Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (1888–1958), scholar, journalist and statesman, was born on 11 November 1888 at Mecca, where his father, the scholar Muhammad Khairuddin, had settled after leaving India in the wake of 1857. The family returned to Calcutta in 1890, and the boy was taught at home by his father, mastering Arabic, Persian and Urdu, and writing from his teens. In 1912, at twenty-three, he founded the Urdu weekly Al-Hilal, whose fearless journalism the British shut down within two years. He rose in the Congress, presiding over it in 1923 and again from 1940 to 1946, and spent years in prison for the freedom struggle, writing the letters from Ahmednagar Fort that became Ghubar-e-Khatir. His great works — the Quranic commentary Tarjuman-ul-Quran, the memoir Tazkira, and the letters — sit beside a small body of early verse, written under the pen-name Azad. When India became free, he became its first Minister of Education, holding the office from 1947 until his death, and laid the foundations of the country's modern learning: the University Grants Commission, the institutes of technology, and the national academies of letters, music, dance and art. He died of a stroke at Delhi on 22 February 1958 and lies buried within the Jama Masjid. His birthday, 11 November, is observed across India as National Education Day, and the Bharat Ratna was conferred on him posthumously in 1992.

"The First Lady of Urdu Poetry" — the first prominent woman poet of the progressive era. Ada Jafri (1924–2015), born Aziz Jahan in Badayun, was the first prominent woman poet of the progressive era — honoured as "The First Lady of Urdu Poetry". Her father died when she was three; raised in a traditional household, she began composing verse at twelve under the name Ada Badayuni, and received guidance from poets including Akhtar Sheerani, who printed her first ghazal in his journal *Rooman*. She married the civil servant and littérateur Nurul Hasan Jafri in Lucknow in January 1947, taking the name Ada Jafarey, and moved with him to Karachi after Partition. Her first collection, *Main Saz Dhoondhti Rahi* (1950), announced a woman's voice writing the ghazal in the romanticist tradition with remarkable confidence; *Shahr-i Dard* (1967) won the Adamjee Literary Award. Later collections, an autobiography (*Jo Rahi So Bekhabari Rahi*), Urdu haiku, and her edited anthology *Ghazal Numa* followed. Pakistan honoured her with the Medal of Excellence (1981), the Pride of Performance (2003), and the Kamal-e-Fun lifetime award (2003) — the first woman to receive it. She died in Karachi on 12 March 2015.

Adil Mansuri (1936–2008) was an Indian modernist poet, calligrapher, painter and playwright, born in Ahmedabad on 18 May 1936 as Farid Mohammad. He spoke Gujarati at home and was educated in Arabic and Urdu; after Partition his family moved to Karachi, where he began writing Urdu ghazals and learning calligraphy, returning to Ahmedabad in 1955. He became a leading modernist who experimented with form and language together, writing ghazals in Gujarati, Hindi and Urdu, and is credited with developing the modern Gujarati ghazal. His Urdu collection *Hashr ki Subh Darakhshan Ho* carries his socio-political consciousness alongside Islamic tradition. He immigrated to New Jersey, USA, in 1985, where he continued to write, paint and practise calligraphy until his death on 6 November 2008. He received the Kalapi Award (1998) and the Vali Gujarati Award (2008).

Lucknow's court poet — the ghazal that carried a fallen city to Kolkata. Agha Hajju Sharaf (1812–1887) was a classical Urdu poet of Lucknow, a disciple of Haidar Ali Aatish and a poet close to the royal house of Awadh. He lived through the fall of the Lucknow court: after the kingdom was annexed in 1856, he followed the exiled court to Kolkata, where he stayed with Hamid Ali Kaukab, the crown prince of Wajid Ali Shah. His best-known work is Afsana-e-Lucknow, a long masnavi written on Lucknow itself — its streets, its court and its vanishing world. His collected ghazals, Deewan-e-Sharaf, appeared in print in 1875, in his own lifetime; forty-two of his ghazals survive. His verse carries the Lucknow ghazal at its most polished — love, fate and the beloved's beauty in clear, musical Urdu — and it keeps the memory of a city that was already slipping away. He died in 1887, at about seventy-five.

