Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

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

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

Nasreen Anjum Bhatti (birth year unknown–2016) was a Pakistani poet, painter, broadcaster and rights activist, born in Quetta and raised in Jacobabad, Sindh. She took her M.A. in Urdu from Oriental College, Lahore, in 1970 and joined Radio Pakistan in 1971, where she served as producer, broadcaster and deputy controller, later becoming resident director of the Shakir Ali Museum in Lahore. Writing in both Punjabi and Urdu, she was a feminist voice of resistance — against General Zia's martial law and against patriarchy. Her first Punjabi collection, *Neel Karaiyan Neelkan* (1979), contains the long poem "Bhutto di Vaar" on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's hanging; *Athay Pehr Tarah* (2009) followed, with the Urdu collections *Bin Bass* and *Tera Lehja Badalne Tak*. She received the Tamgha-i-Imtiaz in 2011 and died of cancer in Karachi in January 2016.

Nawab Mustafa Khan Shefta (1809–1869), born in Delhi into a prominent Bangash Pathan landowning family — Nawab of Jahangirabad, holder of the Palwal and Jehangirabad jagirs — was a poet, critic and patron at the heart of Delhi's literary circle, alongside Ghalib, Zauq and Momin. He wrote Urdu verse as "Shefta" and Persian verse as "Hasrati," consulting Ghalib in Persian and Momin in Urdu, and his Delhi house was famous for its weekly mushairas, where he encouraged younger poets — it was Shefta who introduced Altaf Hussain Hali to Ghalib. His tazkira Gulshan-e-Bekhar (compiled 1834), cataloguing 671 poets, remains a trusted source for the literary history of the age. The 1857 uprising broke his world: suspected for his ties to Bahadur Shah Zafar and his rebel kinsmen, he was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment, his estates seized — half restored on appeal — and much of his poetry was lost in the sack of Delhi. His son later bought the very prison and built the family home, Mustafa Castle, over it, keeping the prison room. After the Hajj he turned increasingly to religious practice. He died at his house in Kucha Chelaan, Delhi, in 1869, and lies in the Bangash family graveyard at Hazrat Nizamuddin, near Ghalib.

Nazar Muhammad Rashid, known as Noon Meem Rashid (1 August 1910 – 9 October 1975), was the pioneer of free verse in Urdu and, with Miraji, is regarded as a father of modern Urdu poetry; Faiz Ahmed Faiz called him *Malik-ush-Shoara*, King of Poets. Son of Raja Fazal Ilahi Chishti, a District Inspector of Schools and lover of Ghalib, he took an MA in Economics from Government College Lahore. His first poem, *Jurrat-e-Parwaz*, appeared in 1932, and his first free-verse book, *Mavra* (1940/41), broke Urdu poetry open. He served as a captain in the Royal Indian Army in the Second World War, then worked for All India Radio and Radio Pakistan, Voice of America, and the United Nations in New York, Jakarta, Karachi and Tehran. His collections include *Mavra*, *Iran Mein Ajnabi* (1955), *La-Insan* (1969) and the posthumous *Gumaan Ka Mumkin* (1977). His style is intellectual, philosophical and cosmic — poetry of thought and of the "new man" (*Adam-e-Nau*), breaking religious, geographical and linguistic boundaries; deliberately difficult — a poet of qualities, not of the people.

Banaras's own voice — the Unani physician who wrote the nation's unity into nazm and ghazal. Nazeer Banarasi (1909–1996), born Nazeer Ahmad on 25 November 1909 at Banaras, was an Indian Urdu poet of nazm and ghazal, and a Unani physician by profession. His father was a well-known practitioner of Unani medicine in Banaras, and Nazeer joined his father's profession, serving his city with both medicine and poetry all his life — he never moved to Delhi or Mumbai to chase fame. He chose his material from the life around him, and his poetry became a living record of his times: he wrote for Hindu-Muslim understanding and Indian nationalism, and composed long poems on the leading literary, social and political figures of his day. His collections include Gang-o-Jaman, Rashtra ki Amanat Rashtra ke Hawale, Jawahar se Lal Tak, Ghulami se Azaadi Tak and Kitab-e-Ghazal. He died on 23 March 1996 at Banaras, aged 86.

