Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

Meer Syed Ali Ghamgeen Dehlvi was a Sufi poet of Delhi for whom Mirza Ghalib held great devotion. His dates must be read with care: 1753–1851 is sometimes given, a span of ninety-eight years, but his birth year is disputed and is recorded here as Unknown, with 1851 carried as the death year. What is solid is the work: 10 ghazals and 9 sher from him survive, with books including Makhzan-ul-Asrar (his diwan of ghazals), Makashafat-ul-Asrar, and a Diwan-e-Rubaiyat, and later studies of his life and poetry, including a volume on the Persian correspondence between Ghalib and Ghamgeen. His verse is Sufi to the core: the journey within the self, wine as spiritual symbol, death, and the beloved's voice heard at the final hour.

The bohemian who freed the Urdu nazm — symbolism, free verse, and Hindu myth in a life lived by the tavern's edge. Meeraji (1912–1949), born Muhammad Sanaullah Dar into a Kashmiri family of Gujranwala, was one of the founding fathers of the modern Urdu nazm — the pioneer who carried symbolism and free verse into Urdu poetry. Raised in Lahore, he first wrote under the takhallus "Sasri"; a one-sided love for a Bengali girl, Meera Sen, gave him the pen name by which he is remembered. Though brought up in comfort — his father Munshi Mohammad Mahtabuddin was a railway engineer — he left home and family to live as a bohemian wanderer, staying with friends and making a living by selling his songs. He served as poetry editor of the Lahore magazine *Adabi Duniya* (1938), worked for All India Radio in Delhi, wrote literary columns for the monthly *Saqi*, and briefly helped edit *Khayal* in Bombay, settling in Bombay after Partition. Drawn from his teens to Hindu mythology, he wove Hindi vocabulary into his poetry, prose, and letters; he acknowledged his debts to the Sanskrit poet Amaru and the French Baudelaire, and translated Damodar Gupta and Omar Khayyam. His collections include *Meeraji ke Geet*, *Meeraji ki Nazmein*, *Geet hi Geet*, *Paband Nazmein*, and *Teen Rang*; the *Kulliyat-e-Meeraji* appeared in 1988. He died in Bombay in November 1949, aged only thirty-seven.

Mian Muhammad Bakhsh (1830–1907) was a Punjabi Sufi saint-poet of the Qadri order, and the last great voice of classical Punjabi Sufi poetry. He was born in 1830 at Khari Sharif, near Mirpur, into a family of the Gujjar people, of the Dedhar clan — his father was Mian Shams-ul-Din Qadri, and he counted himself a fourth-generation spiritual descendant of Pir-e-Shah Ghazi Qalandar Damriyan Wali, whose shrine stands at Khari Sharif. He wrote in the Pothohari speech of his country, a Punjabi rich in Persian and Arabic words, and in all he is credited with some fifteen works — retellings of Sohni Mahiwal, Shireen Farhad and Mirza Sahiban among them, and a commentary on the Arabic *Qasidat-ul-Burda*. His great work is *Saif-ul-Malook*, which he himself called *Safar-ul-Ishq*, the Journey of Love: the story of Prince Saif-ul-Malook, son of the King of Egypt, who falls in love with the fairy Badi-ul-Jamal from her picture on a cloth and sets out to find her — a tale drawn from the Thousand and One Nights, told in the manner of the Persian masnavi, in more than 9,000 verses across 64 chapters. He finished it in the month of Ramadan, 1279 AH (1863), when he was thirty-three years old, and it has been the most loved telling of the tale ever since — read, recited and sung across the northern Punjab and Kashmir, and still in print more than a century after it first appeared. He died in 1907, on the 7th of Dhu al-Hijjah 1324 AH, after a stroke that struck him at prayer, and was buried at Khari Sharif, where his shrine remains a place of devotion and of song.

