Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

Lucknow's tale-teller — the sun of judgement is a mote before her face. Rajab Ali Beg Suroor (1786–1869), born at Lucknow to Mirza Asghar Ali, was a poet and prose writer of the Lucknow school, remembered above all for Fasana-e-Ajaib, the tale of wonders that made his name immortal in Urdu letters. Schooled at Delhi, he learned Arabic and Persian in the old way and was accomplished besides in horsemanship, archery, calligraphy and music; a sociable and humorous man with a wide circle of friends, he counted Ghalib among his acquaintances. Around 1824 the ruler of Awadh, Ghazi-ud-Din Haider, took offence at something and had him turned out of Lucknow. The exile proved fruitful: at Kanpur, at the urging of Hakim Asad Ali, he turned to the prose that made him — above all Fasana-e-Ajaib, written in 1824, a dazzling, witty answer to Mir Aman's Bagh-o-Bahar, rich in wordplay, description and verse, his own and the masters'. When Naseer-ud-Din Haider came to the throne he was forgiven and allowed back to Lucknow, and under Wajid Ali Shah he joined the court poets at fifty rupees a month. The end of the kingdom of Awadh in 1856 cut off his patronage, and the upheaval of 1857 drove him from Lucknow. In his later years he went to Calcutta for treatment of his eyes, and on his return died at Banaras in 1869. Beside Fasana-e-Ajaib he left a shelf of books — renderings from Persian, tales, and collections of verse and prose — and a small body of ghazals in which the Lucknow manner, polished and playful, turns grave: the beloved's face outshining the sun of judgement, a prayer that ends in union or in death, and a thousand laments where a single sigh of refusal never arrives.

Sachal Sarmast (1739–1829) was a Sindhi Sufi saint-poet of Daraza, a small village near Ranipur in Khairpur, Sindh. Born Abdul Wahab Faruqi, into a family that traced its line to the second caliph Umar, he lost his father as a child and was raised by his uncle, Khwaja Abdul Haq, who became his spiritual master. The name his disciples gave him says what he stood for: Sachal, the truthful one, and Sarmast, drunk with God. He lived his whole life at Daraza — born there, teaching there, and dying there at about ninety — and his shrine still stands in the village, where a three-day gathering is held every year in the month of Ramadan. He is remembered as the poet of seven languages — Sindhi, Saraiki, Persian, Urdu, Punjabi, Arabic and Balochi — though his most celebrated verse is in Sindhi and Saraiki, above all the kafi, the sung Sufi lyric. His poetry sings the unity of being: God is not far away but present in every form, and the lover's cry "I am the Truth" is not defiance but the soul's homecoming. Nine compilations of his Persian verse survive, among them the Diwan-e-Ashkar and the Dard Nama, alongside five Persian masnavis; his collected verse was first printed in 1933.

Delhi's naked faqir — the Persian mystic of the rubai, martyred for refusing to bend. Sarmad Kashani (c. 1590–1661), whose full name was Muhammad Sa'id, was a Persian-speaking Armenian mystic and poet who made India his home. Born around 1590, in Kashan or Armenia, into a Jewish Persian-speaking Armenian merchant family, he was educated in philosophy and the sacred texts, and studied under the great thinkers of Isfahan. As a wealthy trader he sailed to India and landed at Thatta in Sind in the early 1630s, where he fell in love with a young Hindu, Abhai Chand — a love that turned him from merchant to wandering dervish. The two travelled together through Lahore and Hyderabad to Delhi, where the Mughal crown prince Dara Shikoh welcomed him and became his disciple. Sarmad wrote some three hundred Persian quatrains, the rubaiyat on which his fame rests, with a small number of ghazals and fragments besides; with Abhai Chand he also carried part of the Torah into Persian, and he supplied the account of Judaism in the great comparative survey of religions written in India in his lifetime. He went about Delhi as a naked faqir, owning nothing, speaking plainly against priestcraft and cant, and refusing to bend. After Aurangzeb defeated Dara Shikoh, Sarmad was tried for heresy and beheaded outside the Jama Masjid in Delhi in 1661. His tomb still stands beside the mosque, a place of pilgrimage, and he is remembered as the second Hallaj — the martyr who would not unsay what he believed.

