Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

The poet of the Rooh — writing the soul's journey home. Kamal Malhiabadi (Kamaal Ahmad Khan) is a contemporary Urdu poet from Malhiabad, Uttar Pradesh, now based in Houston, Texas. His sher, written in the Sufi tradition, return again and again to one journey: the rooh — the soul that comes from Allah and returns to Him — and the body it briefly lodges in, a saraye, a rented house on the way. Through his series Noor-e-Kalam and Rooh-e-Kalam, and through Safha Global, the literary archive he founded to preserve the heritage of Malhiabad and Avadh for the coming generations, he pairs every sher with its decoding — the concept at its heart, opened layer by layer. His family has served Urdu for generations through Bazm-e-Urdu, the literary organisation led by his younger brother, Rehan Khan. He is writing the history of his homeland, Malhiabad, and a memoir, "Meray Safar Malhiabad Say America Tak".

Khalid Ahmad (1943–2013) was a Pakistani Urdu poet, playwright and columnist who gave the ghazal new progressive trends. Born on 5 June 1943 in Lucknow, the son of writer and politician Mohammad Mustafa Khan 'Maddah' and brother of the celebrated fiction writers Khadija Mastoor and Hajira Masroor, he migrated to Pakistan after Partition and took an MSc in Physics from Government College, Lahore. He worked as an information officer at WAPDA, retiring as Deputy Controller, while writing the column 'Lamha-Lamha' for the Daily Imroz and later for Jang and Nawa-i-Waqt, plays for Pakistan Television — Kajal Ghar, Kiran and Ghubar — and editing the monthly literary magazine Bayaz for twenty-two years. His books include Daraz Palkon ke Saaye Saaye, Ek Mutthi Hawa, Pehli Sada Parinde Ki and Hatheliyon par Charagh. He received the Pride of Performance in 2011 and died in Lahore on 19 March 2013.

Khalil-ur-Rehman Azmi was an Indian Urdu poet and literary critic, and one of the founding fathers of modern Urdu criticism in the subcontinent. Born on 9 August 1927 at Sedhan Sultanpur in Azamgarh district, to Maulana Muhammad Shafi, founder of Madarsatul Islah, he was educated at Aligarh Muslim University, where he stood first-class first in his M.A. in Urdu (1950), tutored the young British Urdu scholar Ralph Russell, and took his Ph.D. in 1957 on the Progressive literary movement in Urdu. He joined Aligarh's Urdu department as lecturer in 1952, became Reader in 1966, and was posthumously elevated to Professor. Imprisoned in 1949 for his political views, he remained aligned with the Progressive Writers' Movement while pioneering modernism in Urdu poetry. His collections include Kaghzi Pairahan (1953) and Naya Ahad Nama (1965), whose title nazm 'Khwabon se dar lagta hai' is among his best-known poems; Zindagi Ae Zindagi appeared posthumously in 1983. He died of leukaemia at Aligarh on 1 June 1978, the year he received the Ghalib Award for Urdu Poetry.

Khumar Barabankvi (1919–1999), born Mohammad Haider Khan on 15 September 1919 at Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh, was the classical ghazal's great mushaira voice — a poet whose singing delivery made him, with Jigar Moradabadi, a guarantee of any mushaira's success. He grew up in a house of poets: his father Dr Ghulam Haider wrote salaams and marsiyas as "Bahar", and his uncle Qaraar Barabankvi corrected his early verse. After high school at Government College, Barabanki, he left intermediate studies at Lucknow for poetry, and chose the classical ghazal as his lifelong service — "after analyzing all the genres of speech, I found the classical ghazal to be the most suitable," he wrote. In 1945 he came to Bombay with Jigar and Majrooh Sultanpuri for a mushaira; A. R. Kardar heard him and asked for a song for Shah Jahan, sung by K. L. Saigal — the start of a film career that included Saaz aur Awaaz and K. Asif's Love and God, though he soon grew dismayed at falling film standards and returned to the ghazal. His collections Aatish-e-Tar, Raqs-e-Mai and Shab-e-Taab carry the voice his audiences knew: gentle, musical, steeped in love and longing, and later, after he gave up drinking, in a deeper tenderness. He died on 19 February 1999 and lies at Karbala Civil Lines, Barabanki, where the Khumar Memorial Academy keeps his name.

