Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

Lucknow's ghazal voice inside the marsiya — the garden, the sleepless night, the martyr's grave. Taashshuq Lakhnavi (1824–1892), born Sayyid Mirza at Lucknow on 11 March 1824, was a poet of the Lucknow school who wrote both ghazal and marsiya. He was the younger brother of the poet Ishq Lakhnavi, a disciple of Nasikh, and belonged to the family of poets around Mir Anees, the great master of the marsiya. He began with ghazals in his early years, and his ghazals are remembered for their delicacy of feeling and freshness of theme; his marsiyas carry the ghazal's music into lament, and the two forms meet in his verse — the same images, of the garden, the night of separation and the martyr's grave, serve both. Among his books are Baraheen-e-Gham and Baraheen-e-Ghazal, and his diwan and a later selection, Afkar-e-Tashshuq, survive in print. He died at Lucknow on 12 April 1892, aged 68.

Hoshiarpur's lyricist — the heart's tales reach the lips only as sighs. Tufail Hoshiarpuri (1914–1993), born on 17 July 1914 at Hoshiarpur in Punjab, was a Pakistani Urdu poet and film song lyricist whose ghazals and whose film songs both travelled far beyond his own name. He began by reading patriotic poems at Muslim League gatherings, and wrote songs for films in British India before Partition; after 1947 he became one of Pakistan's best-loved lyricists — his words carried by the qawwali "Sanson Ki Mala Pe" in Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's voice, and by the breakthrough hit "Ni Suhay Chooray Waliye" from the film Shammi (1950). Alongside the film work he kept writing ghazals, dohe, rubai and naat, and his services to Urdu letters were honoured with the Pride of Performance. He died at Lahore on 4 January 1993, aged 78.

Syed Waheed Akhtar was an Indian Urdu poet, critic, orator and philosopher, and one of the leading Muslim scholars of the twentieth century. Born in Aurangabad to a family that had migrated from Nasirabad–Jais in Raebareli district, he spent his childhood in Aurangabad, studied at Osmania University, Hyderabad, where he completed his Ph.D., and was then appointed lecturer at Aligarh Muslim University, where he settled for the rest of his life and retired in 1995 as Professor of Philosophy. In his early years he used the takhallus Barq. His poetry collections include Shab Ka Razmiyah, Paththaron Ka Mughanni and Zanjeer Ka Naghma, and his Karbala Ta Karbala (1991) carried the marsia into a new age; he also wrote a major research study of Khwaja Mir Dard. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi described him as a modernist whom many also counted as a progressive, who argued that modernism was really an extension of progressivism. He died on 13 December 1996.

Wahshat Raza Ali Kalkatvi (1881–1956) was a prominent later–classical Urdu poet from Bengal. Born on 18 November 1881 in Hooghly to Maulvi Shamshad Ali, who had moved there from Delhi, he was schooled at Madrasa Aaliya in Calcutta and became a poetry apprentice of Abul Qasim Mohammad Shams in 1898. After higher education he served as Chief Maulvi in the Persian department of the Imperial Record Department, Calcutta, and when Islamia College started in 1926 he became a professor of Urdu there. In 1931 the British Government honoured him with the title of Khan Bahadur. His collections include Diwan-e-Wahshat and Taraana-e-Vahshat (1950), and the progressive poet Parvez Shahdi was his disciple. After independence he migrated to Pakistan, where he died in 1956.

Waris Shah (1722–1798) was a Punjabi Sufi poet of the Chishti order, and the voice Punjab still turns to when it tells the story of Heer and Ranjha. He was born in 1722 at Jandiala Sher Khan, in the Sheikhupura district, into a Sayyid family — his father was Gulsher Shah and his mother Kamal Banu — and his parents died while he was still young. He was educated at Kasur, under Hafiz Ghulam Murtaza, and became a disciple of Pir Makhdum of Kasur. After his studies he settled at Malka Hans, a village north of Pakpattan, where he lived in a small room beside the mosque that now bears his name. There, in 1766, at the asking of his friends, he made the old love of Heer new again: his *Heer Ranjha* retells the tale — traditionally set in the fifteenth century, one of the four great tragic romances of Punjab — in the speech of the Punjab itself, thick with its idioms, proverbs and sayings, and with a minute, living picture of Punjabi life and of the troubled politics of his own century, whose invasions he saw with his own eyes. He did not invent the story — earlier poets had told it before him — but his telling became the classic, the one singers still perform and listeners still know by heart. When he died in 1798 he was buried at Jandiala Sher Khan, where his tomb stands and an annual gathering is held, and lovers still come to it as pilgrims. He is remembered as the Shakespeare of the Punjabi language.