Shah Abdul Aziz Dehlvi (1746–1824), eldest son of Shah Waliullah, was born in Delhi on 11 October 1746 and was seventeen when his father died. He took his father's place as teacher of hadith at the Madrasa Rahimiyya and held it for more than sixty years, becoming the Muhaddith of Delhi — the scholar to whom the whole subcontinent turned on questions of law and tradition. He had memorised the Quran as a boy and mastered the religious sciences young, learning first from his father and then from his father's students. His books number in the dozens: the Persian commentary Fath al-Aziz, dictated to a student while he was ill; the collection of legal opinions known as Fatawa-e-Azizi; Bustan al-Muhaddithin, a garden of the hadith masters; and Tuhfa Ithna Ashariya, his reasoned answer to Twelver Shiism, published in 1789. His most lasting gift to ordinary readers was the Quran in Urdu — he translated the whole Book into the language of the people and completed his father's Persian commentary where it had stopped. After British rule settled over India he issued the ruling that the land was a territory under non-Muslim rule, a judgement that stirred the religious movements of the century after him. He died in Delhi on 5 June 1824 and lies beside his father in the Mehdiyan cemetery.

Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai (1689–1752) is the greatest poet of the Sindhi language — a Sufi saint of Sindh whose verse was sung before it was ever written down. Born at Hala Haveli to Shah Habib, of a family tracing its line to Herat, he left home young and wandered Sindh, Punjab and the Thar desert, learning from mystics and Jogis, before settling at the mound of Bhit — the "Bhittai", the man of the mound — where his shrine stands today. His disciples gathered his sung verses after his death into Shah Jo Risalo, thirty chapters set to the ragas, in which the folk heroines of Sindh — Sassui, Sohni, Marui, Momal, Noori, Sorath and Lila — become figures of the soul's search for the Beloved. He also wrote in Persian, and his message was simple and wide: one God, love of the Prophet, tolerance, and the dignity of every human being.

Shah Abdul Qadir Dehlvi (1753–1815), third son of Shah Waliullah, was born in Delhi in 1753 and was nine years old when his father died. Much of his education came from his elder brother, Shah Abdul Aziz, at the Madrasa Rahimiyya. His life's work was a single great act of translation: Muzih-ul-Quran, the first complete Urdu rendering of the Quran in living, idiomatic language, finished in 1790–91 and first printed at Delhi in 1829. Where his brother Rafiuddin had translated word by word, Abdul Qadir translated sense by sense, with short notes that opened difficult passages to ordinary readers — so that the Book could be read, at last, in the language of the home. He also wrote a short guide to purification and prayer and left notes on the Quran's meaning. He died in Delhi on 27 June 1815, and his translation has never gone out of use.

Shah Alam II (1728–1806), born Mirza Ali Gauhar at Shahjahanabad, Delhi, was the Mughal emperor who reigned from 1759 until his death — a king who kept his throne and lost his empire, and a serious poet who wrote under the pen-name Aftab, "the Sun". Son of Alamgir II, he was crowned a fugitive in Bihar and did not return to Delhi until 1772; in 1788 the Afghan chief Ghulam Qadir blinded him, and he ended his life in Delhi under British protection, still universally regarded as emperor. As his power faded, poetry became his chief pursuit: his Persian and Urdu ghazals, guided and collected by Mirza Fakhir Makin, fill a diwan (Nadirat-e-Shahi, compiled around 1797), and he also wrote Ajaib-ul-Qasas, one of the earliest works of Urdu prose. He composed in Persian and Urdu as Aftab, in Braj Bhasha under his own title "Shah Alam", and knew Arabic, Sanskrit and Turkish besides. He died in Delhi on 19 November 1806.