Khwaja Aziz-ul-Hasan Ghori "Majzoob" (1884–1944), born 12 June 1884 at Orai in Jhelum district, U.P., was a Sufi poet of the Chishti-Sabiri tradition and an authorized disciple and khalifa of Ashraf Ali Thanvi. He first wrote under the takhallus "Hasan"; after coming under Thanvi's influence he became "Majzoob" — the absorbed one. Educated at Aligarh (B.A., LL.B.), he served first in the excise department and then seven years as deputy collector; finding the post against his temperament, he took a lower salary in the education department, where he served as deputy inspector of Islamic makatib and then Inspector of Schools (U.P.), retiring on pension. He had no ustad in poetry; his kalam — hamd, munajat, na'at, marsiya, ghazal, nazm — is suffused with spirituality and gnosis (irfan). Nearly two hundred khulafa of Thanvi recited his mystical verse with devotion, and it remains beloved in the Thanvi silsila to this day. Per his will his kalam was first published as Kalam-e-Majzoob and then continuously as Kashkol-e-Majzoob. In prose he compiled Ashraf-us-Sawaneh (4 volumes, 1935–1943), the first and most authoritative biography of his master. He died at Orai on 17 August 1944.

Khwaja Ghulam Farid (1845–1901) was a Sufi poet and saint of the Saraiki country, born at Chachran Sharif in the old Bahawalpur state, on the banks of the Indus. The son of Khwaja Khuda Bakhsh, he lost both parents while still a boy and was raised and taught by his elder brother, Fakhr Jahan. He belonged to the Chishti-Nizami order, and became the custodian of the shrine at Kot Mithan, across the river from his birthplace. In 1876 he made the pilgrimage to Makkah. He was called the poet of seven tongues — Saraiki, Urdu, Persian, Sindhi, Punjabi, Braj Bhasha and Arabic — but his fame rests on his Saraiki verse: the kafis of the Diwan-e-Farid, sung still at shrines and festivals, where the desert of Rohi, the tall red date-palms, the cranes in flight and the long wait for the Beloved carry a longing that is at once earthly and divine. He also left an Urdu divan of ghazals and prose works in Persian. He died in 1901 at Chachran and was buried at Kot Mithan, where his shrine still draws devotees from across the Saraiki country, and his yearly urs keeps his kafis alive in song.

The Sufi saint of Delhi's classical school — the poet who made pain a prayer.

Kunwar Mohinder Singh Bedi 'Sahar' (1909–1992), born at Chak Bedi in Montgomery District, Punjab, was an Urdu poet whose pen name meant "daybreak" — and whose verse lived up to it. Born into a Bedi zamindar family tracing its line to Guru Nanak, he fell in love with Urdu in school and began writing ghazals while studying at Lahore. He joined the Indian Administrative Service, served as City Magistrate of Delhi, and worked alongside Nehru and Patel to restrain violence and resettle refugees after Partition — the same Partition that uprooted his own family to Fazilka. His poetry is traditional in form and humane in temper: love and yearning beside unity, peace between India and Pakistan, and a gentle humour. Khushwant Singh called him "the stoutest bridge between India and Pakistan". His first collection, *Tulu-e-Sahar* (1962), played on his own name — the advent of daybreak — and his autobiographical poems *Yadon Ka Jashn* (1983) remain a document of Punjab before and after Partition. Jagjit Singh sang eight of his ghazals on the album *Forget Me Not*. He died on 18 July 1992.

Lala Madhav Ram Jauhar — pen name Jauhar — was a classical Urdu poet of the nineteenth century and a contemporary of Mirza Ghalib. He held a highly respected post in the court of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, placing him at the heart of Delhi's literary world in its final Mughal years. A Hindu poet writing fluent, graceful Urdu, he became known for ghazals of love, longing, and the beloved's glance — couplets in which a signal before the gathering, a withheld meeting, or a hidden love that cannot stay hidden carries the whole poem. About forty of his ghazals and 174 of his couplets survive, along with his prose work Insha-e-Madhoram. He lived through the passing of the Mughal order into British rule, and his verse keeps the courtly grace of that world while speaking plainly of separation and unmet desire. Jauhar died in 1889. His couplets remain widely quoted, including one carried into the film Prem Kahani (1975).

Lutf Ali (1716–1794) was a poet of Bahawalpur, and the author of the *Saifalnāma* — the tale of Prince Saif-ul-Muluk that the Saraiki country still reads and sings. He was born in 1716 in the village of Mao, in what is now the Rahim Yar Khan District of Punjab. Little is known of his life beyond the poem itself: he was a learned man of Bahawalpur — "Maulvi" is the title he carries — writing in the Saraiki speech of the Multan–Bahawalpur country. In 1781 he completed his *Saifalnāma*, also called *Sayf al-Mulūk*, the Sword of Kings: the story of Prince Saif-ul-Muluk, 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 across seas and deserts to find her — a tale drawn from the Thousand and One Nights, told in long narrative verse in the manner of the Persian masnavi. The poem became the popular telling of the tale in the Saraiki country, and it has stayed in print and in song ever since — an Urdu rendering of it appeared in 1964. He died in 1794, thirteen years after finishing his poem, in the Bahawalpur country where he had lived and written.

