Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

Bulleh Shah (c. 1680–1757), born Sayyid Abdullah Shah Qadri, was a Punjabi Sufi poet of Kasur, and one of the greatest voices Punjab has ever produced. He was born around 1680 — Uch is the place most often named, though some accounts give Pandoke, near Kasur, where his family settled when he was six. His father, Shah Muhammad Darwaish, was a village mosque preacher who taught him his first lessons while the boy worked as a herder; his higher learning came at Kasur, under Hafiz Ghulam Murtaza, and then at Lahore, where he became the disciple of the Qadiri Sufi Shah Inayat — a gardener of the Arain caste. That choice cost him everything respectable: a Sayyid bowing to a man of low caste shocked his family, and the town's clerics declared him a non-believer. He answered them in the people's own tongue. His kafis — short, song-like poems built on a refrain — ask the simplest and hardest questions: who am I, if I am neither believer nor unbeliever, neither Moses nor Pharaoh? More than 150 kafis and 94 other compositions survive, carried for over a century by singers before they were first printed. When he died at Kasur in 1757, the clerics who had condemned him refused to lead his funeral prayer; it was led instead by Syed Zahid Hamdani, and a shrine grew over his grave. Three centuries on, his verses are still sung — by qawwals, by rock bands, in village gatherings and concert halls — wherever Punjabis gather. He is remembered as the Poet of the People.

Chaman Lal Chaman (1934–2019) was an Indian-British Punjabi and Urdu poet, lyricist and radio broadcaster based in London. Born on 15 May 1934 in Pasla, in Jalandhar district, he lost his mother as a child and was called by his father to Nairobi, where he became a presenter on The Voice of Kenya. Moving to Britain, he worked for the BBC's Asian service and Panjab Radio, started London's first Indian commercial radio programme, *Geetmala*, and anchored weekly programmes on BBC TV One and BBC Radio Four in the 1990s. His lyrics were sung by Asha Bhosle and Jagjit Singh — his Punjabi song "Saun da Mahina" (1979) remains his best-known lyric — while his Urdu ghazals, including those in *Shora-e-London* (1985) and the collection *Phool Khile Chaman-Chaman* (2010), carry a quieter, city-wise voice. He received the Asian Achievers Gold Award in London in 2010 and died in London on 4 February 2019.

Chandar Bhan Kaifi Dehelvi (1878/79–1941) was a Delhi poet of the late classical tradition, educated in Persian and Urdu, who taught Persian for a long period of time. Known for poems on interesting topics as well as patriotic poems, he carried classical discipline into the colonial era: his ghazals hold personal longing beside national consciousness, and his nazm "Nai-Dehli" mourns and questions the new capital rising over old Delhi's ruins. Thirteen of his ghazals and ten of his nazms survive, with Risala-e-Qaumi Nazm (1908) among his books and Khumnistan-e-Kaifi published posthumously in 1951. He died in 1941.

Chandra Parkash Jauhar Bijnauri (1923–1995) was a traditional-style Urdu poet and beloved mushaira voice, born at Bijnor, Uttar Pradesh, in 1923. His father, though not a poet himself, was a connoisseur who loved listening to poets in mushairas, and in that atmosphere the young Bijnauri found his calling, taking counsel on his ghazals from Izhar Hussain Khan Izhar Rampuri. After Partition he made his life in Lahore, where his clear, musical ghazals — of love, separation, the sorrows of the age and the praise of Urdu itself — won him a devoted mushaira following. His collection Auraq-e-Gul appeared in 1986. He died in 1995, leaving 21 ghazals that still carry the traditional ghazal's grace without stiffness.

Chandu Lal Bahadur Shadan (birth year disputed, 1761–62 / 1763 / 1766 – 15 April 1845) was a Maharaja, statesman and poet of Hyderabad. Born in Hyderabad to a Khatri family from Rai Bareilly, he rose from a clerk of the vegetable market to become Prime Minister of Hyderabad State, serving from after Munir-ul-Mulk's death in 1832–33 until his resignation in 1844. He received the title of Maharaja from Sikandar Jah in 1819–20 and was famed for a generosity that drew poets and men of letters to his court — he even invited Zauq from Delhi, who declined. He studied Persian poetry with Qatil and Hafiz and Urdu poetry with Shah Nasir, and wrote extensively in Persian — a Kulliyat, a 4,025-couplet masnavi, three divans of ghazals — alongside Urdu verse, of which one divan has been published. He died at Hyderabad on 15 April 1845.