Wazir Agha (1922–2010) was a Pakistani Urdu poet, critic and essayist, and one of modern Urdu's most prominent critics. Born in Wazir Kot in the Sargodha district, he learned Persian from his father and Punjabi from his mother, graduated from Government College Jhang, took a master's in economics from Government College Lahore, and earned a PhD from the University of Punjab in 1956 for research on humour and satire in Urdu literature. From 1960 to 1963 he co-edited Adbi Duniya, and from 1965 he edited the monthly Auraq for many decades. He wrote more than forty prose books, including the landmark critical study Urdu Shairi ka Mizaj, and experimented in poetry with ballads, sonnets and free verse, his poems often carrying an element of story. He received the Sitara-e-Imtiaz and was a Life Fellow of the Pakistan Academy of Letters.

The journalist-poet of the freedom movement — *Zamindar*'s editor, whose nazms were acts of resistance. Maulana Zafar Ali Khan (1873–1956), born in Kot Marath in Sialkot district, was the journalist-poet of India's freedom movement. Educated at Mission High School Wazirabad and Aligarh's Anglo Mohammedan College (BA), he took over the Daily *Zamindar* of Lahore in 1908 — the paper his father Maulvi Sirajuddin Ahmad had founded in 1903 — and made it northern India's most influential Urdu daily. His poetry was a mode of resistance: nationalist nazms that opposed the British, supported the Khilafat Movement, and rejected Gandhi's non-violence in favour of direct confrontation. The price was five years' rigorous imprisonment under Punjab's Governor Michael O'Dwyer. His diwans — *Baharistan* (1937), *Nigaristan*, *Chamanistan* (1944), *Raharistan* — carry the same fire, alongside essays, a play (*Jang-e-Rus-o-Japan*), and a celebrated Urdu translation of Kipling's *Jungle Book*. His naats, including "Woh Shama Ujala Jis Ne Kiya" sung by Mehdi Hassan, are classics of the genre. A founding member of the Majlis-e-Ahrar-e-Islam and a close associate of Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar, he was honoured after Partition with a Pakistan Post commemorative stamp. He died on 27 November 1956.

Zaheer Kashmiri (1919–1994) was a Pakistani Urdu poet, critic and film writer, a leading voice of the Progressive Writers' Movement. Born Peer Dastgeer Zaheer on 21 August 1919 at Amritsar, into a family that had migrated generations earlier from Srinagar, Kashmir, he took an MA in English and began writing poetry at eleven. He became editor of Savera, the Progressive Writers Association's literary magazine — serving on its board alongside Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi — and wrote the landmark essay "Meri Zindagi, Mera Fann" (Savera, 1951). Reaching Lahore around Partition, he worked in films — story and direction of Teen Phool (1961), stories for Anjam (1957) and Sheikh Chili (1958), lyrics for seven films — and from 1959 wrote a column in the daily Ehsaan under the pen name Majnu. His poetry collections include Azmat-e-Aadam (1955), Taghazzul, Chiragh-e-Aakhir-e-Shab, Raqs-e-Junoon (1982) and Auraaq-e-Musawwir; his critical work Adab Ke Maaddi Nazariye argued for a materialist reading of literature. His ghazal turns the classical idiom toward the progressive cause: the lover's lamp becomes the last lamp of the night, burning so that after it there is light, not darkness. He died in Lahore on 12 December 1994; the Pride of Performance was conferred on him after his death.

Bhikampur's caged nightingale — the young poet who wrote women's freedom into Urdu verse. Zahida Khatun Sherwani (1894–1922), who wrote as Zay Khay Sheen — the letters Z-Kh-S — was an Urdu poet and a pioneering voice for women's rights, who died at twenty-seven. Born on 18 December 1894 at Bhikampur in the Aligarh district, the younger daughter of Nawab Sir Muzammilullah Khan Sherwani, a leading figure of the Aligarh movement, she began writing verse at ten and sending poems and articles to women's magazines. Because her society did not permit women to write poetry, she published first as Nuzhat and then, from 1912, as Zay Khay Sheen. Her ghazals and nazms carried a woman's feeling and a reformer's anger together: a nazm on the Kanpur mosque tragedy in 1913, verses on the Tripoli and Balkan wars, a Sipas-Nama-e-Urdu presented at the opening of Osmania University in 1918, and her celebrated masnavi Aaina-e-Haram (1921), a plea for women's rights. Her two collections are Aaina-e-Haram and Firdaus-e-Takhayyul. She died at Bhikampur on 2 February 1922, aged twenty-seven, and her verse was gathered and published by her cousin Aneesa Khatoon Sherwani.