Mir Hasan (1727–1786), born Mir Ghulam Hasan in Delhi's Syed Wada, was the foremost masnavi poet of Urdu — and the grandfather of Mir Babar Ali Anis, the future king of the marsiya. Trained first by Khwaja Mir Dard, he came of age in a Delhi that was breaking apart: his family moved to Faizabad in Awadh as the invasions pressed, and he later settled at Lucknow, where the displaced Delhi school rebuilt itself under the Nawabs. There he composed, in 1784, the work that made him immortal: Sehr-ul-Bayan, the masnavi romance of Benazir and Badr-e-Munir — a love story told with such sweetness of language that it became the model Urdu narrative poem. Around it stand his other masnavis — Gulzar-e-Iram, the verse-account of the Delhi to Awadh migration; Ramuz-ul-Arifin, a Sufi masnavi; Khwan-e-Nemat, on the dishes of Asaf-ud-Daula's dastarkhwan — plus a ghazal divan and a Persian tazkira of Urdu poets, Tazkira-i-Shuara-i-Urdu. Four of his sons were poets; through Anis, his grandson, his bloodline carried the masnavi's music into the marsiya's age. He died at Lucknow in 1786.

Mir Muhammad Ja'far Zatalli (birth year disputed — c. 1658/59, Narnaul in the Delhi Subah; died 1713, Delhi) is often called the first satirist of the Urdu language. Born into a Shia Sayyid family of Narnaul (in present-day Haryana), he lived through the reigns of Aurangzeb, Bahadur Shah I and Farrukhsiyar, served princes and amirs — including Prince Kam Bakhsh — and turned his pen into a weapon. His art was hajw: scathing lampoon of the nobles, maulvis, kotwals and officials of a decaying empire, written in rekhta — a crude, living mixture of Urdu and Persian that the refined called nonsense and he made his own (his takhallus Zatalli means exactly that: "the babbler of nonsense"). His verse spares nothing and nobody, and much of it is too profane for the public page — which is why this entry leads with the life, not the lines. The life ended the way the satire demanded: after he parodied Emperor Farrukhsiyar's coronation coin in verse, the emperor had him strangled with a shoelace — tasma-kashi — in Delhi in 1713. His Zatal Nama survives in nineteenth-century lithograph editions, and in him Urdu poetry learns its first, dangerous lesson: that the pen can laugh at a throne.

Mirza Abdul-Qadir Bedil (1642–1720), born at Azimabad (present-day Patna) into a Chaghatay Barlas family, was the foremost Persian poet of the Indian style (Sabk-e-Hindi) and a Sufi thinker of the school of wahdat al-wujud — the unity of being. Orphaned young and raised by his uncle, he taught himself Persian, philosophy, medicine, astrology and music, and spent most of his life in Delhi, where his gatherings drew scholars, Sufis and poets. He refused court patronage and panegyric, writing instead for truth as he saw it, on the side of the common people against a corrupt clergy. His sixteen books hold nearly 147,000 verses — ghazals, rubais and four great philosophical masnavis (Muhit-e-Azam, Tilism-e-Hairat, Tur-e-Marifat, Irfan), plus the prose autobiography Chahar Unsur. His verse is famously difficult: dense, paradoxical, riddle-like, building meaning out of startling compounds and metaphors. That difficulty became his gift to Urdu poetry — Ghalib learnt his "meaning-creating" art from Bedil and called him, in effect, Ghalib's Ghalib; Iqbal too read him deeply. He died at Delhi in 1720, where his shrine-garden, Bagh-e-Bedil, still stands.

Mirza Ali Lutf (d. 1813) was an early Urdu prose writer and poet of the age of Fort William College, Calcutta, remembered above all as the author of Gulshan-e-Hind — the first biographical treasury of Urdu poets, written in 1801 at the suggestion of John Gilchrist, the college's head. He rendered Ali Ibrahim Khan's Persian Gulzar-e-Ibrahim into Urdu, giving the new Urdu prose its first literary history, and he also turned Saadi's Pand-Nama into Urdu verse and wrote the masnavi Nairang-e-Ishq. His own poetry, in what survives, is small — ten ghazals and fifteen couplets — and it is the plain-spoken ghazal of a traveller: the rind answering the preacher, the road from the temple winding to the Kaaba, and a wanderer who left Hindustan not knowing whether the dark men of the Deccan or the fair men of England would be his end. No birth year is settled for him, and no birthplace is recorded; his working life ran between Hyderabad, where Gulshan-e-Hind was written, and Calcutta.