Chhannu Lal Dilgeer (c. 1780 – 1848) was Lucknow's great marsiya poet — the man who gave up ghazal for Karbala. Born in Lucknow, the brother of Raja Jhau Lal, deputy prime minister under Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula, he first studied under Mirza Khani Nawazish and later under Nasikh, and was praised by Mushafi. He began as a ghazal poet under the takhallus Tarab, but, captivated by Karbala, he abandoned ghazal entirely — famously throwing his ghazal diwan into Moti Jheel, Lucknow — and devoted himself to marsiya and salam. He converted to Islam and took the name Ghulam Hussain. A speech impairment kept him from reciting his own marsiyas, but he innovated in composition, was popular under Ghazi-ud-Din Haider, and received Rs. 400 from Nawab Mohammad Ali Shah for a masnavi in praise of Hussainabad. He is credited with 417 marsiyas; his Majmua Marasi Mirza Dilgeer (Nawal Kishore Press) is preserved in the Tagore Library of Lucknow University. His most famous marsiya, Ghabraye Gi Zainab, on Zainab's arrival after Karbala, is still recited worldwide in majlis and Sham-e-Ghareeba. He died in 1848 and lies in Lucknow's "tilted grave".

Chiragh Hasan Hasrat (1904 – 26 June 1955) was a Kashmiri-born poet and journalist, famous for his humorous columns. Born at Poonch in Kashmir, he learned Arabic, Persian and Urdu at home, matriculated from Poonch and took his B.A. from Lahore. He worked for *Zamindar*, *Insaaf* and *Ehsaan*, edited *Fauji Akhbar* during the Second World War, and wrote beloved humorous columns — as Columbus in *Nai Dunya*, as Koocha Gard in *Asr-e-Jadeed*, and as Sindbad Jahazi in the daily *Imroz*. In 1926 he launched his own journal *Aftab* from Calcutta. He wrote sixteen books, including the long poetical narrative *Saguzasht-e-Islam* and studies of Jinnah and Iqbal, though no collection of his poetry was ever published. He died at Lahore on 26 June 1955.

Pandit Daya Shankar Naseem (1811–1845) — born Daya Shankar Kaul in Lucknow — was a 19th-century Awadh poet and disciple of Khwaja Haider Ali Atash. Born into a respected Kashmiri Pandit family, he served as a clerk in the Nawabi army's finance department under Nawabs Ghazi-ud-Din Haider and Naseer-ud-Din Haider, at the height of Lucknow's comforts and luxuries. He began, like Atash's other pupils, with the ghazal — but the ghazal could not contain his imagination. His enduring fame rests on the romantic masnavi *Gulzar-e-Naseem* (published 1844): the tale of Prince Taj-ul-Muluk and the fairy Gul Bakawali, versified from Persian prose — hailed as the masnavi that represents the Lucknow school of poetry, and prized above all for its language, the very idiom of dabistan-e-Lucknow. He died young, at about thirty-four; his authorship of the masnavi was once questioned and was defended by Brij Narayan Chakbast.

Shahjahanpur's classical ghazal poet — love told straight, from its beginning to its end. Dil Shahjahanpuri (1875–1959), born Zameer Hasan Khan in Shahjahanpur in 1875, was a ghazal poet of the old classical line who lived his whole life in the small town whose name he carried. He learnt his craft as a disciple of Amir Meenai, one of the great masters of the nineteenth-century ghazal, and he kept that manner all his life — plain speech, clean rhyme, and love, separation and the wine-cup as his whole world. Two collections of his ghazals survive in print, Naghma-e-Dil and Tarana-e-Dil, and he also wrote a novel, Dard-e-Dil. A full study of his life and work appeared in 1988, nearly thirty years after his death, and it remains the one book devoted to him. He died in Shahjahanpur in 1959, in the town where he was born.

Bijnor's voice of the common person — the pain must melt, and from this Himalaya a Ganga must flow. Dushyant Kumar (1931–1975), born in September 1931 at Rajpur Navada, a small village in Bijnor district, was the poet who carried the ghazal into Hindi and made it the voice of the common person. He took his MA in Hindi from Allahabad University, where his literary life began, and worked as a scriptwriter at All India Radio in Delhi before moving to Bhopal, where he served at Akashvani and in the state's cultural and language department. He wrote poems, novels and plays — Ek Kanth Vishpayi and Mann Ke Kon among them — but his name rests on the ghazal: in plain, spoken Hindi he gave the old form a new anger and a new hope, writing of hunger, of locked doors, of lamps that never reach the city. His collection Saaye Mein Dhoop — Sunlight in the Shade — appeared in 1975, the year of his death, and its lines were taken up in movements and on the streets, quoted in parliaments and protests alike. He died of a heart attack at Bhopal on 30 December 1975, aged 44; a manuscript museum in Bhopal keeps his papers.