The Shakespeare of Urdu — the playwright whose ghazals still sing. Agha Hashar Kashmiri (1879–1935), born Muhammad Shah on 3 April 1879 at Banaras, was the Urdu stage's great playwright-poet — the man remembered as the Shakespeare of Urdu. His father, Ghani Shah, had come to Banaras from Kashmir, and the boy grew up between Arabic and Persian learning and the travelling Parsi theatre companies that passed through the city. He began writing verse at seventeen, and wrote his first play, Aaftaab-e-Mohabbat, at eighteen; when an elder of the theatre dismissed playwriting as no work for a boy, he took the taunt as a challenge and made the stage his life. He had already gone to Bombay at fourteen, and he rose through its theatre companies — his first play for the New Alfred Theatrical Company, Mureed-e-Shak, drawn from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, was a success, and his pay rose from fifteen rupees a month to forty. Over the following decades he wrote plays in Urdu, Hindi and Bangla: Shakespeare retold for Indian audiences — Shaheed-e-Naaz, Said-e-Hawas, Safaid Khoon after King Lear, Khwab-e-Hasti after Macbeth — and stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, above all Sita Banbas and Bilwa Mangal, with Yahudi Ki Ladki the most staged of them all. He worked in Bombay and in Calcutta, and his plays carried ghazals and songs inside their dialogue, so his verse travelled on the stage as well as on the page. He married the classical singer Mukhtar Begum, elder sister of Farida Khanum. Shortly before his death he moved to Lahore to try his hand at film production, and he died there in 1935, aged 56, and was buried in the Miani Sahib graveyard. His ghazals are still sung — the spring breeze that betrays a lover's secret, the world forgotten in remembrance, the road of the beloved set against the road of the mosque.

Agha Shahid Ali was a Kashmiri-American poet who wrote in English and carried the ghazal into American poetry. Born in New Delhi in 1949 and raised in Kashmir, he studied at the University of Kashmir and the University of Delhi, then earned a PhD at Pennsylvania State University and an MFA at the University of Arizona, teaching at universities including Hamilton, Princeton and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His collections include The Half-Inch Himalayas, A Nostalgist's Map of America, The Country Without a Post Office and Rooms Are Never Finished, a National Book Award finalist, and he translated Faiz Ahmed Faiz and edited Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English. His poems return again and again to Kashmir, exile, memory, loss and home. He died in Amherst, Massachusetts, on 8 December 2001.

Hyderabad's craftsman — difficult metres made graceful, and the pen-name that bends every heart. Ahmad Husain Mail (1857/58–1914) was a poet of Hyderabad in the Deccan, praised in his own time for the technical mastery of his verse. He wrote in difficult metres that few others attempted, and he was best known for his rubais — four-line poems of wit and reflection — alongside his ghazals. Nineteen of his ghazals and nineteen of his rubais survive, and his collected verse appeared in his lifetime as Deewan-e-Doctor Mail (Agra, 1897); a later selection of his work, Bada-e-Sukhan, was gathered after his death and published in 1935. His best-loved lines turn on the play of his own pen-name — Mail, meaning inclination — making love itself the force that bends every heart. He died in 1914.

Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi (1916–2006), born Ahmad Shah Awan on 20 November 1916 at Anga in Khushab district, Punjab, was one of the central figures of modern Urdu literature — poet, short-story writer, critic, journalist and editor. From a family of Sufi pirs, he graduated from the University of the Punjab, Lahore, in 1935, briefly served in the excise department, and then gave his life to letters. He edited Phool, Tehzeeb-i-Niswaan, Adab-i-Lateef, Savera and Naqoosh, edited the daily Imroze, and from 1962 published his own journal Funoon for almost half a century — the nursery of a generation, Parveen Shakir among his mentees. As secretary-general of the Progressive Writers' Movement in Punjab (1948) and then Pakistan (1949), and from 1974 of the Majlis-e-Taraqqi-e-Adab, Lahore, he was repeatedly arrested in the 1950s and 1970s for his convictions. His poetry moves between the traditional ghazal and the modern nazm, and his short stories — Chaupal, Bagooley, Sannata among them — are counted, by some critics, second only to Premchand in their depiction of rural life. He received the Pride of Performance (1968) and the Sitara-e-Imtiaz (1980), and died in Lahore on 10 July 2006.