The soldier-poet who gave Delhi its first Urdu impulse — and purified its diction a century before the Lucknow reformers. Shah Hatim (1699–c. 1783), born Shaikh Zahuruddin in Delhi, was a soldier who became one of the founding voices of Urdu poetry in Delhi. When Wali Dakhni's diwan reached the capital around 1720, Hatim and his friends Naji, Mazmun and Abru took up Rekhta poetry — Delhi's answer to the Deccan. By profession a sepoy (he served as an inspector under Nawab Amdat-ul-Mulk of Allahabad and in the households of several nobles), he spent his last days in seclusion near the Delhi Fort. His lasting act was editorial: mid-century he discarded his early diwan and recompiled his work in a purified, standardised Rekhta idiom, naming it *Divan Zadeh* ("Descendant of the Diwan") — the first conscious program of Urdu poetic reform, a century before Nasikh and Aatish are credited with it. Deeply influenced by Khan Arzu (though not formally his disciple), he was proudest of his own pupil: Mirza Muhammad Rafi Sauda. His *Divan Zadeh* holds ghazals, mukhammas, rubais, a saqi-nama, two masnavis in praise of tobacco and qehwa, and a shehr-ashob on Muhammad Shah's Delhi.

Shah Hussain (1538–1599) was the pioneer of the Punjabi kafi and the first great poet of early-modern Punjab. He was born in 1538 inside the walled city of Lahore — the same year Guru Nanak died — the son of Sheikh Usman, a weaver of the Dhudha Rajput clan; his grandfather had embraced Islam, and Hussain grew up among the looms, taking the weaver's images — thread, shuttle, cloth — into his verse for the rest of his life. As a young man he became the disciple of Shaikh Bahlol Daryai, founder of a branch of the Qadiri order, and studied until his mid-thirties. Then, at thirty-six, he turned away from formal prayer, put on red clothes, and began to sing and dance in the streets of old Lahore — a faqir by choice, not by birth. It was then that he met Madho Lal, a young Brahmin boy from Shahdara across the Ravi, thirty-eight years his junior; the bond between them became so complete that the two names fused into one, Madho Lal Hussain, and when Hussain died they were buried together at Baghbanpura, near the Shalimar Gardens. His kafis — short poems of four to ten lines, made to be sung — are the first of their kind in Punjabi: simple in language, built on the rhythms of folk song, and carrying a voice that is often a woman's, a weaver's, a sweeper's, never a dignitary's. More than 160 of them survive, passed down by singers until the oldest manuscript was written in 1804, and they are still sung today. He died in 1599, at sixty-one, near the Ravi, and every year his shrine fills with light for the Mela Chiraghan, the Festival of Lights — Lahore still keeps the feast of its red-clad saint.

Shah Mubarak Abro (birth year disputed — 1683 or 1685, Gwalior; died 1733, Delhi) is one of the founding fathers of Urdu poetry. A grandson of the saint Muhammad Ghaus Gwaliori, he came to Delhi as a young man and became a disciple of the great scholar-poet Siraj-ud-Din Ali Khan Arzu — in whose circle the young Khwaja Mir Dard also studied. Abroo's place in history rests on a surviving fact: his Diwan-e-Abroo endures, making him the first authenticated sahib-e-diwan — master of a collected divan — of Rekhta in northern India. His art was iham, the double meaning: a single line that says two things at once, witty, idiomatic, rooted in Hindustani and Braj speech rather than Persian loftiness. He pioneered a whole genre on the grace of an imaginary beloved — love addressed to a beauty who never existed, and all the truer for it. He died in Delhi in 1733 — one tazkira says, kicked by a horse — and lies near Syed Hasan Rasul Numa. Where he stands in the line is clear: the generation that taught Urdu to smile and to mean two things at once.

Shah Nasir (1756–1838) — also spelled Shah Naseer — was a prominent poet and Sufi of 18th-century Delhi. Born Mohammad Naseeruddin, known as Mian Kallu, he succeeded his father as Sajjada Nashin of the family dargah in 1768, and learned his craft as the pupil of Shah Mohammad Mail, a disciple of Qayem Chandpuri, in the company of Khwaja Mir Dard. He travelled to Meerut and Lucknow, meeting Jur'at, Mushafi, Aatish and Nasikh, and became master guide to members of the royal family. He was a trend-setter of his age, famed for complicated metres and difficult radifs — and the teacher of the next generation: Momin, Zauq and Zafar were his pupils. His ghazal holds the Sufi and the lover in one voice: the beloved's name as rosary and meditation, the mosque and the temple both set aside, and the heart's pain measured out in proverbs. 71 of his ghazals and 97 of his sher survive.