Zeb-un-Nissa Makhfi (1638–1702) was a Mughal princess and Persian poet, the eldest child of Emperor Aurangzeb and his chief consort Dilras Banu Begum. Born at Daulatabad on 15 February 1638, she memorised the Quran by the age of seven and was educated by Hafiza Mariam in Persian, Arabic, philosophy, astronomy and mathematics. Writing in secret under the pen name Makhfi — "Hidden One" — she kept a Delhi salon of scholars and poets, built a great private library, and composed the ghazals later collected as *Diwan-i-Makhfi*. She never married, and spent about the last twenty years of her life imprisoned by her father at Salimgarh Fort, Delhi, where she died on 26 May 1702.

Zia Fatehabadi (1913–1986) — born Mehr Lal Soni on 9 February 1913 at Kapurthala, Punjab — was a modern Urdu poet of the ghazal and the nazm, and a disciple of Seemab Akbarabadi in the line of Dagh. His family came from Fatehabad, near Tarn Taran, the town whose name he carried; "Zia", meaning Light, was the pen name his teacher chose for him. He wrote his first ghazal in 1925, still a schoolboy in Jaipur, and became Seemab's disciple in 1930, remaining true to his ustad all his life and working to keep his legacy alive. His first collection, Tullu (Dawn), appeared in 1933 while he was still at college, followed by Noor-e-Mashriq (The Light of the East) in 1937. He took a B.A. with honours in Persian in 1933 and an M.A. in English in 1935, then joined the Reserve Bank of India in 1936, serving for thirty-five years and retiring as Deputy Chief Officer in 1971. He married Raj Kumari in 1942 and made Delhi his home after retirement. Across six decades he produced nineteen works — eleven collections of poetry, among them Nai Subah (1952), Gard-e-Raah (1963), Husn-e-Ghazal (1964), Dhoop aur Chandni (1977), Rang-o-Noor (1981) and Soch ka Safar (1982) — alongside qataat, rubaiyat, geets, sonnets, essays and letters. He never sought public recognition or state awards, and kept a low profile all his life; his verse is plain, musical and hopeful, written in the common man's language, with light and dawn as its abiding images. He died in Delhi on 19 August 1986, after a long illness.

Zia Jalandhari (1923–2012) was a Pakistani Urdu poet, broadcaster and television chief, and a pioneering member of the Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq, the Circle of Connoisseurs. Born Syed Zia Nisar Ahmad on 2 February 1923 in Jalandhar, his family moved to Lahore, where he took an MA in English Literature from Government College and lectured in English at Islamia College. He began his broadcasting career at All India Radio and joined Radio Pakistan in 1948, later serving as Managing Director of Pakistan Television. His poetry — in collections such as Narsa (1966), Sar-e-Sham (1968), Dam-e-Subh (2003) and the Kulliyat-e-Ziya (2007) — carries the Halqa's modernist inwardness: plain speech, moral clarity and the world seen through the beloved's eyes. He received the Pride of Performance in 2006 and a National Literary Award for Dam-e-Subh, and died in Islamabad on 13 March 2012.

Momin Khan Momin was a contemporary and rival of Ghalib known for intricate romantic nuance, astrological mastery, and the iconic couplet Ghalib offered his entire Diwan in exchange for. Explore his book: Diwan-e-Momin – https://safhaglobal.org/ebook/diwan-e-momin

Nida Fazli was a Sahitya Akademi Award winning poet and lyricist who bridged Urdu and Hindi with deep humanist sensitivity, Doha compositions, and colloquial everyday philosophy.

The founder of the Urdu ghazal — the Deccan poet whose diwan taught Delhi the music of Rekhta.

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

The poet of the people — father of the Urdu nazm, who sang of bread, festivals, and the common man.