Amritsar's voice of Partition — where does the day go, where does the night go? Ahmad Rahi (1923–2002), born Ghulam Ahmad on 12 November 1923 at Amritsar in Punjab, was a Pakistani Punjabi poet and writer, an Urdu ghazal poet, and one of Lollywood's most prolific film lyricists. Schooled at Amritsar, he went on to M.A.O. College, Lahore, where he was expelled for taking part in political movements, and he stood with the Progressive Writers' Movement. At Partition in 1947 he migrated to Pakistan and became the founding editor of the quarterly literary magazine *Sawera* at Lahore. His first book, *Tarinjan* (1952), sang Punjabi culture and mourned Partition's dead — its lament poems carry the folk lovers Heer, Sahiban and Sohni through the bloodshed of 1947 — and his Urdu ghazals were gathered in *Rag-e-Jaan*. For the cinema he wrote more than 1,900 songs and some 260 film scripts across 51 films, Punjabi and Urdu, among them *Heer Ranjha* (1970), *Mirza Jat* (1967), *Baji* (1963) and *Yakke Wali* (1957). His services to letters were honoured with the Pride of Performance and the Adamjee Literary Award. He died at Lahore on 2 September 2002, after seven months of paralysis.

Aish Dehlvi (1779–1874) was a classical Urdu poet of Delhi, remembered above all as one of the most outspoken critics of Ghalib's poetic style. A physician by profession — he is cited in the Ghalib tradition as Hakeem Agha Jaan Aish — he lived his long life in the Delhi of the late Mughal and early colonial eras, writing in the Delhi idiom at a time when the ghazal's language and obscurity were themselves matters of public debate. He is "one of the most vocal critics of Ghalib's poetic style," and the anecdote that preserves his name is a mushaira exchange in which he teased Ghalib for verse that only its author could understand. His surviving work is small — sixteen ghazals, six selected couplets and one qita, with a modern Kulliyat-e-Aish (1992) as his book — but the couplets that survive show a poet of wit, plain speech and moral clarity: the heart's unnamed ache, the candle burning out at dawn, and a world whose colours and fragrances no longer tempt those who have seen its impermanence.

Lisan-ul-Asr — the master of satire who laughed at a changing world.

Aligarh's Progressive voice — memory is a torment, so take it away, O Lord. Akhtar Ansari (1909–1988), born Muhammad Ayub Ansari on 1 October 1909 at Budaun in Uttar Pradesh, was an Indian Urdu poet, short-story writer and critic, and a firm voice of the Progressive movement. He was schooled at the Anglo-Arabic School, took his B.A. and teaching degree from Aligarh Muslim University — where he also taught at the university school — and in 1947 took his M.A. in Urdu and lectured in the university's Urdu department, later working at its Training College. He stood by progressive ideas in his poetry and his criticism without joining the movement as an activist, giving its concerns a firm critical and scientific base in his writings. His poetry collections include Naghma-i-Rooh, Aabgeeney (1945), Tedhi Zameen and Suroor-e-Jaan; his stories appeared in Andhi Duniya aur Doosre Afsaane and Nazo aur Doosre Afsaane; and his critical books include Hali aur Naya Tanqueedee Shaoor and Afaadi Adab, besides studies of the ghazal itself. He died on 5 October 1988 at Aligarh, aged 79.