Ehsan Danish (born Ehsan-ul-Haq; died 22 March 1982, Lahore) was a self-taught Urdu poet, prose writer, linguist and lexicographer known as Shair-e-Mazdoor, the Poet of the Workmen. Born in Kandhla, Muzaffarnagar district, Uttar Pradesh, into a poor family, he could not continue formal schooling and taught himself Arabic and Persian. Migrating to Lahore, he worked for years as a labourer — mason, painter's assistant, watchman and more — before establishing himself as a writer and founding the publishing house Maktaba-e-Danish. He wrote more than 80 books of poetry, prose, linguistics and lexicography, including the classic autobiography Jahan-e-Danish, and received the Sitara-e-Imtiaz in 1978. His early verse was romantic; his mature poetry spoke for labourers and common people in plain, direct Urdu.

Delhi's first voice in Urdu — the founder who gave the ghazal the language of the bazaar. Faez Dehlvi (1690–1738), born Nawab Sadruddin Mohammad Khan in Delhi, was one of the earliest poets of northern India to leave behind a complete divan in Urdu, and a founder of Delhi's Urdu poetry before Mir. His forefathers had come from Iran and settled in Delhi, and his father, Mohammad Khalil Zabardast Khan, was a Mughal noble of high rank who served as a judge in Jaunpur and as an administrator in Awadh. Faez was brought up in a disciplined and cultured household, educated under his father's eye and by accomplished teachers, and learned Arabic and Persian alongside the living speech of Delhi's streets and bazaars. He wrote about nineteen thousand verses in Persian and some five hundred in Urdu — ghazals, masnavis and other poems — and in the Urdu verse he took the people's tongue, still new to poetry, and gave it the full ghazal: Persian compounds, similes and metaphors set beside plain dialect words, in a style praised for its simplicity and clarity. His ghazals sing mostly of love — divine love and the beauty of the beloved — and his Holi verses show a poet at home in the festivals and colours of India. His last years were shadowed by money troubles and by a troubled mind; he withdrew into seclusion and stopped meeting people. He died in Delhi in 1738 and was buried there. Only a part of his Persian work survives, but the five hundred Urdu verses that remain mark the moment when Delhi began to speak its poetry in its own tongue.

Fahmida Riaz (1946–2018), born 28 July 1946 at Meerut in a literary family, was Pakistan's poet of resistance — the woman's voice that refused, for fifty years, to be either decorative or silent. Her father, educationist Riaz-ud-Din Ahmed, was transferred to Sindh, so she grew up in Hyderabad, lost her father at four, and was raised by her mother; her first poem appeared in Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi's Funoon when she was fifteen. Her first collection, Patthar ki Zaban (1967), already spoke a young woman's desire with a directness Urdu had seldom heard; her second, Badan Dareeda (1973) — "the torn-bodied" — was denounced by conservatives as erotic and became a milestone of modern Urdu poetry for exactly that honesty. Under Zia-ul-Haq she was charged with sedition and spent seven years in exile in India, where she was poet-in-residence at Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, and learnt Hindi. On return she led the National Book Foundation, later headed the Urdu Dictionary Board in Karachi, and kept writing: Godaavari, Khatt-e Marmuz, novels, stories, and the first rhymed Urdu translation of Rumi's Masnavi, Khana e Aab O Gil, alongside translations of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai and Shaikh Ayaz from Sindhi. Her late poem "Tum bilkul hum jaisey nikley" (2014) — addressed across the border — made her, once more, the conscience of two countries at once. She received the Pride of Performance (2010) and the Sitara-e-Imtiaz, and died in Lahore on 21 November 2018.

Faqir Muhammad Khan Goya (c. 1784 – c. 1850) was the soldier-poet Nawab of Malihabad, in Awadh. Born into an Afridi Pashtun family whose roots lay in the Khyber region, he mastered Urdu and Persian and followed the school of Imam Bakhsh Nasikh. He served as a soldier and commander under Yashwant Rao Holkar at Indore and under Ghaziuddin Haider, Nawab of Awadh, rising to Commander-in-Chief of the Awadh army, and founded the Tharri-Fatehnagar estate at Malihabad. His Diwan-e-Goya holds ghazals, qasidas, naats, nohas and salaams, and his Bustan-e-Hikmat (Nawal Kishore, 1887) renders the Persian Anwar-e-Suhaili into Urdu. He is remembered in Malihabad's literary line as the great-grandfather of Josh Malihabadi — the elder voice of the town whose poetry Josh would later carry to the world.