Mirza Jan Tapish — real name Mirza Mohammad Ismail — was a Delhi-born poet and lexicographer whose life ran through the hinge of British India. His father, Mirza Yusuf Begh, had come from Bukhara and settled in Delhi, where Tapish was born and where he learnt Persian, Urdu and Sanskrit. In 1799 he was imprisoned with Shamsuddowlah for an alleged conspiracy to unsettle the British and sent to jail in Calcutta; freed in 1806 or 1807, he joined Fort William College as a scribe of Persian documents and a reviser of other translators' books, and became one of Calcutta's men of letters. His first book, Shamsul Bayan fi Mustalahat-e-Hindostan (1792), is a Persian dictionary of Urdu idioms, proverbs and technical terms, named for his friend Shamsuddowlah; he translated Enayetullah's Persian Masnavi Bahar-i-Danish into Urdu in 1801; and his own Urdu poems, the Kulliyat-i-Tapish, were published by Fort William College in 1812. The tazkiras praise his neatness, his clarity of language (fasahat) and the freshness of his subjects. He died in Kolkata in 1814.

Delhi's exile who gave Calcutta its Shakuntala — the Fort William munshi who carried the Quran into Urdu print. Mir Kazim Ali Jawan (birth year unknown – 1816) was a Delhi-born man of letters who became one of the founders of Urdu prose. His real name was Mir Kazim Ali; Jawan — "the young one" — was the name he wrote under. When ruin gripped Delhi he left the city, as so many did, and after wandering through several places he reached Lucknow, where he spent long years and came to be counted among its famous poets. He knew Brij Bhasha as well as Arabic and Persian, and the Resident at Lucknow, Colonel Scott, was so impressed by his abilities that he recommended him to Fort William College in Calcutta. There Jawan spent the rest of his life in writing and compiling, among the munshis who were giving Urdu prose its first plain, workable shape. Three books of his survive: his Urdu rendering of Kalidasa's Shakuntala, the Shakuntala Natak of 1801; Barah Masa, also called Dastoor-e-Hind, on the festivals of India through the year; and Singhasan Battisi. He also carried the Quran into Urdu in 1802, one of the earliest landmarks in the printed Urdu Quran. He died in 1816, in Calcutta, the city that had become his home.

Delhi's Persian voice of ten thousand verses — the Indian-style master who walked his own road. Mirza Muhammad Fakhir Makin Dehlavi (birth year unknown – 1757) was a Persian poet of Delhi, of Iranian descent, whose verse belongs to the Indian style. Makin — "the dweller" — was his pen name, and Delhi the city of his life. Some ten thousand of his Persian verses survive, and they show a poet committed to the manner of the Indian-style masters while keeping his own road: of all the Persian poets of India, he leans least on the poets of Iran, and his work carries its own independent music. Little else of his life has come down — no birthplace beyond his Delhi name, and no firm record of the year of his death beyond 1757. He stands in the directory, then, as the record stands: a considerable Persian voice of eighteenth-century Delhi, remembered for the scale and independence of his verse.

Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa (1857–1931), born in Lucknow in the year of the great uprising, was the Urdu novelist who gave the language its first great novel — and a poet in his own right. His ancestors had come from Persia; his great-grandfather was an adjutant in the Nawab of Awadh's army, and the family lane in Lucknow was still called Adjutant's Lane. Educated at Thomson Engineering School (Thomason College, Roorkee), he taught at Lucknow's Central High School and Christian College, worked as a civil servant and railwayman, and later moved to Hyderabad to work at the Dar-ut-Tarjuma, Osmania University's translation bureau. He knew Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, English, Latin and Greek, wrote on religion, philosophy and astronomy, and even invented a system of Urdu shorthand. His literary career began in 1887 with a verse Laila-Majnu; then came the novels — Afshai Raz, Zaat-e-Shareef, Shareef Zada, Akhtari Begum — and, above all, Umrao Jan Ada (first published Lucknow, 1899; often cited as 1905), the courtesan-poet's life story told as memoir, regarded by many as the first Urdu novel and later filmed in Pakistan and India. His ghazals — 31 sher catalogued on Rekhta — carry the same world as the novel: two ruined cities, a lifetime's weariness, love as affliction. He died at Hyderabad on 21 October 1931.