Akhtar Sheerani (1905–1948), born Muhammad Dawood Khan at Tonk on 4 May 1905, was Lahore's poet of romance. His father, the scholar Hafiz Mahmood Khan Shirani, had the boy taught at home — religious learning, wrestling for the body, poetry for the soul — and when the family was driven from Tonk after a revolt against the Nawab, father and son settled in Lahore, where Dawood passed Munshi Fazil (1921) and Adeeb Fazil (1922) at Oriental College and took the pen name Akhtar under the guidance of Maulana Tajwar Najibabadi. From 1923 to 1939 he edited, in succession, Intikhab, Bahaaristan, Khyaalistan and Romaan, and wrote, at a time when the Progressive movement dominated Urdu letters, a poetry deliberately apart from it: not slogans but youth, beauty, nature and longing, in the spirit of Shelley and Keats — a verse that, in Pakistan Post's words, "exhales verse as a flower exhales fragrance". Woman, for him, was not one figure but beauty itself — beloved, wife, mother, sister — and nature took its colour from her. His life, by contrast, was a succession of losses — a son, a friend, a love called Salma who did not return his love — and drink undid his health. He died at Lahore on 9 September 1948, aged forty-three, two days before Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and lies in Miani Sahib Graveyard.

Pillar of the modern Urdu nazm — Sahitya Akademi laureate and the Filmfare-winning pen behind *Waqt*'s famous dialogues. Akhtar-ul-Iman (12 November 1915 – 9 March 1996), born at Qila Patthargarh near Najibabad in Uttar Pradesh's Bijnor district, was one of the pillars of the modern Urdu nazm. Raised in harsh circumstances — an orphan's upbringing in Delhi — he worked menial jobs while studying, graduated from the Anglo-Arabic (Zakir Husain) College in Delhi, and took his master's in Urdu from Aligarh Muslim University. After a spell as a staff artist at All India Radio, he moved to Bombay in 1945 and became one of Hindi cinema's most respected screenwriters: his dialogues shaped landmark B.R. Films productions including *Kanoon* (1960), *Dharmputra* (1961) and *Waqt* (1965), earning him the Filmfare Best Dialogue award twice (1963, 1966); the famous "glass-house" line of *Waqt* is his. As a poet he deliberately set the ghazal aside, choosing the nazm — in free, conversational verse — to speak of the modern individual's alienation, moral choice and philosophical humanism. His collection *Yadein* won the 1962 Sahitya Akademi Award in Urdu. He died in Mumbai on 9 March 1996.

Ale Ahmad Suroor (1911–2002), born in Badaun, was one of the founders of modern Urdu criticism — a poet who became the conscience of Urdu literary judgement. His father, a postmaster, wanted him to be a doctor, so he first graduated in science from St John's College, Agra; but literature claimed him, and he took an M.A. in English in 1934. He taught English and Urdu at Aligarh and Lucknow, and from 1958 to 1974 was professor and Head of Urdu at Aligarh Muslim University, later founding and directing the Iqbal Institute at the University of Kashmir. His critical books — *Tanqeed Kya Hai?* (1947), *Adab aur Nazriya* (1954) and above all *Nazar aur Nazariya* (1973) — turned Urdu criticism from impressionistic praise into a disciplined, principled art; his lifelong study of Iqbal (*Iqbal: Nazriya aur Shairi*, 1978) remains a landmark. He wrote poetry too, in ghazal and nazm, with a critic's clarity and a poet's heart — the shore's peace weighed against the joy of fighting the storm. India honoured him with the Sahitya Akademi Award (1974) and the Padma Bhushan (1991). He died in Delhi on 9 February 2002.

The historian of Urdu letters — a cup shown but never handed, and a thought the tongue never spoke. Ali Jawad Zaidi (1916–2004), born on 10 March 1916 in the village of Karhan in Azamgarh district — now Mau district — in Uttar Pradesh, was an Indian Urdu poet, critic and historian of Urdu literature. Schooled first at home and then at the Mehmoodabad state school, he passed his matriculation in 1935, his intermediate in 1937 and his B.A. from Lucknow University in 1939. The freedom struggle drew him to the Communist Party of India, and he was jailed for six months for his part in it. After independence he served in government in prominent positions, including administrative work in the commission set up for the development of Urdu. His poems, gathered in Tesha-i-Aawaaz and Rag-e-Sung, often carry his patriotic concerns, while his critical books — Do Adabi School, Qaseeda Nigaaraan-e-Uttar Pradesh, Tareekh Urdu Adab ki Tadween and Urdu Mein Qaumi Shairi ke Sau Saal — and his English history of Urdu literature made him one of the great record-keepers of the tradition. He received the Padma Shri in 1988 and died at Lucknow on 7 December 2004, aged 88.