Lucknow's classical voice — the son of Inder Sabha's author, and eloquence itself. Fasahat Lucknowi (1857–1930), born Syed Abbas Hasan in Lucknow in 1857, was a representative of Lucknow's classical poetic tradition — and the elder son of the man who made Lucknow's name in Urdu letters. His father, Agha Hasan Amanat, wrote Inder Sabha, the first stage play in Urdu, and died in 1858, when Fasahat was still a small child. His upbringing and education were taken up by his elder brother, Syed Hasan Latafat, in whose literary company his own gift for verse was refined. In a short time he made his name as a poet of originality, refined and elegant language, and strong craftsmanship — the delicacy, vibrancy and subtle elegance of Lucknow's literary culture, kept alive in his ghazals. His poetry was first published under various names, so few readers knew it was his; it was later gathered and arranged as Diwan-e-Fasahat, with a preface by Abdul Halim Sharar and tributes from his contemporaries and students. He had a considerable circle of disciples, and he is counted among the prominent poets of his era. He died in Lucknow in 1930.

Fayyaz Hashmi (1920–2011) was a Pakistani poet and film lyricist, born in Calcutta in 1920 to the poet and stage-drama writer Syed Muhammad Hussain Hashmi 'Dilgeer'. He began writing songs as a teenager — his early hit "Tasveer teri dil mera behla na sakegi", sung by Talat Mahmood, made the singer famous — and served as resident lyricist of the Gramophone Company of India from 1943 to 1948. After Partition he moved to Lahore, where he helped organise Pakistan's music scene and promoted artists including Farida Khanum; his first Pakistani film songs were for Kunwari Bewa (1956). He is credited with 482 songs for 122 Pakistani films, and his lifetime song count is quoted at over 2,000. Alongside the film work he wrote ghazals, collected in Satah-e-Aaina (1982), winning the Graduate Award three times and the Nigar Award for best song in 1978. He died in Karachi on 29 November 2011.

Fidvi Lahori (1729–1780) was born Mukund Lal into a Hindu Bania family of Lahore. He converted to Islam and took the name Mirza Fidai Beg, with "Fidvi" — one who sacrifices himself, a devotee — as his takhallus. After several years in Isfahan, he came to Delhi and became a pupil of Sabir Ali Sabir. A qasida he wrote for Ahmad Shah won him a horse, a sword and a thousand rupees. He served at the courts of Nawab Muhammad Yar Khan and later Nawab Zabita Khan. His poetic rivalry with Mirza Sauda was famous: Sauda lampooned him in satires, one of them in Punjabi, that survive in Sauda's kulliyat. Little of Fidvi's own Diwan has survived, but one of his couplets — on the lover's funeral going out with pomp — has passed into proverb. He died in 1780, in Lahore according to most accounts, though Mashafi says Moradabad.

First Urdu Jnanpith laureate — the poet who gave the modern ghazal an Indian heart.

Ghawwasi was a seventeenth-century Dakhni poet of the Deccan, also known as Gawwasi Bedri and in literary histories as Mulla Ghawwasi, court poet of Golconda under Sultan Abdullah Qutb Shah. His fame rests on the romance masnavi Saif al-Muluk wa Badi' al-Jamal — the tale of Prince Saif al-Muluk and Badi' al-Jamal — begun under Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah and completed in 1035 AH (1625–26), in over two thousand verses; literary histories also credit him with a Tutinama. As a court poet he was trusted enough to be sent as an envoy to Bijapur in 1045 AH, when the Adil Shahi court sent its own envoy to Golconda. His surviving ghazals, in plain Dakhni, turn on the saqi's cup, the beloved who is the heart's comfort, and a proud final claim: that no one has grasped Ghawwasi's manner. The takhallus itself — the diver — suits a poet of romance, descending for pearls.

Mir Ghulam Ali Azad Bilgrami (1704–1786) was born at Bilgram, in Awadh, into a family of scholars, and became one of the great learned men of eighteenth-century India — a poet in Arabic and Persian, a biographer of poets, and a historian of his own town and age. Taught first by his grandfather, the scholar-poet Mir Abdul Jalil Bilgrami, he travelled widely in his youth — Delhi, Lahore, Multan, Sind — and in 1737 set out for the Hijaz, where he spent two years studying the traditions of the Prophet in Mecca and Medina. On his return he settled at Aurangabad in the Deccan, where he lived the rest of his long life, its first seven years in seclusion at a saint's tomb, refusing court service and reserving his praise-poetry for the Prophet and the saints — the devotion that earned him the title Hassan of Hind, the Hassan of India. His Arabic diwan alone contains more than three thousand couplets, and beside it stand a Persian diwan and long masnavis; but his lasting gift to literature is his biographical writing. In three great Persian dictionaries of poets — Yad-e-Bayza, with lives of 532 poets; Sarv-e-Azad, with 143 poets of India, among them eight early Urdu poets; and Khizana-e-Amira, written in 1762–63, with 135 poets — he preserved the lives and verses of men he often knew himself, and in Ma'asir al-Kiram he wrote the history of Bilgram, its saints and learned men. His Subhat al-Marjan, the Coral Rosary, written in Arabic in 1763–64, wove together Indian and Arabic learning and praised India as the first home of Adam. He died at Aurangabad in 1786, aged eighty-two, and was buried at Khuldabad, near the shrine of Amir Hasan Dihlavi.