Shah Niyaz Ahmad Barelvi (1742–1834), takhallus 'Niyaz', was a Chishti-Sufi saint, scholar and poet who founded the Niyaziya Silsila and the Khanqah-e-Niyazia in Bareilly. Born in Sirhind, Punjab, into an Alvi-Rizvi Syed family, he moved with his family to Delhi, where by his teens he had mastered Qur'an, Hadith, Tafsir, Fiqh and Arabic at Madrasa Faqriya, and became a leading disciple and khalifa of Fakhr-ud-Din Dehlvi (Fakhr-e-Jahan) in the Chishti-Nizami order — also receiving initiation in the Qadiri, Suhrawardi and Naqshbandi orders. On his master's direction he settled in Bareilly, where his khanqah became a major centre of Sufi teaching whose deputies carried his message to Badakhshan, Samarqand, Kabul and Mecca. His *Diwan-e-Niyaz* — published more than fifty times — holds poetry in Persian, Urdu, Arabic and Hindavi on divine love and Wahdat-ul-Wujood; his Urdu ghazals, in simple, direct diction, remain favourites of qawwali gatherings across India and Pakistan. He died in Bareilly in 1834; his shrine at Khanqah-e-Niyazia is a living pilgrimage site.

Shah Waliullah Dehlvi (1703–1762), born Qutb ud-Din Ahmad ibn Abd-ur-Rahim at Phulat, near Muzaffarnagar, on 21 February 1703, was the great scholar of eighteenth-century Delhi — hadith master, Quranic exegete, jurist and Sufi — whom his followers remember as the renewer of his age. His father, Shah Abdur Rahim, founded the Madrasa Rahimiyya in Delhi, where the boy memorised the Quran by seven and was initiated into the Naqshbandi path at fifteen; on his father's death in 1719 he became the madrasa's principal. In 1731 he made the pilgrimage to Mecca and spent fourteen months in Medina studying hadith, returning to Delhi in 1732 to teach and write for the remaining thirty years of his life. In that span he produced more than fifty works in Arabic and Persian — above all Hujjat Allah al-Baligha, his great argument for the wisdom behind the law, and Fath al-Rahman, the first Persian translation of the Quran made in the subcontinent, completed in 1738. He wrote for ordinary believers as much as for scholars, translating the Quran so that it could be read directly, and reconciling the schools of law and the Sufi orders in a single vision. He died in Delhi on 20 August 1762, aged fifty-nine, and lies in the Mehdiyan cemetery. His sons — Abdul Aziz, Rafiuddin, Abdul Qadir and Abdul Ghani — carried his school forward, and his thought runs through the reform movements of the next two centuries.

Poet laureate of the Mughal court and ustaad of Bahadur Shah Zafar — master of crystal-clear classical Urdu.

The exile of Isfahan — the Persian master who called his life in India a kind of death. Shaykh Muhammad Ali Hazin Lahiji (January 1692–1766) was a Persian poet, memoirist and scholar whose life was broken in two by the fall of a dynasty. Born in Isfahan in January 1692, into a family of scholars and landowners from Lahijan in Gilan, he claimed descent from Shaykh Zahid Gilani, the guide of the house that became the Safavid rulers of Iran. He was schooled in the learning of his day and wrote a fine hand in several scripts. In 1722 the Afghans besieged Isfahan; his younger brothers, his family and many of his friends perished, and the Safavid world he had grown up in fell apart. He spent the next twelve years wandering — through the cities of Iran, the shrine cities of Iraq, and the Hejaz, where he performed the pilgrimage — before making his way to India in 1734, through Sindh, Multan and Lahore, to Delhi. There he was received at the court of Muhammad Shah, but he was a difficult guest: he mocked the king and the court, and scorned the land, its people and the Persian of its poets, and his fiercest opponent was the great scholar Siraj-ud-Din Ali Khan Arzu, whose taste would shape the young Urdu poetry of Delhi. He set down his life in the memoir completed at Delhi in 1741–42, gathered his divan in 1743, and in 1752 compiled his biographical dictionary of the poets. He compiled four divans of verse, of which only one survives. In 1748 he left Delhi for Benares, where he lived the last eighteen years of his life and died in 1766. He was remembered there as a Sufi, and his tomb is venerated to this day. His verse is the poetry of exile: India, for him, was a kind of death, and home was lost for ever with the fall of Isfahan. A century later, Ghalib still counted him among the great masters of Persian poetry.