Ali Sardar Jafri (1913–2000), born in Balrampur, Gonda district, U.P., was one of the most prominent Urdu poets of the twentieth century — a progressive poet, critic, and film lyricist. Raised in Lucknow's religious atmosphere, he could reportedly recite a thousand verses of Anis by age eight. Admitted to Aligarh Muslim University in 1933, he was expelled in 1936 for political reasons; he graduated from Zakir Husain College, Delhi (1938), and his Lucknow University postgraduate studies ended with his 1940–41 arrest for anti-war poems. He presided over the first conference of the Progressive Writers' Movement in Lucknow (1936), co-edited *Naya Adab* (1939–1949), and later edited *Guftagu*; his poetry collections — *Nai Duniya Ko Salaam* (1948), *Asia Jaag Utha* (1951), *Ek Khwab Aur*, *Mera Safar*, *Sarhad* — carry his romantic lyricism and revolutionary hope. He wrote film lyrics (*Dharti Ke Lal*, 1946; *Pardesi*, 1957), produced the documentary *Kabir, Iqbal and Freedom* and the 18-part TV serial *Kahkashan* on Urdu poets. He received the Padma Shri (1967), the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship (1971) and the Jnanpith Award (1997). He died in Mumbai on 1 August 2000.

Allama Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi (birth year disputed, 1796 or 1797 – 19 August 1861) of Khairabad, Sitapur, was one of the great scholar-poets of nineteenth-century India — a Hanafi mufti, a Kalam theologian, and a master of logic and philosophy whom scholars called the final authority on fatwas. Son of Fazl-e-Imam Khairabadi, the Mughals' Sadr al-Sadur, he completed his education by the age of thirteen, taught from that age, studied Hadith with Shah Abd al-Qadir and Shah Abd al-Aziz, and became mufti in the Department of Qaza in 1828. He edited the first diwan of Ghalib at Ghalib's own request, and moved in the Delhi circle of Ghalib, Mufti Sadruddin Azurda and Bahadur Shah Zafar. In 1825 he issued his famous refutation of Ismail Dehlvi, Tahqeeq al-Fatwa fi Abtal al-Taghwa. On 26 June 1857, as Bakht Khan's army reached Delhi, he gave the Friday sermon and issued the edict supporting jihad against British rule — the fatwa signed by Azurda and other Delhi scholars that carried the uprising. After the rebellion failed he was arrested at Khairabad on 30 January 1859, defended himself at his own trial, was sentenced to life transportation, and was shipped to the Andaman Islands on 8 October 1859 aboard the Fire Queen. There, in captivity, he wrote Arabic qasidas as eyewitness accounts of 1857 and his book al-Thawra al-Hindiyya — the first book ever written on the events of 1857. He died in exile on the Andaman Islands on 19 August 1861. His son Abdul Haq, his grandson Muztar Khairabadi and his great-grandson Jan Nisar Akhtar carried the family's literary line forward.