Mah Laqa Bai "Chanda" (7 April 1768 – August 1824), born Chanda Bibi in Aurangabad, was a tawaif-turned-court-poet of Hyderabad — the first woman Urdu poet with a published diwan. Daughter of the courtesan Raj Kunwar (who had migrated from Rajputana) and Bahadur Khan, a Mughal mansabdar, she was raised by her childless aunt Mehtaab Ma, the favoured courtesan of Nawab Rukn-ud-Daula, who gave her an elite education. The second Nizam, Mir Nizam Ali Khan (Asaf Jah II), conferred the title "Mah Laqa Bai" (Visage of the Moon) and appointed her to the *omarah*, the highest nobility; she advised on state policy, accompanied him to three battles in male attire, and was celebrated as a thumri singer and Deccani Kathak dancer — the first woman of the region to recite in a mushaira. Her diwan, *Gulzar-e-Mahlaqa* (39 ghazals of 5 couplets each), was printed in 1824 after her death — the first published diwan by any woman Urdu poet; her own 1798 manuscript *Diwan-e-Chanda* (125 ghazals, gifted to Captain Malcolm in 1799) survives in the British Museum. She died in Hyderabad in 1824 and lies in the mausoleum she built at Moula-Ali, restored in 2010. She is also held, by some scholars, to be the inspiration behind Mirza Hadi Ruswa's *Umrao Jaan Ada* (1899).

Maharaja Sir Kishan Prasad Shad (1864 – 13 May 1940) of Hyderabad was a poet first and a prime minister second — or, as Hyderabad liked to say, a poet who happened to rule. A childhood friend of Nizam Mahbub Ali Khan and heir to a family that traced itself to Raja Todar Mal, he became Peshkar of Hyderabad State in 1892 and its Dewan (Prime Minister) in 1901, taking the title Yamin-us-Saltanat, "right hand of the realm", and the rank of Maharaja. In his first tenure he raised the state's revenues, organised relief after the great Musi Flood of 1908, and left the treasury fuller than he found it; after resigning in 1912 he was called back by Nizam Osman Ali Khan in November 1926 and served until March 1937, passing the Mulki regulations that reserved posts for Hyderabad's own people. He was knighted KCIE in 1903 and GCIE in 1910. Through all of it he remained a disciple of Dagh Dehlvi, writing Urdu and Persian poetry under the takhallus "Shad" — happy — in a Sufi key: ghazal, naat and marsiya, collected in Bagh-e-Shad (1890) and later volumes, and shared in his own magazine Mahbub al-Kalam. His house was a morning court of poets, painters and musicians from across India, Persia and Arabia, and his life — seven wives, Hindu and Muslim, each following her own faith — was itself an argument for the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb he championed. At his death in Hyderabad on 13 May 1940, the Nizam said society had witnessed "the departure of the last vestige of the Mughal Empire".

Majeed Amjad (1914–1974) was a Pakistani modern Urdu poet, counted among the founding fathers of modern Urdu poetry and described as a philosophical poet of depth and sensitivity. Born Abdul Majid on 29 June 1914 in Jhang, Punjab, he was taught Arabic and Persian by his maternal grandfather, took his bachelor's degree from Islamia College Lahore in 1934, and edited the weekly Arooj in Jhang. He then served in the Food Department, spending the last twenty-eight years of his life in Sahiwal, where he retired as Assistant Food Controller in 1972 and died on 11 May 1974; he was buried in Jhang. His first collection, Shab-e-Rafta (1958), with a preface in verse, was the only book published in his lifetime; Shab-e-Rafta Ke Baad followed posthumously in 1976, and his complete works, Kuliyat-e-Majeed Amjad, were edited by Khawaja Muhammad Zakariya in 1989. Away from the great literary centres, he built a poetry of striking images and unexpected connections — philosophical, introspective, and deeply personal, in ghazal, nazm and free verse.

Majrooh Sultanpuri (1919–2000), born Asrar ul Hassan Khan in Sultanpur, U.P., was a Progressive Urdu poet and one of Hindi cinema's most celebrated lyricists. A trained Unani physician (Hakim) and disciple of Jigar Moradabadi, he left medicine for poetry, joined films in 1946 with Shahjahan ("Jab dil hi toot gaya"), and served two years in prison in 1949 for his leftist verse. Across six decades he wrote more than two thousand film lyrics — from Andaz and Dosti ("Chahunga main tujhe sanjh savere", Filmfare Best Lyricist 1965) to Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak and Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar ("Pehla nasha") — while his fifty-odd ghazals and two notable nazms carried the Progressive fire; none is more famous than "main akela hi chala tha jaanib-e-manzil magar", which Wikipedia's own article calls one of the best-known verses of Urdu poetry. He became the first lyricist to receive the Dadasaheb Phalke Award (1993), and also received the Ghalib Prize and the Iqbal Samman. He died in Mumbai on 24 May 2000.