The witty chronicler-poet of old Delhi and Lucknow, whose maqtas still sting and heal.

Ghulam Muhammad Qasir (d. 1999) was a Pakistani Urdu poet from Paharpur, Dera Ismail Khan, counted among the finest modern poets of the Urdu ghazal. A Pashtun who grew up speaking Pashto, he made Urdu his literary home. Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi introduced him in the journal Fanoon in 1977, the year his first collection Tasalsul appeared; Qasmi called him "the poet of continuity". Two further collections followed — Aathwaan Aasman Bhi Neela Hai (1988) and Darya-e-Gumaan (1997) — and his complete works were gathered as Ik Sher Abhi Tak Rehta Hai. By profession a lecturer in Urdu at government colleges across the North-West Frontier Province, he also wrote more than seventy dramas and programmes for PTV Peshawar and Radio Pakistan, including the popular serials Talash and Bhoot Bangla. His ghazal turns away from the beloved alone toward the deprivation and hope of ordinary people — a book instead of gunpowder, a dream instead of despair. He died in Peshawar on 20 February 1999 and is buried there; the Government of Pakistan awarded him the Pride of Performance posthumously in 2006–07.

Gulzar Dehlvi (1926–2020), born Anand Mohan Zutshi, was one of the last voices of Old Delhi's composite Ganga-Jamuni culture — a Kashmiri Pandit who carried the Gita and the Quran in one heart, and wrote Urdu ghazals in a white sherwani with a rose on his chest. Born on 7 July 1926 in Gali Kashmeerian, Old Delhi, to two poets — his father Tribhuvan Nath 'Zar' and his mother Brij Rani 'Be-Zaar' — he was given his pen name 'Gulzar', a bed of roses, by his ustad Bekhud Dehlvi. He took an M.A. from Hindu College, Delhi, and became editor-in-chief of Science Ki Duniya in 1975, Urdu's first science magazine. Jawaharlal Nehru recited his poem 'Zarurat Hai Un Naujawano Ki' from the Red Fort on 15 August 1947. Honoured by the Vice-President of India on his 91st birthday for his lifelong service to Urdu, he died at his Noida home on 12 June 2020, days after recovering from COVID-19, aged 93.

The voice behind the century's ghazal — love that never grows few, and the friend who is hard to find. Hafeez Hoshiarpuri (1912–1973), born Shaikh Abdul Hafeez Saleem on 5 January 1912 at Hoshiarpur in Punjab, was one of the most refined ghazal poets of his generation. He was educated at Government College Lahore, where he studied alongside Faiz Ahmad Faiz; in October 1929 the teacher Sufi Tabassum first heard them both at a college mushaira. He began as a teacher, then entered government service, and after Partition made his life in Pakistan. He was one of the founders of Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq, a researcher and a teacher of philosophy, and a master of tarikh-goee — the art of the chronogram, hiding a date inside a verse. He was the ustad of Nasir Kazmi, who learned the ghazal at his feet and went on to become one of the great names of Urdu poetry. His own ghazals are smooth and lyrical, balancing romance with reflection, and his most famous — "Mohabbat karne wale kam na honge", written in the 1920s — has been sung by Mehdi Hassan, Farida Khanum and Jagjit Singh, and a century after it was written, by Arooj Aftab, whose rendition won the Grammy Award for Best Global Music Performance in 2022. His collection Maqam-e-Ghazal appeared after his death. He died in Karachi on 10 January 1973, aged 61.

Abu al-Asar Hafeez Jalandhari (Muhammad Abdul Hafeez, 14 January 1900 – 21 December 1982) was the poet whose words became Pakistan's national anthem. Born in Jalandhar, Punjab, to Shams-ud-Din, a Hafiz-e-Quran, his formal schooling ended at the seventh grade — he disliked mathematics and loved only Urdu — yet he educated himself through voracious reading and became a disciple of the Persian poet Maulana Ghulam Qadir Bilgrami. From 1922 to 1929 he edited monthly magazines including Naunehal, Hazar Dastaan, Tehzeeb-e-Niswan and Makhzin, and he threw himself into the Pakistan Movement, using his writing to inspire its cause. After independence in 1947 he migrated to Lahore; in early 1948 he joined the forces for the freedom of Kashmir and was wounded. Out of 723 poets who competed to write Pakistan's national anthem, his lyrics were selected, set to music by Ahmed Ghulam Ali Chagla. His four-volume Shahnama-e-Islam retells the glorious history of Islam in verse, in the manner of Firdowsi's Shahnameh. His poem "Abhi To Main Jawan Hoon", sung by Malika Pukhraj, became a household song. The Government of Pakistan honoured him with the Pride of Performance (1958) and the Hilal-e-Imtiaz. He died in Lahore on 21 December 1982 and lies buried near the Minar-e-Pakistan.

