked as an editor — first with Urdu Markaz, Lahore, then for many years at Tej Bahadur Sapru's Hindustani Press in Allahabad, editing the magazine Hindustani. A close friend of Jigar Moradabadi (whose Safha profile is in this directory), Asghar was not a prolific writer; he was preoccupied essentially with the idea of perfecting his ghazal. His poetry takes the stock romantic metaphors of the ghazal and re-thinks them in both romantic and spiritualist registers — a soft, melancholic voice that is philosophical without ever losing its music. His best-known sher, "chala jata hun hansta khelta mauj-e-hawadis se / agar aasaniyan hon zindagi dushwar ho jae," has entered the living memory of Urdu. His collections include Nishat-e-Rooh and Surood-e-Zindagi. He died in Allahabad in 1936.

Seemab Akbarabadi (1882–1951), born Aashiq Hussain Siddiqui in Agra, was one of the most prolific poets of twentieth-century Urdu — some seventy-five books, including twenty-two collections of poetry. In 1898 he became a disciple of Daagh Dehlvi (whose Safha profile is in this directory), joining the great classical tradition of the Delhi school. In 1923 he founded the publishing house Qasr-ul-Adab in Agra and launched the monthly Paimana, the weekly Taj, and the monthly Shair — printing not only his own work but that of a generation; his son Aijaz Siddiqi carried Shair on for decades. His ghazals, beloved in the voice of Kundan Lal Saigal, move easily between love, philosophy, and social themes. Late in life he completed Wahi-e-Manzoom, a verse translation of the Quran, published after his death. After Partition he moved to Karachi, where a paralytic stroke in 1949 ended his writing life; he died there on 31 January 1951.