Founder-editor of Nigar — the caged bird remembering its nest. Niaz Fatehpuri (1884–1966), born Mawlana Niyaz Muhammad Khan in 1884 at Nayi Ghat in Barabanki district, Uttar Pradesh, was an Urdu poet, fiction writer, critic and polemicist, and the founder-editor of the journal Nigar. Educated at the Madrasa Islamia in Fatehpur, the Madrasa Alia in Rampur and the Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama in Lucknow, he served briefly as a police sub-inspector before resigning in 1902, and worked in several posts before launching the monthly Nigar from Agra in 1922. Under his editorship Nigar became one of the most respected Urdu literary journals of the subcontinent, publishing from Lucknow and Bhopal as well as Agra, and he declared it an organ of rationalists and free-thinkers, using it to argue for reason in religion and literature and against clerical orthodoxy. He wrote more than fifty books — fiction, criticism, religion, philosophy and history among them — including Man-o-Yazdan, the story collections Jamalistan and Nigaristan (1939), the poetry collection Arz-e-Naghma (1962), and an Urdu translation of Tagore's Gitanjali. His short stories, often called poems in prose, earned a place beside the finest Urdu fiction of his time, and though he was better known as a fiction writer and critic, his first love was poetry, in the classical manner of Mir. In 1962 he received the Padma Bhushan for his services to Urdu, and in July that year he moved to Karachi, where he spent his last four years. He died of cancer in Karachi on 24 May 1966.

Qamar Jalalvi (1887–1968) was a classical Urdu ghazal poet celebrated for the simplicity and clarity of his expression. Born Syed Mohammad Hussain in Jalali, near Aligarh, he began writing poetry at the age of eight and was already popular by his twenties. He earned his living for many years repairing bicycles; the title "Ustad" — first given to him as a skilled workman — stayed with him as critics recognised his mastery of the ghazal, and he became known as Ustad Qamar Jalalvi. He lived in great financial hardship despite his fame. After the Partition of 1947 he moved to Karachi, where he spent the rest of his life. His ghazal collections include Rashk-e-Qamar, Auj-e-Qamar, Tajalliyat-e-Qamar and Gham-e-Javedan. Many of his ghazals were set to music and sung, but his reputation rests on the chaste classical ghazal itself: direct language, a complete thought in two lines, and a maqta that turns on his own name, Qamar — the moon.

Qateel Shifai (1919–2001), born Muhammad Aurangzeb Khan on 24 December 1919 at Haripur in the Hazara Division, was Urdu's great lyrical poet — a ghazal writer whose lines travelled, without losing their literary shape, into the mouths of millions through film. His father's death in 1935 cut short his education; small businesses failed, and in 1946 he was called to Lahore as assistant editor of the monthly Adab-e-Latif. He showed his early verse to Hakim Yahya Shifa Khanpuri, from whom he took "Shifai", and then became the disciple — and neighbour and friend — of Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi. From Teri Yaad (1947) he wrote film lyrics for over five decades, more than two thousand songs, while publishing some twenty collections of ghazals and nazms — Guftagu, Bargad, Amokhta among them — in a diction deliberately simple, musical and close to ordinary speech. He received the Adamjee Literary Award (1964) and the Pride of Performance (1994); his autobiography Ghungroo Toot Gaye appeared posthumously. He died in Lahore on 11 July 2001; Haripur and a Lahore street now carry his name.