Lucknow's "fire" of the ghazal — idiom-rich verse, Nasikh's great rival.

Hasan Abidi (1929–2005), pen name 'hasan', was a Pakistani journalist, poet and political activist whose ghazal carried the evening light of Karachi — a city he loved and questioned all his life. Born Syed Hasan Askari on 7 July 1929 at Zafarabad in Jaunpur district, he was educated at Azamgarh and Allahabad, and moved to Pakistan in 1948, settling in Karachi. He began in journalism in Lahore at the daily Afaq in 1955, moved to the weekly Lail-o-Nahar in 1957 — then edited by Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Sibte Hassan, both of whom shaped him — and later edited the women's magazine Akhbar-e-Khwateen before joining Dawn, where he worked until his death, writing a weekly literary column for its Karachi pages. He was president of the Karachi Press Club, an active trade unionist, and a member of the Irtiqa forum; his politics cost him spells in jail. His poetry collections are Navisht-i-Nai (1995), Jareeda (1998) and Farar Hona Huroof Ka (2004); he also wrote verses for children in Kaghaz ki Kashti and translated the essays of Eqbal Ahmed into Urdu. He wrote both ghazals and nazms, but his surest ground was the ghazal, while his nazms told the story of a society whose changing values he mourned. He died of a heart attack in Karachi on 6 September 2005, aged seventy-six, having handed in his latest column the evening before. He left a wife and three children.

Hashmi Bijapuri was a seventeenth-century Deccani poet of the Adil Shahi court at Bijapur, remembered as the first Rekhti poet and as the author of the masnavi *Yusuf Zelkha*. Writing in Dakhni Urdu before Rekhti had a name, he gave his ghazals a woman's voice and a woman's vocabulary, drawing his imagery from the domestic world of elite households rather than only from the conventional garden of the classical ghazal. His surviving Diwan, published in modern times as *Deewan-e-Hashmi*, therefore reads as a bridge: it keeps the ghazal's form while opening it to everyday speech, household detail, and a frankly female point of view. Later Lucknow poets made Rekhti famous, but Hashmi's Bijapur ghazals are its earliest full flowering, and they remain the key evidence for how Urdu poetry first learned to speak in a woman's idiom.

Hasrat Jaipuri (1922–1999), born Iqbal Hussain on 15 April 1922 in Jaipur, was the romantic voice of Hindi cinema's golden age — the lyricist who gave Raj Kapoor's films their songs of love and longing. He came to Bombay in 1940 and worked for eight years as a bus conductor, earning eleven rupees a month, while his verses found their way to mushairas. A poem about a labourer's corpse, recited before Prithviraj Kapoor, brought him to Raj Kapoor, and his first film songs came in Barsaat (1949) — "Jiya Beqaraar Hai" was his first recorded song, and he wrote six of the film's ten songs — beginning a partnership with Raj Kapoor and the composers Shankar-Jaikishan that ran through some three hundred films. His pen gave Hindi cinema "Baharon Phool Barsao", "Zindagi Ek Safar Hai Suhana", "Ehsan Tera Hoga Mujh Par", "Tum Mujhe Yun Bhula Na Paoge", "Yeh Mera Prem Patra" and "Aji Rooth Kar Ab Kahan Jaiyega". He won the Filmfare Award for Best Lyricist twice, in 1966 for "Baharon Phool Barsao" (Suraj) and in 1972 for "Zindagi Ek Safar Hai Suhana" (Andaz). Beside the films he wrote ghazals all his life, in the plain, musical Urdu of the romantic tradition, and he kept writing lyrics until his last breath — his final film work appeared in Hatya (2004), five years after his death. He died in Bombay on 17 September 1999, aged 77.

