Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

Shabnam Shakeel (1942–2013), born in Lahore, was a modern Urdu poet whose ghazals carry a deep feminist consciousness in a classical frame. She grew up in a literary home: her father, Syed Abid Ali Abid, was a poet and academician, and her childhood circle included Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum and Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Educated at Kinnaird College and Islamia College, Lahore, she took her M.A. in Urdu from Oriental College, Lahore, and lectured at several colleges. Her first book, *Tanqeedi Mazameen* (1965), was criticism; her poetry collections — *Shab Zaad* and *Masaafat Raigaan Thi* (2008) among them — speak in a woman's voice about love, failure, dignity and the road's dust, with the ghazal's discipline intact. Rekhta, which carries 53 of her ghazals, describes her as a poet who "deeply expresses feminist consciousness". Pakistan honoured her with the Pride of Performance. She died in Karachi on 2 March 2013, ten days short of her seventy-first birthday, and was buried in Islamabad.

Shad Azimabadi (1846–1927), born Syed Ali Mohammad in Azimabad (Patna), was a master of the ghazal and the marsiya and one of Bihar's greatest literary figures. Born into a wealthy and respected Syed family, he received a classical education in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, and trained under several masters of the age — chief among them Shah Ulfat Hussain Faryaad. The British government titled him Khan Bahadur, and he served Patna as Honorary Magistrate and Municipal Commissioner. The Urdu scholar Ali Jawad Zaidi called him "a saviour of the ghazal"; the critic Kalimuddin Ahmad placed him, with Mir and Ghalib, as the third pillar of the Urdu ghazal — a judgment Allama Iqbal himself shared in his admiration. His five volumes of verse blend feeling, thought and richness of expression. Beyond ghazals and marsiyas he wrote *Hayat-e-Faryaad* (his master's biography), the historical tract *Nawa-e-Watan*, and *Fikr-e-Baligh*, an account of marsiya poets. He died in Patna on 7 January 1927.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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