Qayem Chandpuri (1722–1793), born Sheikh Qayam-ud-din at Chandpur in Bijnor district, was one of the prominent poets of the eighteenth-century Delhi school — the contemporary, and the self-declared rival, of Mir Taqi Mir, Mirza Sauda and Khwaja Mir Dard. He began as a disciple of Mir Dard and then of Mir himself, but made his own road: a plain, simple, idiomatic rekhta, stripped of ornament, that claimed dignity for the spoken tongue. Delhi in his lifetime was a city of invasions and upheaval — he wrote shahr-ashobs on the turmoil of Shah Alam II's Delhi — and his long years at Rampur, and a spell at Lucknow under Raja Ticket Roy's patronage, gave him the full canvas of the declining Mughal world. Alongside the divan, he left a prose tazkira, Tazkira-e-Makhzan-e-Nikaat, keeping the record of his age's poets. His famous boast — that he gave rekhta itself "the robe of acceptance" — is the claim of a whole school: that Urdu, the plain tongue, needs no apology before any master.

Rais Amrohvi, born Syed Muhammad Mehdi in Amroha in 1914, was a Pakistani Urdu poet, scholar, journalist and psychoanalyst, and the elder brother of Jaun Elia. After migrating to Pakistan in 1947 he settled in Karachi, where for decades he wrote quatrains for the daily Jang, becoming famous for qata-nigari — the topical quatrain as a daily comment on politics, society and morals. He founded the Rais Academy for emotional and moral well-being and wrote widely on metaphysics, meditation and yoga, besides attempting an Urdu translation of the Bhagavad Gita. His books include Masnavi Lala-e-Sehra (1956), Pase Ghubar (1969), the Qattat volumes, Hikayaat (1975) and Aasaar (1985). His most famous poem, on the threatened fate of Urdu, opens "Urdu ka janaza hai zara dhoom se nikle." He was assassinated in Karachi on 22 September 1988.

Lucknow's tale-teller — the sun of judgement is a mote before her face. Rajab Ali Beg Suroor (1786–1869), born at Lucknow to Mirza Asghar Ali, was a poet and prose writer of the Lucknow school, remembered above all for Fasana-e-Ajaib, the tale of wonders that made his name immortal in Urdu letters. Schooled at Delhi, he learned Arabic and Persian in the old way and was accomplished besides in horsemanship, archery, calligraphy and music; a sociable and humorous man with a wide circle of friends, he counted Ghalib among his acquaintances. Around 1824 the ruler of Awadh, Ghazi-ud-Din Haider, took offence at something and had him turned out of Lucknow. The exile proved fruitful: at Kanpur, at the urging of Hakim Asad Ali, he turned to the prose that made him — above all Fasana-e-Ajaib, written in 1824, a dazzling, witty answer to Mir Aman's Bagh-o-Bahar, rich in wordplay, description and verse, his own and the masters'. When Naseer-ud-Din Haider came to the throne he was forgiven and allowed back to Lucknow, and under Wajid Ali Shah he joined the court poets at fifty rupees a month. The end of the kingdom of Awadh in 1856 cut off his patronage, and the upheaval of 1857 drove him from Lucknow. In his later years he went to Calcutta for treatment of his eyes, and on his return died at Banaras in 1869. Beside Fasana-e-Ajaib he left a shelf of books — renderings from Persian, tales, and collections of verse and prose — and a small body of ghazals in which the Lucknow manner, polished and playful, turns grave: the beloved's face outshining the sun of judgement, a prayer that ends in union or in death, and a thousand laments where a single sigh of refusal never arrives.