The Deccan's Sufi ascetic — one immortal ghazal that dissolves lover, beloved, and self into pure unknowing. Siraj Aurangabadi (1715–1763), born Syed Sirajuddin in Aurangabad, is the Deccan's great Sufi ghazal-voice. He began in Persian, under the spell of Hafiz, then turned to Urdu and wrote over five thousand shers — a bridge between the old Deccani style and the new idiom taking shape in the north. In 1734, at about twenty, he took bai'at with Shah Abdul Rahman Chishti; on his murshid's order he renounced poetry after 1740 and lived as an ascetic — younger poets still gathered at his house for instruction. His youth had its own wandering: he left home as a mendicant and was brought back and kept under guard. His fame rests on one ghazal, "Khabar-e-tahayyur-e-ishq" — hear the wonder-tale of love, where neither madness nor the beloved remains — sung in our own time by Abida Parveen and others. His *Kulliyat-e-Siraj* gathers ghazals, qasidas and rubais, and his masnavi *Bostan-e-Khayal* is a long narrative in verse. Divine love is the centre of everything he wrote. He died in Aurangabad in 1763.

Siraj-ud-Din Ali Khan Arzu (1687–1756), born in Agra, was the great scholar-poet of eighteenth-century Delhi — a Persian poet of the first rank, a pioneering linguist and lexicographer, and the mentor of a whole generation of Urdu poetry. Writing mainly in Persian (seven divans, five masnavis), he nevertheless championed rekhta — early Urdu — at a time when Persian still ruled the literary world: he urged poets like Sauda to compose in the vernacular, and groomed his own nephew Mir Taqi Mir alongside Mazhar Jan-e-Janan and Shah Mubarak Abroo. His home mushaira in Delhi was the city's literary court; poets sent their manuscripts to him for correction, and Mir wrote that every master of rekhta was, in effect, Arzu's student. As a scholar he stood a century ahead of his time: his dictionaries — *Siraj-ul-Lughat*, the Urdu–Persian *Nawadir-ul-Alfaz* (1751), and the *Chiragh-e-Hidayat* glossary of poetic idiom — laid the foundations of Urdu lexicography, and in his philological treatise *Muzmir* he was the first scholar to place Sanskrit in the Indo-European language family, decades before Sir William Jones. He moved to Lucknow in 1754 and died there in 1756.

Sultan Bahu (1630–1691) was a Punjabi Sufi poet of the Qadiri order and the founder of the Sarwari Qadiri tradition. He was born on 17 January 1630 at Shorkot, in the Jhang region of Punjab, into the Awan tribe; his father, Bayazid Muhammad, was an officer in the Mughal army, and his mother, Mai Rasti, was herself a woman of prayer, who first turned her son toward the spiritual life. Little is known of his early years beyond what later tradition records: by his own account he searched for a true guide for thirty years, and at last found his training in Delhi, under Syed Abdul Rehman Jilani Dehlvi of the Qadiri order, before returning to Punjab for the rest of his life. He wrote more than forty books on Sufism, almost all of them in Persian, on the knowledge and vision of God — but it is his Punjabi verse that made him beloved. The Abyat-e-Bahu are short quatrains in the people's tongue, simple enough for anyone to sing and deep enough for a lifetime of study: they speak of Faqr, spiritual poverty, as the whole of the path, of the perfect guide without whom the road cannot be walked, and of the cry "Hoo" — He — with which every verse ends, as if the poem itself were a breath of remembrance. He lived under the Mughal emperors Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, and died on 1 March 1691, at sixty-one, without naming a successor to the trust of Faqr. His shrine stands at Garh Maharaja, near the Chenab, and has been moved twice as the river changed its course; his verses are still sung in qawwali and kafi gatherings across Punjab, in the singing style his own couplets created.

Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), born Syed Ahmad Taqvi on 17 October 1817 in Delhi, was the reformer and educationist who led the Aligarh Movement and founded the college that became Aligarh Muslim University. Born into a family close to the fading Mughal court, he entered the Company's judicial service as a young man and rose to sub-judge; at Bijnor in 1857 he sheltered European lives during the uprising, and afterwards wrote his searching account of the revolt's causes. Convinced that his people's future lay in modern learning, he founded the Scientific Society in 1864 to carry Western knowledge into Urdu, visited England in 1869–70 to study its universities, and in 1870 began the journal Tahzib-ul-Akhlaq, which taught a new plain prose and a rational, questioning temper. In 1875 he founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, and in 1886 the Muhammadan Educational Conference. His great works — the survey of Delhi's monuments, his history of the revolt, and his commentary on the Quran — sit beside a lifetime of essays urging reason, science and education. Knighted in 1888, he died at Aligarh on 27 March 1898 and lies buried in the college mosque.

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.

Waris Shah (1722–1798) was a Punjabi Sufi poet of the Chishti order, and the voice Punjab still turns to when it tells the story of Heer and Ranjha. He was born in 1722 at Jandiala Sher Khan, in the Sheikhupura district, into a Sayyid family — his father was Gulsher Shah and his mother Kamal Banu — and his parents died while he was still young. He was educated at Kasur, under Hafiz Ghulam Murtaza, and became a disciple of Pir Makhdum of Kasur. After his studies he settled at Malka Hans, a village north of Pakpattan, where he lived in a small room beside the mosque that now bears his name. There, in 1766, at the asking of his friends, he made the old love of Heer new again: his *Heer Ranjha* retells the tale — traditionally set in the fifteenth century, one of the four great tragic romances of Punjab — in the speech of the Punjab itself, thick with its idioms, proverbs and sayings, and with a minute, living picture of Punjabi life and of the troubled politics of his own century, whose invasions he saw with his own eyes. He did not invent the story — earlier poets had told it before him — but his telling became the classic, the one singers still perform and listeners still know by heart. When he died in 1798 he was buried at Jandiala Sher Khan, where his tomb stands and an annual gathering is held, and lovers still come to it as pilgrims. He is remembered as the Shakespeare of the Punjabi language.

Zeb-un-Nissa Makhfi (1638–1702) was a Mughal princess and Persian poet, the eldest child of Emperor Aurangzeb and his chief consort Dilras Banu Begum. Born at Daulatabad on 15 February 1638, she memorised the Quran by the age of seven and was educated by Hafiza Mariam in Persian, Arabic, philosophy, astronomy and mathematics. Writing in secret under the pen name Makhfi — "Hidden One" — she kept a Delhi salon of scholars and poets, built a great private library, and composed the ghazals later collected as *Diwan-i-Makhfi*. She never married, and spent about the last twenty years of her life imprisoned by her father at Salimgarh Fort, Delhi, where she died on 26 May 1702.

Momin Khan Momin was a contemporary and rival of Ghalib known for intricate romantic nuance, astrological mastery, and the iconic couplet Ghalib offered his entire Diwan in exchange for. Explore his book: Diwan-e-Momin – https://safhaglobal.org/ebook/diwan-e-momin

The founder of the Urdu ghazal — the Deccan poet whose diwan taught Delhi the music of Rekhta.

The Naqshbandi saint of Delhi — Sufi, scholar, and one of the four pillars of Urdu poetry.

The poet of the people — father of the Urdu nazm, who sang of bread, festivals, and the common man.

Yahya Aman, known to poetry as Qalandar Bakhsh Jur'at (1748–1809), was the Lucknow school's most exuberant voice. Born in Delhi and raised in Faizabad, he settled in Lucknow, where he entered the service of Mirza Sulaiman Shikoh and became a beloved fixture of the nobility's gatherings with his wit, humour and mischievous storytelling. A disciple of Mirza Ja'far Ali Hasrat and the lifelong friend of Insha Allah Khan 'Insha', Jur'at lost his eyesight in the prime of his youth — yet no other poet, blind or sighted, ever painted the colours of love as he did. Mir Taqi Mir called him a "skirt-chasing poet"; his ghazals depict romantic encounters with unabashed sensuality, though some of his verses also carry the melancholy of the political chaos around him. His *Kulliyaat-e-Jurat* appeared in print in 1968. He died in Lucknow in 1809.