Mirza Muhammad Hasan Qateel (c. 1758–1818) was born Diwani Singh, into a Punjabi Khatri family of Delhi, and became the most influential Persian teacher of his age in India. Educated in Persian and Urdu, he came at eighteen under the influence of his tutor, the Shi'a poet Mirza Baqir Shahid Isfahani, embraced Twelver Shi'a Islam, and took the name Mirza Muhammad Hasan Qateel. After service in the army of Najaf Khan, he moved to Lucknow in 1784, where he became the city's leading philologist and teacher of Persian. A polyglot — Persian, Urdu, Turkish and Arabic — he wrote nearly twenty books, above all the Persian grammars Chahar Sharbat and Nahr al-Fasahat, which were copied across India as primers and drew a famous line between Indian Persian and the Iranian Persian he held as standard. With Insha Allah Khan Insha he wrote Darya-e-Latafat, the first book on Urdu metre and prosody. His Urdu ghazals, in the manner of Hafiz, survive only scattered in tazkiras. He died in Lucknow in 1817 or 1818 and is buried at Qaisar Bagh.

Lucknow's cousin of the Nawab — the classical ghazal in its simplest, most elegant dress. Mirza Muhammad Taqi Hawas (1766–1855), whose real name was Mirza Mohammad Taqi Khan, was a classical Urdu poet of Lucknow, remembered by his pen name Hawas. Born at Faizabad in 1766, he was a cousin of Asif-ud-Daula, the Nawab of Awadh, and spent his working life in Lucknow, in the flourishing literary world of the Nawabi court. His ghazals are noted for their elegance and simplicity, turning on longing, love and quiet reflection; twenty-three of his ghazals survive. His collected verse survives as Deewan-e-Hawas. He died at Lucknow in 1855.

The unrivalled satirist of classical Urdu — master of qasida, ghazal and marsiya.

Mirza Shauq Lakhnavi (d. 1871) was a poet of Lucknow, born in the city in the late eighteenth century — his exact birth year is not settled — and he lived his whole life there, through the last decades of Nawabi rule and the fall of the old order. His real name was Tasadduq Husain Khan; "Shauq", longing, was the name he wrote under. He began with ghazals, but his fame rests on his masnavis, above all Zahr-e-Ishq, the Poison of Love, written between 1855 and 1862: a love story told in his own voice, of a poet who falls for a merchant's daughter glimpsed from a neighbouring rooftop, and of a parting that ends in her death by poison and his own attempt to follow her. Plain-spoken where the court ghazal was ornate, drawing on the everyday speech of Lucknow and its idioms and proverbs, the masnavi moved its first audiences to tears — its stage performance was stopped, its printing banned, and the ban was only lifted in 1919 — yet handwritten copies passed from reader to reader, and its popularity came to overshadow the most celebrated masnavis of the age. His other masnavis, Bahar-e-Ishq, Fareb-e-Ishq and Lazzat-e-Ishq, belong to the same world of love told as a lived story. Only a handful of his ghazals survive beside them, but they carry the same voice: plain, direct, and unafraid of grief, of death, and of its own sins.