Makhdoom Mohiuddin (1908–1969), born Abu Sayed Muhammad Makhdoom Mohiuddin in Andole village, Medak district, Hyderabad State, was the revolutionary Urdu poet known as "Shayar-e-Inquilab" (Poet of the Revolution). He founded the Progressive Writers Union in Hyderabad, taught Urdu literature at City College (1934), joined the Communist Party of India, and stood at the forefront of the 1946–47 Telangana Rebellion against the Nizam; he later became a founder of the CPI in Andhra Pradesh, a member of the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Council (1956–1969) and its opposition leader. His collections *Surkh Savera* (1944) and *Gul-e-Tar* (1961) were gathered with the rest of his verse in *Bisat-e-Raqs*, which won the 1969 Sahitya Akademi Award for Urdu. His ghazals — "Aap Ki Yaad Aati Rahi Raat Bhar," "Phir Chhidi Raat, Baat Phoolon Ki," "Ek Chameli Ke Mandve Taley" — became immortal through Hindi films. He died in Hyderabad on 25 August 1969.

Tonk's wandering bird — he still believes the promise, though he has tested it a thousand times. Makhmoor Saeedi (1938–2010), born Sultan Mohammad Khan on 31 December 1938 at Tonk in Rajasthan, was an Indian Urdu poet, critic, translator and journalist, and one of the finest modern voices to come out of Tonk. His father, Ahmed Khan Nazish, was himself a noted Urdu poet. Schooled at Tonk and then at Agra, he moved to Delhi after graduation and gave his life to Urdu letters — writing ghazals and nazms, rubai, qataa, doha and geet, and working in criticism, journalism and translation, including a verse rendering of the Bhagavad Gita into Urdu. His poetry collections include Sabrang, Siyah bar Safed, Awaaz ka Jism (1972), Guftani, Baans ke Jangalon se Guzarti Hawa (1983), Diwaar-o-Dar ke Darmiyan (1994), Umr-e-Guzishta ka Hisab in two volumes, and Raasta aur Main (2003). He was long associated with the Delhi magazine Tahrik, and his work won the Sahitya Akademi Award. He died on 2 March 2010 at Jaipur, aged 71, and was buried at Tonk.

Maulvi Abdul Haq (1870–1961), remembered as Baba-e-Urdu, the Father of Urdu, gave his whole life to the language — its words, its grammar, its history and its honour. Born on 20 April 1870 at Hapur, he was educated in the Punjab and at Aligarh, where he took his bachelor's degree in 1894, and fell under the influence of Sir Syed, Shibli and Hali. In 1895 he went to Hyderabad, where he taught, edited journals, headed the institute that translated history, science and philosophy into Urdu, and became the first head of the Urdu department at Osmania University. In 1912 he became general secretary of the Anjuman Taraqqi-e-Urdu, the society for the progress of Urdu, and held that post until Partition. He edited the journal Urdu for more than three decades, gathered old manuscripts that rewrote the early history of the language, and produced some fifty volumes — among them his Standard English-Urdu Dictionary and his Urdu grammar — while pressing, all his life, for Urdu to be given its rightful place in public life. After migrating to Pakistan in 1948, he rebuilt the Anjuman in Karachi, founded the Urdu College there, and worked on until illness overtook him. He died at Karachi on 16 August 1961, leaving the language he had served with a dictionary, a grammar, a history — and a father's name.

Delhi's deputy who taught a nation to read — the pioneer of the Urdu novel. Maulvi Nazir Ahmad Dehlvi (1830–1912), known as Deputy Nazir Ahmad, was the pioneer of the Urdu novel — a novelist, reformer, scholar and translator. Born at Rehar in the Bijnor district in 1830, to a family of scholars, he was taught Persian and Arabic by his father, a teacher, and in 1842 was sent to study in Delhi, entering Delhi College in 1846. He began as a teacher of Arabic, became a deputy inspector of schools in 1856, and rose to deputy collector in the North-Western Provinces — the post that gave him his familiar name. His novel Mirat-ul-Uroos (1869), the story of two sisters, Asghari and Akbari, written for the education of girls, established the Urdu novel and has never been out of print; Banat-un-Nash, Taubat-un-Nasuh (1873), Fasana-e-Mubtala (1885), Ibn-ul-Waqt (1888) and Ruya-e-Sadiqa followed. A friend and sometime critic of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and the Aligarh movement, he wrote more than thirty books, translated the Quran into Urdu, and put the Indian Penal Code into Urdu as Taazirat-e-Hind. He died of a stroke at Delhi on 3 May 1912.

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.