The founder of Rekhti — the 18th-century Delhi poet who gave Urdu poetry a woman's voice.

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

Imam Bakhsh Nasikh (birth year disputed — d. 16 August 1838, Lucknow), known as Sheikh Imam Bakhsh Nasikh, was born in Faizabad and made Lucknow his home, becoming the founder of the Lucknow school of Urdu poetry. He is celebrated less as a poet of deep feeling than as the supreme craftsman of the art: he deliberated upon language, syntax, and poetic device with unmatched technical virtuosity, expanding Urdu's vocabulary and refining its idiom while respecting classical norms. His legendary rivalry with Khwaja Haidar Ali Aatish — Nasikh the polished craftsman against Aatish the soulful natural — shaped the literary life of Lucknow in the 1830s. Forced into exile by court politics, he returned to Lucknow after the death of minister Hakim Mehdi in 1837 and died there in 1838. His diwans, later printed together as the *Kulliyat-e-Nasikh*, remain monuments of the Lucknow style.

Mir Babar Ali Anis (birth year disputed — d. 10 December 1874, Lucknow), known as Mir Anis, was born in Faizabad into a family of poets: his father Mir Khaliq was a marsiya poet and his grandfather Mir Hasan the author of the celebrated masnavi *Sehr-ul-Bayan*. He called himself the fifth generation of Shabbir's (Imam Husain's) praise-singers. A pupil of Imam Bakhsh Nasikh, who gave him the takhallus *Anis*, he first wrote ghazals and then, on his father's counsel, devoted himself to the marsiya, taking the elegy to unprecedented heights. He broadened the form beyond lamentation into realistic battlefield narrative, vivid portraiture of the heroes, landscape, and moral reflection, in language of unmatched sweetness and purity — Muhammad Husain Azad credited him with at least ten thousand elegies. His great contemporary and friendly rival was Mirza Salamat Ali Dabeer. He died in Lucknow in 1874 and lies buried at his residence in Chowk.

Mirza Salamat Ali Dabeer (d. 1875), takhallus Dabeer, was the great marsiya master of 19th-century Lucknow — counted with his contemporary and friendly rival Mir Anis as one of the two founders of the classical Urdu marsiya. Born in Delhi, he began reciting marsiya as a child at Muharram majalis, learned poetry under Mir Muzaffar Husain Zameer, and moved to Lucknow, where he spent his life. As much an erudite scholar as a poet — he composed a be-nuqta (dotless) marsiya, *Mah-e-Kamil*, signing it not "Dabeer" but "Utarid" — he is credited with some three thousand elegies (per Muhammad Husain Azad's *Aab-e-Hayat*). His rivalry with Anis split Lucknow's admirers into the "Aneesiya" and "Dabeeriya" schools, though the two masters themselves remained on cordial terms. When Anis died in 1874, Dabeer mourned him in verse; a year later, in 1875, Dabeer died in Lucknow and was buried there.

Wajid Ali Shah 'Akhtar' (1822–1887) was the last Nawab of Awadh. He ascended the throne of Lucknow in 1847 and ruled for nine years, until the British East India Company annexed his kingdom in February 1856 and removed him. He spent the rest of his life — over three decades — in exile at Matiya Burj (Metiabruz) near Calcutta, where he died in 1887. A poet, playwright, dancer and composer, he was one of the great patrons of the arts: he nurtured the Lucknow gharana of Kathak, staged magnificent rahas, and wrote over forty works in Urdu and Persian — poems, prose and thumris. His most famous couplet — "dar-o-diwar pe hasrat se nazar karte hain / KHush raho ahl-e-watan hum to safar karte hain" — was his farewell to Lucknow, and it lives on in every Urdu speaker's heart.