Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

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.