Allama Shibli Nomani (1857–1914), born at Bindwal in Azamgarh district, was the scholar who gave Urdu its modern historiography. Taught first by the rationalist Maulana Muhammad Farooq Chirayakoti and then, on Hajj, by scholars in Arabia, he joined Sir Syed Ahmad Khan's Anglo-Mohammedan College, Aligarh, in 1882 as professor of Arabic and Persian, where sixteen years beside Thomas Arnold opened him to Western thought without loosening his oriental roots. After Sir Syed's death he advised Hyderabad State on education, then served as principal of Nadwatul Ulama (1908–1913), before returning to Azamgarh. His biographies — above all Al-Farooq — set a new standard: history written from sources, in lucid Urdu prose, rather than panegyric. As a critic, Sher-ul-Ajam made him a founder of Urdu literary criticism. He founded Shibli National College in 1883 and, in his last year, bequeathed his house and orchard for Darul Mussanifin (the House of Writers) at Azamgarh; its first formal meeting was held on 21 November 1914, three days after his death, and his disciple Syed Sulaiman Nadvi carried the house — and Sirat-un-Nabi — forward. His poetry, small in bulk beside his prose, carries the same mind: a reformer's grief for a community that had lost its learning, and a believer's address to eternity.

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.

Ambar Bahraichi (1949–2021) was a prominent modern Urdu poet and a well-known Sanskrit scholar. Born Mohammad Idris at Bahraich on 5 July 1949, he made Lucknow his home and his literary base. He was a Sahitya Akademi award winner, and his bibliography joins the two traditions he lived in: Urdu collections such as Doob (1990), Khali Seepiyon Ka Iztirab (2000) and Malang Malhar (2013) stand beside Sanskrit and critical works including Maha Bhinishkarman (1987) and studies of Anand Vardhan. His ghazal is spare, image-driven and quietly philosophical — rivers and thirst, faces and masks, victories won outside the house and lost within it. A man who seems to have been a river himself, carrying the thirst of every stream he passed, he wrote of success as a face that changes colour, and of solitude as the silence of a forest of faces. He died at Lucknow on 7 May 2021, leaving a body of work that bridges Urdu poetry and Sanskrit learning.

Ameeq Hanafi (1928–1988) was one of the most prominent modern Urdu poets and a critic of wide range. Born Abdul Aziz Hanfi at Indore on 3 November 1928, he was educated at Mhow, matriculating in 1946 and taking two M.A. degrees, in Political Science in 1952 and in History in 1954. Alongside the social sciences he cultivated a deep interest in music and Indian philosophy. He joined All India Radio and retired from a senior position, remaining a broadcaster at heart. He began writing poetry at Mhow. His first collection, Sang-e-Pairahan (1958), still carried the imprint of Progressive poetics, but his later work — Shajar-e-Sada, Shab Gasht, and the long poem Salsalat-ul-Jaras — established him as a modernist of great promise and fulfilment. He also wrote criticism, including work on Amir Khusro and the study of poetry and poetics Sher Cheeze Deegar Ast, which ranges across Eastern and Western poetics. In both verse and criticism, he joined modern experiment to a classical sense of form.

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.

Amjad Islam Amjad (4 August 1944 – 10 February 2023) was the poet Pakistan invited into its living rooms — through verse, and through television dramas that became household names. Born in Lahore to a family originally from Sialkot, he took an MA in Urdu literature from Punjab University (1967), lectured at Govt. M.A.O. College Lahore (1968–1975), directed at Pakistan Television Corporation (1975–1979), and later served as Director General of the Urdu Science Board (1989) and project director of the Children's Library Complex. Poet, playwright, lyricist, columnist, critic and translator, he authored more than seventy books. His first poetry book appeared in 1974; his collections include Barzakh (1974), Satvan Dar (1978), Fishar (1982), Barish ki Aawaz (1997) and Yahiin Kahiin (2006). His TV dramas — Waris (1979), Dehleez, Samandar, Raat, Waqt, Apnay Log — made him a household name, as did his famous ghazal "Insha Ji Utho", sung by Ghulam Ali, and the lyric "Mann Ki Lagan". His style is simple, humanistic and philosophical, emotionally direct — everyday feeling with depth. He received the Pride of Performance (1987), Sitara-e-Imtiaz (1998) and Hilal-e-Imtiaz (2023).