Yahya Aman, known to poetry as Qalandar Bakhsh Jur'at (1748–1809), was the Lucknow school's most exuberant voice. Born in Delhi and raised in Faizabad, he settled in Lucknow, where he entered the service of Mirza Sulaiman Shikoh and became a beloved fixture of the nobility's gatherings with his wit, humour and mischievous storytelling. A disciple of Mirza Ja'far Ali Hasrat and the lifelong friend of Insha Allah Khan 'Insha', Jur'at lost his eyesight in the prime of his youth — yet no other poet, blind or sighted, ever painted the colours of love as he did. Mir Taqi Mir called him a "skirt-chasing poet"; his ghazals depict romantic encounters with unabashed sensuality, though some of his verses also carry the melancholy of the political chaos around him. His *Kulliyaat-e-Jurat* appeared in print in 1968. He died in Lucknow in 1809.

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

The poet whose heart carried the whole world's pain — lexicographer of the *Ameer-ul-Lughat*, master of the naat.

The last voice of Mughal Delhi — ghazals of effortless simplicity that charmed commoner and court alike.

The poet who turned Urdu poetry toward reform — Musaddas-e-Hali, Urdu's first critic, and Ghalib's first biographer.

Shaair-e-Inqilab — the poet whose slogan was "revolution, revolution, and revolution."

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

Imam Bakhsh Nasikh (birth year disputed — d. 16 August 1838, Lucknow), known as Sheikh Imam Bakhsh Nasikh, was born in Faizabad and made Lucknow his home, becoming the founder of the Lucknow school of Urdu poetry. He is celebrated less as a poet of deep feeling than as the supreme craftsman of the art: he deliberated upon language, syntax, and poetic device with unmatched technical virtuosity, expanding Urdu's vocabulary and refining its idiom while respecting classical norms. His legendary rivalry with Khwaja Haidar Ali Aatish — Nasikh the polished craftsman against Aatish the soulful natural — shaped the literary life of Lucknow in the 1830s. Forced into exile by court politics, he returned to Lucknow after the death of minister Hakim Mehdi in 1837 and died there in 1838. His diwans, later printed together as the *Kulliyat-e-Nasikh*, remain monuments of the Lucknow style.

Mir Babar Ali Anis (birth year disputed — d. 10 December 1874, Lucknow), known as Mir Anis, was born in Faizabad into a family of poets: his father Mir Khaliq was a marsiya poet and his grandfather Mir Hasan the author of the celebrated masnavi *Sehr-ul-Bayan*. He called himself the fifth generation of Shabbir's (Imam Husain's) praise-singers. A pupil of Imam Bakhsh Nasikh, who gave him the takhallus *Anis*, he first wrote ghazals and then, on his father's counsel, devoted himself to the marsiya, taking the elegy to unprecedented heights. He broadened the form beyond lamentation into realistic battlefield narrative, vivid portraiture of the heroes, landscape, and moral reflection, in language of unmatched sweetness and purity — Muhammad Husain Azad credited him with at least ten thousand elegies. His great contemporary and friendly rival was Mirza Salamat Ali Dabeer. He died in Lucknow in 1874 and lies buried at his residence in Chowk.

Mirza Salamat Ali Dabeer (d. 1875), takhallus Dabeer, was the great marsiya master of 19th-century Lucknow — counted with his contemporary and friendly rival Mir Anis as one of the two founders of the classical Urdu marsiya. Born in Delhi, he began reciting marsiya as a child at Muharram majalis, learned poetry under Mir Muzaffar Husain Zameer, and moved to Lucknow, where he spent his life. As much an erudite scholar as a poet — he composed a be-nuqta (dotless) marsiya, *Mah-e-Kamil*, signing it not "Dabeer" but "Utarid" — he is credited with some three thousand elegies (per Muhammad Husain Azad's *Aab-e-Hayat*). His rivalry with Anis split Lucknow's admirers into the "Aneesiya" and "Dabeeriya" schools, though the two masters themselves remained on cordial terms. When Anis died in 1874, Dabeer mourned him in verse; a year later, in 1875, Dabeer died in Lucknow and was buried there.

Wajid Ali Shah 'Akhtar' (1822–1887) was the last Nawab of Awadh. He ascended the throne of Lucknow in 1847 and ruled for nine years, until the British East India Company annexed his kingdom in February 1856 and removed him. He spent the rest of his life — over three decades — in exile at Matiya Burj (Metiabruz) near Calcutta, where he died in 1887. A poet, playwright, dancer and composer, he was one of the great patrons of the arts: he nurtured the Lucknow gharana of Kathak, staged magnificent rahas, and wrote over forty works in Urdu and Persian — poems, prose and thumris. His most famous couplet — "dar-o-diwar pe hasrat se nazar karte hain / KHush raho ahl-e-watan hum to safar karte hain" — was his farewell to Lucknow, and it lives on in every Urdu speaker's heart.