Rajinder Krishan (1919–1987), born Rajinder Krishan Duggal on 6 June 1919 in Jalalpur Jattan, in Gujrat district, was Hindi cinema's quiet master — a poet, lyricist and screenwriter who wrote more than sixteen hundred songs and never sought the limelight. He began writing couplets as a schoolboy, recited at his first mushaira at fifteen in Shimla, and learned his craft from the Urdu of Firaq Gorakhpuri and Ehsan Danish and the Hindi of Pant and Nirala. He moved to Bombay in the mid-1940s, wrote his first screenplay, Janta (1947), and his first film lyrics for Zanjeer (1947); Aaj Ki Raat (1948), Badi Bahen (1949) and Lahore (1949) made his name. Days after Mahatma Gandhi's assassination he wrote "Suno Suno Ai Duniya Walon, Bapu Ki Yeh Amar Kahani", which became a national lament. Across four decades he wrote songs of every kind — "Tumhi Mere Mandir, Tumhi Meri Pooja", "Chal Ud Ja Re Panchhi", "Mujhe Le Chalo", "Ek Chatur Naar", "Mere Piya Gaye Rangoon", "Chup Chup Khade Ho" — and the dialogues and screenplay of Padosan, besides eighteen scripts for AVM Studios. He won the Filmfare Award for Best Lyricist once, in 1966, for "Tumhi Mere Mandir, Tumhi Meri Pooja" (Khandan). He was also a ghazal poet in his own right, and his ghazals carry the same plain, aching Urdu as his songs. He kept so low a profile that many who loved his songs never knew his face — few photographs of him exist. He died in Bombay on 23 September 1987, aged 68; after his death His Master's Voice brought out an album of twelve of his songs.

Lucknow's great novelist — Azad and Khoji, and the city that laughed at itself. Ratan Nath Dhar Sarshar (1846–1903), known by his pen name Sarshar, was one of the pioneers of the Urdu novel — a novelist, journalist, translator and editor whose great book, Fasana-e-Azad, brought the streets of Lucknow alive in print. Born in 1846 into a Kashmiri Pandit family settled in Lucknow, he lost his father at the age of four and was brought up by his mother. He learnt Persian and Arabic in the old way, entered Canning College but left without taking a degree, and taught for a time in a school in Kheri district. In August 1878 he became editor of the Lucknow newspaper Avadh Akhbar, and in its pages his Fasana-e-Azad began to appear — the wandering tale of Azad and his companion Khoji, from the lanes of Lucknow to the battlefields of the Russo-Turkish War, told with the humour of Don Quixote and Pickwick and the colour of the old dastan. Published in four volumes between 1881 and 1883, it ran to more than three thousand pages and stands among the first novels in Urdu; Premchand later turned it into Hindi as Azad Katha. Later novels followed — Sair-e-Kohsar and Jam-e-Sarshar — and translations, among them Don Quixote as Khuda-e-Foujdar and the Alif Laila. In 1895 he moved to Hyderabad, where he worked for Maharaja Sir Kishen Pershad and edited the journal Dabdaba-e-Asifi. He wrote poetry too, and taught poetry to the Maharaja, but his fame rests on his prose. He died at Hyderabad on 21 January 1903.

Sachal Sarmast (1739–1829) was a Sindhi Sufi saint-poet of Daraza, a small village near Ranipur in Khairpur, Sindh. Born Abdul Wahab Faruqi, into a family that traced its line to the second caliph Umar, he lost his father as a child and was raised by his uncle, Khwaja Abdul Haq, who became his spiritual master. The name his disciples gave him says what he stood for: Sachal, the truthful one, and Sarmast, drunk with God. He lived his whole life at Daraza — born there, teaching there, and dying there at about ninety — and his shrine still stands in the village, where a three-day gathering is held every year in the month of Ramadan. He is remembered as the poet of seven languages — Sindhi, Saraiki, Persian, Urdu, Punjabi, Arabic and Balochi — though his most celebrated verse is in Sindhi and Saraiki, above all the kafi, the sung Sufi lyric. His poetry sings the unity of being: God is not far away but present in every form, and the lover's cry "I am the Truth" is not defiance but the soul's homecoming. Nine compilations of his Persian verse survive, among them the Diwan-e-Ashkar and the Dard Nama, alongside five Persian masnavis; his collected verse was first printed in 1933.

Safi Lakhnavi (1862–1950) was a Lucknow Urdu poet of the people, honoured as Lassan-ul-Qaum, the spokesman of the people. Born Syed Ali Naqi Zaidi in Lucknow, he received his early education from his father, learnt Persian from Najmuddin Kakorvi and Arabic from Maulvi Ahmad Ali, took his Entrance degree from Canning College, and taught English in the school attached to that college. In 1883 he joined government service in the revenue department. He began writing verse at the age of thirteen without an ustad, when having a teacher was the norm, and his poetry broke from traditional Urdu verse in its plain, sweet language of the common folk. He preferred the nazm to the traditional ghazal, wrote patriotic poems on the social, political and cultural condition of his times, and also practised qasida, mathnawi and rubai. His works are gathered in Aagosh-e-Maadar, Tanzeem-ul-Hayaat and Deewan-i-Safi.