Anand Bakshi (1930–2002), born Bakshi Anand Prakash Vaid on 21 July 1930 in Rawalpindi, was Hindi cinema's most prolific lyricist — the soldier turned poet whose plain words carried four decades of film songs. His grandfather was a superintendent of police in Rawalpindi and his father served in the army; his mother died when he was nine. At fourteen he joined the Royal Indian Navy, serving three years, then joined the army, where his poems appeared in the army's own magazine; he left the army in 1950 and came to Bombay dreaming of becoming a singer. Sahir Ludhianvi taught him to weave poetry into lyrics and introduced him to producers, and his first film songs came in Bhalaa Aadmi (1958). His breakthrough came with Jab Jab Phool Khile (1965) and Milan (1967), and from there he wrote nearly thirty-three hundred songs in about six hundred and thirty films — more than any other lyricist of his time — for Laxmikant-Pyarelal, R. D. Burman, Kalyanji-Anandji and a generation of composers, becoming Rajesh Khanna's favoured lyricist. His songs run the whole range of Hindi film feeling — "Dum Maro Dum", "Chingari Koi Bhadke", "Kuch To Log Kahenge", "Zindagi Ke Safar Mein", "Chitthi Aayi Hai", "Yeh Dosti Hum Nahin Todenge", "Tujhe Dekha To Yeh Jaana Sanam", "Mehendi Laga Ke Rakhna", "Aadmi Musafir Hai" — love songs and laments, lullabies and anthems, in words anyone could sing. He won the Filmfare Award for Best Lyricist four times, in 1978, 1981, 1995 and 1999, from forty nominations, and he was still writing hit songs at seventy, for Mohabbatein (2000). He also sang in five films himself. He died in Bombay on 30 March 2002, aged 71. His son Rakesh's life of him, Nagme, Kisse, Baatein, Yaadein, appeared in 2021.

Lucknow's judge-poet — the mother tongue he would never give up, and the voice of Lucknow's shared culture. Anand Narain Mulla (1901–1997) was a judge, parliamentarian and Urdu poet of Lucknow — a Kashmiri Brahmin who called Urdu his mother tongue. He was born in Lucknow on 24 October 1901, the son of Jagat Narain Mulla, a leading advocate. He was educated at Firangi Mahal under Barkatullah Raza Firangi Mahali, then at Government Jubilee High School and College, taking his B.A. in 1921, his M.A. in English in 1923 and his LL.B. in 1925 from Canning College, Lucknow. He first wrote poetry in English, in 1926, and then moved to Urdu, learning the craft from Barkatullah Raza and under the influence of Brij Narain Chakbast. He practised law, and from 1954 to 1961 he was a judge of the Allahabad High Court. His first collection of poems, Joo-e-Sheer, appeared in 1949; Meri Hadis-e-Umr-e-Gurezan won the Sahitya Akademi Award in Urdu in 1964, and he received the Iqbal Samman when he was 92. In 1967 he was elected to the Lok Sabha from Lucknow as an Independent, and from 1972 to 1978 he sat in the Rajya Sabha. He chaired the Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu and was the first chairman of the UP Urdu Academy, from 1972 to 1977. He also translated Iqbal's poetry into English. His saying — "Urdu is my mother tongue! I can give up my religion but not my mother tongue" — is still quoted as the voice of Lucknow's shared culture. He died in New Delhi on 12 June 1997, aged 95.

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.

Arsh Malsiani (1908–1979) — born Balmukund on 20 September 1908 in Malsiyan, Punjab — was a distinguished Urdu poet, translator, prose writer and editor, known as the Raj Kavi of Punjab. His father, Labhu Ram "Josh" Malsiyani, was a celebrated Urdu-Persian scholar-poet and disciple of Dagh Dehlvi; that Dagh lineage is Arsh's literary inheritance. He began as an overseer in the Punjab Irrigation department, then taught for about fifteen years at the Government Industrial School, Ludhiana, earning his F.A. and B.A. along the way. From 1948 to 1968 he served in the Publications Division of the Government of India — Assistant Editor of the Urdu monthly Aajkal under Josh Malihabadi, and its editor from 1954. His poetry collections are Haft Rang, Chang-o-Aahang, Sharar-e-Sang and Aahang-e-Hijaz; he translated Umar Khayyam's rubais (Hast-o-Bood), gathered his humorous prose as Post-mortem, and published a biographical sketch of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (1976). He died in Delhi on 15 December 1979.