Mohammad Ali Jauhar (1878–1931) was an Indian Muslim leader, journalist, scholar and Urdu poet, a leading figure of the Khilafat Movement. Born on 10 December 1878 at Rampur, he studied at Aligarh and at Lincoln College, Oxford, then served the Rampur state and the Baroda civil service before turning to journalism — founding the English weekly The Comrade in 1911 and the Urdu daily Hamdard in 1913. He co-founded the All-India Muslim League and Jamia Millia Islamia, led the Khilafat delegation to Europe in 1920, was imprisoned for sedition, and presided over the Indian National Congress in 1923. His Urdu poetry, collected in Deewan-e-Jauhar, carries the same fire as his politics: faith, sacrifice and resistance — above all his Karbala couplet, "the killing of Husain was in truth the death of Yazid", quoted for decades. He died of a stroke in London on 4 January 1931, days after the first Round Table Conference, and was buried in Jerusalem as he had wished.

Mohammad Alvi (1927–2018) was one of the most prominent modernist poets of Urdu, praised for his "layered simplicity" — short, plain lines that carry a philosophical weight. Born on 10 April 1927 at Ahmedabad, he had little formal schooling in his youth and completed his higher education at Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi. He began writing as a progressive poet in the late 1940s, but found his own voice in the late 1950s, when he turned to modern Urdu poetry. His collections — *Khali Makaan* (1963), *Aakhiri Din Ki Talash* (1968), *Teesri Kitab* (1978), *Chautha Aasmaan* (1992) and *Raat Idhar Udhar Roshan* (1995) — made him one of the most-read modern ghazal writers; *Chautha Aasmaan* won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1992, and he also received the Ghalib Award. He died at Ahmedabad on 29 January 2018, aged 90.

Mohammad Meer Soz Dehlvi — born in Delhi, the son of Syed Ziauddin, whose forefathers had migrated from Bukhara to India — was a prominent contemporary of Mir Taqi Mir. He first took "Mir" as his takhallus, then changed it to "Soz" (burning, passion) when Mir Taqi Mir rose to fame under that name — a change he himself records in one of his couplets. A master of Persian and Arabic, a noted calligrapher, and a skilled archer and horseman, Soz was above all famous as a reciter: his manner of reciting verse was widely imitated in his day. When Delhi lay devastated, he left for Lucknow, where Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula honoured him and even became his disciple. His Urdu diwan holds ghazals, masnavis, quatrains and mukhammas, and his ghazals are praised for directness, simplicity and pathos. In his last years he withdrew into seclusion and prayer, and died in Lucknow.

Mohsin Naqvi (1947–1996), born Syed Ghulam Abbas Naqvi in 1947 at the village of Sadat near Dera Ghazi Khan, Punjab, was the voice in which modern Urdu grief learned to speak plainly — and the poet Pakistan calls the "Shayar-e-Ahl-e-Bayt". His father, Syed Chirag Hussain Shah, was a saddlemaker and food vendor; Mohsin graduated from Government College, Bosan Road, Multan, and took his master's degree from the University of the Punjab, Lahore, where he was already known by his pen name. His ghazals — collected in Azaab-e-Deed, Khaima-e-Jaan, Barg-e-Sehra, Band-e-Qaba and others — move between romantic longing and Karbala: love's separation and Husain's grief are, in his verse, two faces of one devotion, which is why his lines are recited as readily in majalis as in mushairas. He wrote with a direct, unadorned diction that made him beloved far beyond literary circles, and he did not spare the rulers of his day. On 15 January 1996 he was assassinated in Lahore, near Moon Market; he was buried at Dera Ghazi Khan, mourned by thousands.

Moin Ahsan Jazbi was an Indian Urdu poet and a major voice of the Progressive Writers' Movement who struck a different chord with it — representing the classical literary tradition and blending it with contemporary poetics. Born on 21 August 1912 at Mubarakpur in Azamgarh district, he began composing poetry at the age of nine, sought guidance from Hamid Shahjehanpuri, and first used the takhallus Malaal before becoming Jazbi. He took his B.A. from Anglo-Arabic College, Delhi (1932), his M.A. in Urdu from Aligarh Muslim University (1934), and his Ph.D. in 1938 on Hali's political consciousness, published as Hali Ka Siyasi Shuoor (1959). After working as assistant editor of the Urdu monthly Aajkal, he joined Aligarh's Urdu department in 1945 and retired as Reader in 1974. His collections are Firozaan (1951), Sukhan-e-Mukhtasar (1960) and Gudaaz-e-Shab (1985); his ghazal 'Marne ki duaen kyun maangun…' became widely sung. He received the Ghalib Award in 1975 and died on 13 February 2005.