The poet whose pen carried love — and whose slogan, "Inquilab Zindabad", carried a revolution. Syed Fazlul Hasan "Hasrat" Mohani (1875–1951) — the "Mohani" marking his birthplace, Mohan in the Unnao district of Uttar Pradesh — was an Urdu poet of the ghazal and one of the Indian freedom movement's most fearless voices. A graduate of MAO College, Aligarh (1903), he founded the influential journal Urdu-i-Mualla, endured several British prison terms, coined the immortal slogan "Inquilab Zindabad" (Long Live the Revolution), and in 1921 became the first to demand complete independence (Purna Swaraj) at the Ahmedabad Congress session. A founder of the Communist Party of India and a member of the Constituent Assembly, he was equally a poet: essentially a ghazal poet who blended classical and modern styles and kept the ghazal alive when it was being marginalised. His ghazal "Chupke Chupke Raat Din Aansu Bahana Yaad Hai" — immortalised by Ghulam Ali and the film Nikaah — remains among the most sung verses in Urdu. He died in Lucknow on 13 May 1951.

Mirza Hatim Ali Beg — known by his pen name Mehr — was a classical Urdu poet of the nineteenth century and a contemporary and friend of Mirza Ghalib. He began writing poetry at about fourteen and soon won notice for his fluency, his smooth diction, and his command of language; he was also skilled in composing chronograms. By profession he was a High Court lawyer, and after the upheaval of 1857 he was rewarded for his loyalty to the government with robes of honour and the grant of two villages, whose income let him live the rest of his life in comfort. He also served as an honorary magistrate in Agra. His works include Diwan-e-Mehr, Para-e-Arooz, Ayagh-e-Farangistan, Almas-e-Darakhshan, and several masnavis, among them Masnavi Shua-e-Mehr and Masnavi Dagh-e-Figar. Ghalib admired his Shuaa-e-Mehr and corresponded with him. Mehr died in 1879. His ghazals survive as a fluent, witty voice from the last generation of the Delhi tradition before the old order passed.

Ibn-e-Insha (1927–1978), born Sher Muhammad Khan in Phillaur, Jalandhar district, Punjab, was one of the most beloved voices of modern Urdu — a poet of distinctive diction laced with the earthy speech of the Hindi-Urdu complex, and one of the finest humorists of Urdu. After Partition he settled in Karachi; he took his B.A. from Punjab University (1946) and M.A. from the University of Karachi (1953), and worked with Radio Pakistan, the Ministry of Culture and the United Nations, whose travels fed his celebrated travelogues — *Chalte Ho To Cheen Ko Chaliye*, *Awara Gard Ki Diary*, *Ibn-e-Battuta Ke Taqabum Mein*, *Duniya Gol Hai*. His poetry collections *Chand Nagar*, *Is Basti Ke Ik Kooche Mein* and *Dil-e-Wehshi*, his children's verse *Bloo Ka Basta*, and his Urdu translation of Chinese poems (*Chini Nazmein*, 1960) followed. He received the Pride of Performance in 1978. He died of Hodgkin's lymphoma in London on 11 January 1978 and was buried in Karachi.

Muhammad Mazharuddin Ibn-e-Nishati was a seventeenth-century Dakhni court poet of Golconda under Sultan Abdullah Qutb Shah, remembered for a single great work: the masnavi Phulban ("Flower Garden"), composed in 1656. In about 3,500 lines and 2,000 couplets, Phulban retells in Dakhni Urdu the Persian Basatin ("Gardens") of Ahmad Zubairi, a fourteenth-century work from the reign of Muhammad bin Tughluq. It is a romance of adventures, anecdote leading into anecdote, opening with a tale told by a dervish to the king of a mythical city of gold, and following, among others, Princess Samanbar's search for Prince Humayun. Literary histories place Nishati among the major poets of the first Dakhni period, beside Wajhi, Ghawwasi and Nusrati. His surviving ghazal, in the same Dakhni, is a poet's boast in garden language: his garden is ever fresh, his bouquet always in bloom, and every verse stands out in delicacy like the brow of the beauties.

Shaikh Imdad Ali, known by his takhallus Bahr, was a nineteenth-century poet and scholar of Lucknow and a disciple of Imam Bakhsh Nasikh. Born around 1810, he devoted his life to language itself: he was praised for his precision of expression, his linguistic research, and his art of presentation, and his prose work *Bahrul Bayan* takes up the rules of Urdu. Patronage took him briefly to Rampur, where Nawab Kalb Ali Khan honoured his learning with a salary, but he returned to Lucknow and lived on a small stipend from the daughter of Nawab Amjad Ali Shah. He never compiled his Diwan in his lifetime; after his death in 1878 his friend Syed Muhammad Khan Rand gathered it, and the sole manuscript of *Bahrul Bayan* survives in the Raza Library, Rampur. Bahr's ghazals are those of a craftsman — witty, exact, and fond of turning a familiar image until it surprises.

Lucknow's dazzling wit — the poet-linguist who gave Urdu its first grammar and its most playful tales.

