Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

Lucknow's ghazal voice inside the marsiya — the garden, the sleepless night, the martyr's grave. Taashshuq Lakhnavi (1824–1892), born Sayyid Mirza at Lucknow on 11 March 1824, was a poet of the Lucknow school who wrote both ghazal and marsiya. He was the younger brother of the poet Ishq Lakhnavi, a disciple of Nasikh, and belonged to the family of poets around Mir Anees, the great master of the marsiya. He began with ghazals in his early years, and his ghazals are remembered for their delicacy of feeling and freshness of theme; his marsiyas carry the ghazal's music into lament, and the two forms meet in his verse — the same images, of the garden, the night of separation and the martyr's grave, serve both. Among his books are Baraheen-e-Gham and Baraheen-e-Ghazal, and his diwan and a later selection, Afkar-e-Tashshuq, survive in print. He died at Lucknow on 12 April 1892, aged 68.

The Indus village boy who became Urdu's poet of the unanswered prayer. Tilok Chand Mahroom (1887–1966), born on 1 July 1887 at Mousa Noor Zaman Shah, a village in tehsil Isa Khel of Mianwali district in Punjab, was an Indian Urdu poet admired as much for his simple life and his refusal of religious division as for his verse. Born into a Hindu family and raised among Muslims, he passed his matriculation with first-class honours from the Diamond Jubilee School, Bannu, in 1907, trained as a teacher at the Central Training College, Lahore, and took his bachelor's degree. He began teaching in 1908 at the Mission School, Dera Ismail Khan, became headmaster of the Cantonment Board Middle School in 1933, lectured in Urdu and Persian at Gordon College, Rawalpindi, and was the first headmaster of the F.G. Technical High School at Tariqabad (Lalkurti), Rawalpindi. He had begun writing verse as a schoolboy — a nazm on service to parents at twelve or thirteen, and an elegy on Queen Victoria in 1901 — and while still a student his poems were appearing in the journals Makhzan of Lahore and Zamana of Kanpur. His first major collection, Ganj-e-Ma'ani, appeared in 1932, holding 175 nazms alongside rubais, qasidas, sehras and elegies; later collections included Rubaiyat, Karvan-e-Watan, Nairang-e-Maani, Bacchon Ki Duniya and Bahaar-e-Tifli, and the long nazm Ashk-e-Hasrat, part of Toofan-e-Gham, became his best-known work. His patriotic verse stands in the line of Suroor Jahanabadi and Brij Mohan Chakbast, and his poems for children carry the same patriotic fire. With the riots of Partition he left Rawalpindi in December 1947 and settled in Delhi, where he became Professor of Urdu at Camp College and served until his retirement in December 1957. He died in Delhi on 6 January 1966, after five weeks of illness, aged seventy-eight. His son, the poet and Iqbal scholar Jagan Nath Azad, gave his father's library to the Allama Iqbal Library at the University of Kashmir, where it is kept as the Tilok Chand Mehroom Collection.

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.