Aligarh's star of the modern ghazal — the dramatist of Anarkali, honoured with the Padma Bhushan. Saghar Nizami (1905–1984), born Samad Yar Khan on 21 December 1905 at Aligarh, was an Indian Urdu poet of ghazal and nazm, and one of the chief revivers of the Urdu poetic drama. His father, Sardar Ahmed Yaar Khan, was a well-known medical doctor in the service of the British government of India. Saghar was among the earliest disciples of Seemab Akbarabadi, and from 1923 to 1932 he edited Paimana, a monthly magazine published by his teacher in Agra. In 1933 he moved to Meerut and founded Adabi Markaz, a publishing house which in its very first year introduced Mehr Lal Soni Zia Fatehabadi to the Urdu literary world by publishing Tullu, the latter's first collection of poems. His own collections include Subuhi (1934), Badah-e-Mashriq (1934), Kahkashan (1934), Rangmahal (1943), Mauj-e-Sahil (1949) and Nehrunama (1967). His great verse drama Anarkali was first broadcast as a radio script in 1958 and published in 1963; he also wrote Nehru Nama (1967), Samandar ki Devi (1972) and Mash'al-e-Azadi (1980), for which he received the Urdu Academy Award in 1981. He was honoured with the Padma Bhushan in 1969 and the Ghalib Award in 1982, and he worked in All India Radio. He died on 27 February 1984 at Delhi, aged 78.

Muhammad Akhtar "Saghar" Siddiqui (1928–1974), remembered as the Shaair-e-Dard (Poet of Pain), was born in Ambala in British India's Punjab and began writing poetry as a child. He first wrote under the pen name Nasir Hijazi before becoming known as Saghar. After Partition in 1947 he migrated to Pakistan and settled in Lahore, where his melodious ghazals made him a beloved mushaira voice. He wrote for films and founded a literary magazine that won critical praise but failed commercially. Disappointment, financial ruin and addiction followed, and in his later years he lived on the streets of Lahore, still composing verse and still holding mushairas by candlelight on the footpaths. In July 1974 he was found dead on a street corner in Lahore, aged 46, and was buried at the Miani Sahib graveyard. Much of his later work is lost or unpublished, which is part of why the voice that survives — pain stated plainly, without ornament — still moves readers so directly.

Hoshiarpur's enchanter — who says love has a language? The eyes say it all. Sahir Hoshiarpuri (1913–1994), born Ram Prakash Sharma on 5 March 1913 at Hoshiarpur in Punjab, was an Indian Urdu poet whose main form was the ghazal. He studied at Government College and took his M.A. in Persian in 1935, learning his craft as a disciple of Josh Malsiyani of the Dagh school. In his college days he formed a lifelong friendship with the poet Mehr Lal Soni Zia Fatehabadi, and the two later lived in Kanpur. With Naresh Kumar Shad he edited the Urdu journal Chandan. Five collections of his verse appeared in his lifetime — Jal Tarang, Sahar-e-Ghazal (1959), Sahar-e-Naghma (1970), Sahar-e-Haraf (1982) and Sahar-e-Khayal (1990) — and his late study Nuqoosh-e-Dagh (1992) gathered the poets of the Dagh school. His ghazals were sung by leading singers, among them Jagjit Singh, and in 1989 the Ghalib Institute honoured him with the Ghalib Award. He died on 18 December 1994, aged 81.