Azamgarh's poet-lawyer — the freedom fighter whose sher asks what imagination can never reach. Iqbal Suhail (1884–1955), born Iqbal Ahmad Khan on 19 December 1884 at Badhariya village in Azamgarh, was an Indian Urdu poet, Islamic scholar, lawyer, educationist and politician. He took his early schooling under Maulana Mohammed Shafi, one of the founders of Madarsatul Islah at Sarai Mir, and completed his M.A. and LL.B. from Aligarh Muslim University in 1918, returning to Azamgarh to practise law. A freedom fighter, he was elected to the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly in 1937 as a candidate of the Indian National Congress, defeating the Muslim League candidate Syed Ali Zaheer, and he served on the executive committee of the Azamgarh Muslim Education Society, which runs Shibli National Post Graduate College and other institutions in the town. His poetry collections include Kulliyat-e-Suhail, Tabish-e-Suhail and Mauj-e-Kausar. He died on 7 November 1955 at Azamgarh, aged 70.

Irfan Siddiqi (1939–2004) was a prominent modern Urdu poet of the neo-classical school, born at Badayun, Uttar Pradesh, on 8 January 1939. He took a postgraduate degree in sociology and joined the Central Information Service in 1962, serving in the Press Information Bureau until his retirement in 1997 as Deputy Principal Information Officer — a government career he carried alongside a lifetime of poetry. His collections run from *Canvas* (1978) through *Shab-e-Darmiyan* (1984), *Saat Samawat* (1992), *Ishq-Nama* (1997) and *Hawa-e-Dasht-e-Mariya* (1998), gathered in *Dariya* (1999). Classical in form and contemporary in feeling, his ghazals keep the old architecture — dream, lamp, night, desert — and fill it with a modern inwardness. He died at Lucknow on 15 April 2004.

The pioneer of children's Urdu poetry — the schoolroom verses generations learned by heart. Ismail Merathi (1844–1917), born Muhammad Ismail in Meerut, is the pioneer of children's Urdu poetry. Home-schooled, then trained in Persian under Mirza Rahim Beg (a contemporary of Ghalib), he took a teaching certificate from the Normal School, Meerut, and spent his working life as an educationist — Persian teacher at Saharanpur (1867/68), then at the Central Normal School, Agra (1888), retiring in 1899. His fame rests on poems a child can sing and a sage can quote: *Nasihat*, *Barsaat*, *Humari Gaye*, *Subah Ki Aamad*, *Sach Kaho* — in Pakistan's primary-school curriculum to this day. He translated English poems into Urdu (*Reza-e-Jawaher*, 1885), wrote the geography textbook and the Urdu primers that taught generations to read (*Urdu Zuban Ka Qayeda*, *Urdu Ki Pehli* through *Panchvi Kitab*), and compiled his *Kulliyat-e-Ismail* (1910). A philanthropist, he founded the Madrasa-tul-Banat girls' school in Meerut in 1909 (today the Ismail National Mahila PG College), and the British government honoured him with the title "Khan Sahib" (1912). He died in Meerut on 1 November 1917, aged seventy-three.

Mirza Jafar Ali Hasrat was an eighteenth-century Lucknow poet and a prominent contemporary of Mir Taqi Mir, known for his depiction of physicality in romantic poetry. He belonged to the early Lucknow school, at a moment when Urdu ghazal was finding a voice distinct from Delhi's, and his influence is visible in his most famous disciple, Qalandar Bakhsh Jurat, who carried the same frank, bodily idiom further. Hasrat's own surviving work is small — one ghazal and two celebrated couplets, with a *Kulliyat-e-Hasrat* published in 1966 — but its note is unmistakable: a lover who accepts the beloved's cruelty as the beloved's pleasure, and who would rather be kept in the cage than freed without wings. That combination of devotion and defiance, tenderness and bodily directness, marks him as a Lucknow voice in his own right, not merely as Mir's contemporary.

Jagan Nath Azad (1918–2004) was an Indian Urdu poet, writer and academician, and the foremost modern authority on the life and thought of Muhammad Iqbal. Born on 5 December 1918 at Isa Khel in Mianwali district, the son of the poet Tilok Chand Mehroom, he studied at Gordon College, Rawalpindi, and at Punjab University, Lahore, before a long career in journalism and government service in Delhi and Srinagar. After retiring in 1977 he became Professor and Head of Urdu at the University of Jammu. He wrote more than seventy books — poetry, criticism, biography and travelogue — including about a dozen studies of Iqbal in Urdu and English and an Urdu translation of Iqbal's Javed Nama. He is widely credited with writing Pakistan's first national anthem at Muhammad Ali Jinnah's request in 1947. He presided over the Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu (Hind) from 1993 until his death in New Delhi on 24 July 2004.