Mufti Muhammad Sadruddin Khan Azurda (1804–1868) of Delhi was, at once, the city's Grand Mufti, one of its leading scholars of hadith and Islamic law, and a poet of the Delhi school. Son of Lutfullah, he studied under Shah Abdul Aziz — Delhi's great authority on hadith — and Fazl-e-Imam Farooqi Khairabadi, served as Sadr Amin of Delhi from 1827 to 1846, then as Sadr-us-Sudur (Grand Mufti) from 1846 to 1857, and examined Arabic at the Anglo-Oriental College. His Delhi house was a meeting place of rebel leaders, scholars, poets and literary men, and he was an acquaintance and admirer of Ghalib. In 1857 he was one of the thirty Delhi scholars who signed the declaration calling the uprising a jihad; he mediated between the British, the Mughal court and the sepoys, was tried after the fall of Delhi, spent six months in detention, and lost his property — his house was restored through Lord Lawrence's intercession, his library was lost for good. Syed Ahmed Khan counted him an accomplished scholar; Hakim Abdul Hai called him the pride of India. He wrote in Persian and Urdu under the takhallus "Azurda" — the distressed one — a name his later years earned twice over. He died in Delhi in 1868.

Muhammad Abdul-Hayy Siddiqui, known as Bekhud Badayuni (17 September 1857 – 10 November 1912), was a leading late-19th- and early-20th-century poet of Badayun, from a prominent Siddiqui family of Islamic scholarship, Sufism and literature, claiming descent from Abu Bakr. Trained as a lawyer — he practised in Moradabad and Shahjahanpur — he later became a high official in the states of Sirohi and Jodhpur. His poetic masters mark his place in the tradition: he was first a disciple of Maulana Altaf Hussain Hali, Ghalib's protégé, who gave him the pen name Bekhud; around 1879, as Hali turned away from traditional forms, he left Hali and became a disciple of Nawab Mirza Khan Daagh Dehlvi. He stayed aloof from the squabble over Daagh's successor, though Daagh is reported to have answered "Bekhud-ain" — the two Bekhuds — when asked: Badayuni and Dehlvi. He published late: his diwan appeared only in 1910, two years before his death, partly to combat the plagiarism and misattribution of verse that had circulated orally for decades — the very confusion that still mixes his work with Bekhud Dehlvi's. His books include Hosh-o-Khirad ki Dukaan (1889), Sabr-o-Shakeeb ki Loot (1889), Marraat-ul-Khayal — Mirror of Thoughts — (1910) and Afsaanah-e-Bekhud. His subjects are love, philosophy, mysticism and Islam.

Muhammad Husain Azad (1830–1910), born in Delhi on 5 May 1830 into a Persian immigrant family, was the stylist who remade Urdu prose and the critic who wrote its first great literary history. His mother died when he was four; his father, Maulvi Muhammad Baqir, educated at Delhi College, bought a press in 1837 and launched the Delhi Urdu Akhbar — probably the first Urdu newspaper in northern India. Azad graduated from Delhi College in 1854 and joined his father's paper — until 1857, when the paper's support for the uprising cost his father his life: Baqir was executed by the British, and the whole joint family was thrown out of its house. After years of hardship and hiding, Azad migrated to Lahore in 1861, worked at the General Post Office and the Director of Public Instruction's office, and found his place when the Anjuman-e-Punjab was founded: lecturer in 1866, its secretary in 1867, then professor of Urdu and Persian at Government College, Lahore. In 1887 he founded the Azad Library and received the title Shams-ul-Ulama, Sun among the Learned. His Aab-e-Hayat (1880) — lives of Urdu poets and the story of the language itself — remains the foundation stone of Urdu literary history; around it stand Qisas-ul-Hind, Nairang-e-Khiyal, Sukhandan-e-Fars and Darbar-e-Akbari. As a poet he was the pioneer of the new natural nazm, writing on nature and everyday subjects instead of only rose and nightingale, beginning with "Shab-e-Qadr." He died at Lahore on 22 January 1910.