Syed Anwar Hussain 'Arzoo' Lakhnavi (1873–1951) was a leading poet of the Lucknow school of Urdu poetry. Born in Lucknow into a cultured, well-off literary family, he was the son of Mir Zakir Hussain 'Yas' and the younger brother of Mir Yusuf Hussain 'Qayas', both poets. Educated at home and later in Arabic and Persian under Lucknow scholars, he wrote his first marsiya at twelve and became a disciple of Syed Zaman Ali 'Jalal' Lakhnavi, succeeding him as guide to Jalal's disciples. Though he wrote in nearly every genre — marsiya, qasida, masnavi, rubai, naat and more — he is remembered above all for his ghazals, collected in Fughan-e-Arzoo, Jahan-e-Arzoo and Nishan-e-Arzoo. His hallmark was plain, conversational language: he brought the ghazal closer to everyday speech without abandoning its Lucknow elegance. In 1942 he moved to Bombay and became one of the first mainstream Urdu poets to write for Hindi cinema, later migrating to Karachi, where he joined Radio Pakistan and died in 1951.

Asar Lakhnavi (1885–1967), born Mirza Jafar Ali Khan, was a prominent poet of the later Lucknow School, a critic, scholar and civil servant. Born on 12 July 1885 in Katra Abu Turab, Lucknow, he was educated at Canning College, served as Deputy Collector and held other important administrative posts, and later worked as a minister in the Government of Jammu and Kashmir, for which service India conferred on him the Padma Bhushan. A disciple of Aziz Lakhnavi, he wrote on traditional subjects with great linguistic finesse. His poetry collections include Baharaan, Naubaharaan and Uroos-e-Firtrat, his critical studies include Anis ki Marsiya Nigari, Mutala-e-Ghalib and Chhan Been, and his dictionary Farhang-e-Asar remains a landmark. He died in Lucknow on 6 June 1967.

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.

Aziz Hamid Madni (1922–1991) was a Pakistani poet, critic and translator, and one of the stalwarts of the new Urdu ghazal in Pakistan. He was born on 15 June 1922 in Raipur, in British India, the son of Mohammad Hamid Saqi — a student of Shibli Nomani and a classmate of Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar. In 1948 he moved to Pakistan and settled in Karachi. After a master's degree in English, he taught and worked in journalism for a short while, then joined Radio Pakistan as a programme executive. Three collections of his poetry appeared in his lifetime — Chashm-e-Nigaraan (1962), Dasht-e-Imkaan (1964) and Nakhl-e-Gumaan (1983) — and his two-volume critical survey of modern Urdu poetry, Jadeed Urdu Shaeri, remains a landmark study. His translations of Shakespeare's Othello and Antony and Cleopatra, and most of his translations of French poetry into Urdu, were never published. Forty-three of his ghazals and thirty-seven of his sher survive, and some of his ghazals have been set to music. He died in Karachi on 23 April 1991.

Aziz Lakhnavi, born Mirza Mohammad Hadi in Lucknow in 1882, was a distinguished Persian and Urdu scholar and poet of the Lucknow school. His family, descended from migrants from Shiraz who first settled in Kashmir and later moved to Lucknow under the Awadh nobles, was renowned for scholarship. Educated at home after his father's death when he was seven, he later taught Persian and Urdu at Aminabad School and then became guardian to the siblings of Ali Mohammad Khan, Maharaja of Mahmudabad, spending the rest of his life there. A disciple of Safi Lakhnavi, he practised every poetic form and earned a particular reputation as a qasida poet, praised for the magnanimity of his language and the vitality of his imagination. His works include Gulkadah and the collected Kulliyat-e-Azeez.

The poet whose heart carried the whole world's pain — lexicographer of the *Ameer-ul-Lughat*, master of the naat.

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

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.