Sail Dehlvi (1867–1945), born Nawab Sirajuddin Ahmad Khan, was a later-classical poet of the Delhi school and a carrier of Dagh Dehlavi's tradition. Born in Delhi on 29 March 1867, he was the son of Mirza Shahabuddin Ahmad Khan Saaqib and the grandson of the Loharu jagirdar Nawab Ziyauddin Ahmad Khan Nayyar Darakhshan; his name is said to have been suggested by Ghalib himself. He studied Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit and Unani medicine, became Dagh's disciple and later his son-in-law, and was a remarkable presence in the mushairas of his day. After Dagh's death, his rivalry with Bekhud Dehlvi over Dagh's legacy grew so bitter that Sail withdrew from mushairas altogether. His divan remained unpublished. He died in Delhi on 25 September 1945 and was buried at Mehrauli.

Saleem Ahmed (1927–1983), who wrote under the pen name Saleem, was born on 27 November 1927 at Barabanki in Uttar Pradesh. He studied at Meerut College, where the critic and teacher Karrar Hussain was among his mentors, and came to be known as one of the most unconventional voices in modern Urdu letters — a poet, a critic and a playwright. As a critic he stood against the grain of his age: he questioned the ghazal's long hold over Urdu poetry and argued against the modernism of his day, pressing instead for a poetry that faced the whole man and the whole of life. His own verse is spare and unsentimental — short, plain lines in which death, the seasons and the passing of time are looked at steadily, without flinching. His poetry collections — Bayaz, Ikai, Charagh-e-Neem Shab and Mashriq — were gathered after his death into Kulliyat-e-Saleem Ahmed (2003); his critical books include Iqbal Ek Shair (1978), Adhoori Jadeediyat (1987) and Nai Nazm Aur Poora Aadmi (1989). He died at Karachi on 1 September 1983, aged fifty-five.

Saqib Lucknawi (1869–1946), born Mirza Zakir Hussain Qizilbash in Akbarabad (Agra), was the model Lucknow-school poet of the neo-classical tradition — "the very model of a Lakhnavi shayar." Raised in a family of Persian descent, he was educated in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, and in English at St. John's College, Agra. After his father's death left the family in difficulty, he tried his hand at business in Lucknow, served as personal secretary to the Iranian consul in Calcutta, and finally — in 1908 — accepted a post at the court of the Raja of Mahmudabad in Sitapur, where he remained until his death. His succinct, polished couplets — many of which attained the status of Urdu proverbs — made him beloved; the filmmaker S.U. Sunny was so taken by "Bade shauq se sun raha tha zamana" that he used it as the recited motto of his films *Mela* (1948) and *Kohinoor* (1960). His diwan, *Tajalli-e-Shahab-e-Saqib*, was published in 1936. He died at Sitapur on 24 November 1946.

Delhi's naked faqir — the Persian mystic of the rubai, martyred for refusing to bend. Sarmad Kashani (c. 1590–1661), whose full name was Muhammad Sa'id, was a Persian-speaking Armenian mystic and poet who made India his home. Born around 1590, in Kashan or Armenia, into a Jewish Persian-speaking Armenian merchant family, he was educated in philosophy and the sacred texts, and studied under the great thinkers of Isfahan. As a wealthy trader he sailed to India and landed at Thatta in Sind in the early 1630s, where he fell in love with a young Hindu, Abhai Chand — a love that turned him from merchant to wandering dervish. The two travelled together through Lahore and Hyderabad to Delhi, where the Mughal crown prince Dara Shikoh welcomed him and became his disciple. Sarmad wrote some three hundred Persian quatrains, the rubaiyat on which his fame rests, with a small number of ghazals and fragments besides; with Abhai Chand he also carried part of the Torah into Persian, and he supplied the account of Judaism in the great comparative survey of religions written in India in his lifetime. He went about Delhi as a naked faqir, owning nothing, speaking plainly against priestcraft and cant, and refusing to bend. After Aurangzeb defeated Dara Shikoh, Sarmad was tried for heresy and beheaded outside the Jama Masjid in Delhi in 1661. His tomb still stands beside the mosque, a place of pilgrimage, and he is remembered as the second Hallaj — the martyr who would not unsay what he believed.

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.