Muhammad Nusrati (d. 1674) was a seventeenth-century Dakhni poet of the Adil Shahi court at Bijapur, where he rose to poet laureate. Born in the Carnatic region, he lived for a time as a Sufi dervish before coming to Bijapur, where he became a mansabdar under Sultan Ali Adil Shah II and was named malik al-shu'ara, king of poets, for his 'Ali-nama. That masnavi, patterned on the Persian Shah-nama, celebrates Ali II's wars against the Mughals and Marathas and is the earliest panegyric of a ruler in Dakhni. His earlier romance masnavi Gulshan-i 'Ishq (1657/1658) follows Prince Manohar's quest for Madhumalati to their union in a rose garden. His final poem, Tarikh-i Sikandari, celebrates Bahlol Khan's victory over Shivaji at Umrani in 1672. Writing in archaic, complex Dakhni, Nusrati is remembered as Bijapur's greatest poet, and as a theorist who first separated a poem's theme (mazmun) from its deeper meaning (ma'ni).

Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (1565–1612), the fifth Sultan of Golconda, is remembered by history as a king — and by Urdu as its first true poet. Ascending the throne at fifteen in 1580, he ruled thirty-one years, and in 1591 founded a new capital on the south bank of the Musi: Hyderabad, crowned by the Charminar and the Mecca Masjid. But his deeper founding was literary. He is the first *sahib-e-diwan* of Urdu — the first to compile a full diwan of Urdu verse, the *Kulliyat-e-Quli Qutb Shah*, writing in the Dakhni idiom of the Deccan alongside Persian and Telugu. His court made Dakhni a language of poetry, celebration, and devotion: ghazals, qasidas, masnavis, marsiyas, hamds and manqabats, in an earthy, musical diction full of "na" for "nahin" and "koon" for "ko". He is a Shi'a poet of divine and earthly love alike, and he is called the father of Urdu poetry in India. His famous munajat — "mera shahar logan sun ma'mur kar" (populate my city with people) — is still remembered as the prayer with which Hyderabad was born. He died in Hyderabad on 11 January 1612.

The Deccan's first classic — the masnavi and prose tale that gave Urdu its southern beginning. Mulla Wajhi (real name Asadullah; birth year not known — died about 1665–1672, Golconda, Deccan) was the first great poet of the Deccan and the founder of Urdu poetry and prose in the south. Born in Golconda during the reign of Sultan Ibrahim Qutb Shah, from a family said to have come from Khurasan, he rose to become the first poet laureate of the Golconda court under Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah. In 1609 he wrote Qutb Mushtari, a romance in verse telling the love of Prince Qutb Shah for the princess Mushtari, a work counted among the first long poems in Urdu. After the king's death he fell from favour, and lived in hardship and obscurity under the pious Muhammad Qutb Shah, until Abdullah Qutb Shah recalled him to honour. At the sultan's command he wrote Sab Ras in 1634, a prose allegory of love in which a prince's search for his beloved becomes a teaching on conduct and the life of the spirit — the first great work of Urdu prose. He also wrote Taj-ul-Haqaiq, and marsiyas for the mourning gatherings of his time, one of which, on Husain, was long sung. His verse and prose gave the language of the Deccan its first classics, and for some two and a half centuries after him his books were loved and read across the Deccan.

Munawwar Rana was an Indian Urdu poet who brought the mother into the centre of the ghazal, a form long reserved for the beloved. Born in Raebareli, Uttar Pradesh, and long associated with Kolkata and later Lucknow, he wrote in plain Hindi-Urdu mixed with Awadhi, deliberately avoiding heavy Persian and Arabic vocabulary so ordinary listeners could follow him at mushairas. His best-known work, Maa, and collections including Shahdaba, for which he won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2014, celebrate mothers, daughters, labourers, migrants and home. He returned the Akademi award in 2015 in protest against rising intolerance. He died in Lucknow on 14 January 2024, aged 71.

Munir Niazi (1923–2006), born Munir Ahmad at Khanpur, Hoshiarpur district, Punjab (British India), was one of the most distinctive voices of modern Urdu and Punjabi poetry. His early schooling was at Khanpur; after Partition in 1947 his family migrated to Sahiwal, where he passed his matriculation and met the noted poet Majeed Amjad, who became his mentor and friend. He earned an intermediate degree from Sadiq Egerton College, Bahawalpur, and a B.A. from Dayal Singh College, Lahore. In 1949 he launched the weekly Seven Colours from Sahiwal; in 1960 he established the publication institute Al-Misal; he was later associated with Pakistan Television, Lahore. In the 1960s his film songs became super-hits — "Us bewafa ka shehr hai aur hum hain dosto" (Shaheed, 1962) made him one of the foremost movie songwriters of Pakistan. He published thirteen Urdu collections — including Taiz Hawa Aur Tanha Phool, Jungle Mein Dhanak, Dushmanon Ke Darmiyan Shaam and Mah-e-Munir — and three in Punjabi: Safar di Raat, Char Chup Cheezan and Rasta Dassan Walay Tarey. He experimented with poetic forms, forging a new imagery, rhythm and diction; innocence, mythology, nostalgia, dreams, melancholy and romance run through his work. He received the Pride of Performance (1992), the Sitara-e-Imtiaz, and the Pakistan Academy of Letters' Kamal-e-Funn Award (2002). He died of respiratory illness in Lahore on 26 December 2006 and rests in Model Town graveyard.

Mustafa Zaidi (died 12 October 1970) was a Progressive Urdu poet whose life ended as mysteriously as some of his verse. Born in Allahabad — his birth year is disputed, 1929 against 1930, and is recorded here as Unknown — he was educated there (Modern High School; Ewing Christian College; BA, University of Allahabad, first class), migrated to Pakistan in 1951, and took an MA in English Literature from Government College Lahore (1953). He joined the Civil Service of Pakistan in 1954, served as deputy commissioner and deputy secretary, and was dismissed in June 1970 with 38 other CSP officers under Yahya Khan. He married Vera Zaidi, a German national, and had a son and a daughter. His first book, *Zanjeeren / Roshni*, published when he was 19, was endorsed by Josh Malihabadi and Firaq Gorakhpuri; later books include *Shehr-e-Azar, Qaba-e-Saz, Mauj Meri Sadaf Sadaf, Koh-e-Nida* and *Gareban*, and he received the Tamgha-e-Quaid-e-Azam. His style is poignant, modern and socially aware. On 12 October 1970 he was found dead in Karachi in circumstances never settled — suicide or murder — and lies in Karachi's Wadi-e-Hussain cemetery.

Muztar Khairabadi (1865–1927) was a distinguished Urdu poet of the classical tradition, born in Khairabad into a family steeped in scholarship and poetry. His grandfather was the scholar-poet Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi, and his first teacher in poetry was his mother, herself a learned poet in Urdu, Persian and Arabic. After her death he sent work to Ameer Minai, who returned it saying it needed no correction. Muztar served in the princely states of Tonk and Rampur and spent much of his life in Gwalior, receiving the titles Eitbar-ul-Mulk and Iftikhar-ul-Shaura. He wrote ghazals, marsiyas, naats and long narrative poems, including Nazr-e-Khuda, Milaad-e-Mustafa and Behr-e-Taweel, and edited the literary magazine Karishma-e-Dilbar. Much of his work was later lost; a five-volume collection, Kharman, was published from his surviving papers. He was the father of poet-lyricist Jan Nisar Akhtar and grandfather of Javed Akhtar.

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

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

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.