Brij Narayan Chakbast (1882–1926), who wrote under the pen name Chakbast, was an Urdu poet of Lucknow and one of the founders of patriotic Urdu poetry in the modern age. Born into a Kashmiri Brahmin (Pandit) family at Faizabad on 19 January 1882 — the son of the poet Pandit Udit Narayan Chakbast — he moved to Lucknow as a boy after his father's death and made it his home for life. He earned his B.A. (1905) and LL.B. (1907) from Canning College, Lucknow, and rose to distinction at the Lucknow Bar. A lawyer by profession, he poured his public spirit into verse: he was a strong proponent of the Home Rule movement, helped found the Kashmiri Young Men's Association and the Bahadur Library, and chose the nazm as his chief form — *Subh-e-Watan* (Dawn of the Nation, 1926) made qaumiyat, love of nation, the subject of Urdu poetry without ever letting it collapse into mere propaganda. Secular to the bone, he wrote with equal reverence on Ram, Krishna, and Gokhale. He died suddenly on 12 February 1926 at Rae Bareli railway station, aged only 44, after a paralytic stroke. His philosophical sher *"Zindagi kya hai anasir mein zuhur-e-tartib / Maut kya hai inhin ajza ka pareshan hona"* — heard by millions at the opening of the film *Masaan* (2015) — returned him to public memory nearly a century later.

Syed Wahid-ud-din Ahmed (1863–1955), known to Urdu letters as Bekhud Dehlvi, was a classical ghazal poet of Delhi and among the finest disciples of Dagh Dehlvi. Born at Bharatpur (Rajasthan) on 21 March 1863 to the poet Syed Shams-ud-din 'Salim', he was brought to Delhi as a boy, where Altaf Hussain Hali schooled him in Arabic, Persian, and the craft of verse. In 1891 Hali made him Dagh's disciple, and he soon rose among the best of that illustrious circle — a lineage that also counted Iqbal's teacher among its masters. His ghazals — collected in Guftar-e-Bekhud and Shahsavar-e-Bekhud — are prized for linguistic dexterity and colloquial grace, carrying Dagh's living idiom into the twentieth century with a distinction all his own. His corpus also includes devotional verse, including a naat. He lived to ninety-two, dying in Delhi on 2 October 1955 — a living bridge from the Mughal twilight to independent India.

Shaukat Ali Khan (1879–1941), known to Urdu as Fani Badayuni — "Fani" meaning the mortal, the perishable — is the twentieth century's most uncompromising poet of despair. Born on 13 September 1879 at Islamnagar in the Badaun district of UP, he took his BA (1901) at Bareilly College and a law degree at Aligarh, but the practice of law never held him; a brief editorship of the magazine Tasneem, years of practice in Bareilly, Lucknow and Agra, and finally a head-teachership in Hyderabad (1932–1939) framed a life of narrowing fortunes. The deaths of his wife and his young daughter in the early 1930s sealed his inward turn — he wrote of himself as "a disgrace to my family, a burden on this earth." Called "Mayusi ka shayar" (the poet of despair) and "Sahib-e-gham," Fani took Mir's pathos and Ghalib's intellectual daring and distilled them into an unrelieved existential pessimism: life as a riddle neither to be solved nor explained. His collections Diwan-e Fani, Baqiyat-e Fani and Irfaniyat-e Fani preserve his later work; the early diwans were lost. He died in Hyderabad on 27 August 1941 and is buried there.

Mirza Wajid Hussain (1884–1956), who wrote first as "Yaas" (despair) and then as "Yagana" (the matchless) — finally Yagana Changezi — was born in 1884 at Azimabad, now Patna, into a family that traced its line to Iranian migrants in the Mughal army. Mentored in poetry by Shad Azimabadi, he tutored the Nawab of Awadh's grandson at Matyaburj, Calcutta, before settling in Lucknow — the city that would both make and break him. Egotistical, uncompromising and brutally outspoken, he caused scandal after scandal: he attacked the veneration of Ghalib in his prose work Ghalib-Shikan (1934), questioned Iqbal, and made controversial statements on religion that once got him attacked by a mob. Declared an apostate and humiliated by Lucknow's literary circles, he spent his last years in illness and loneliness, dying on 2 February 1956. His tone — direct, curt, stinging — made him an interrogator of life and art rather than a singer of love: "more than writing about the myriad manifestations of love, he wrote about the manifestations of life". His collections Nishtar-e Yaas (1914), Aayat-e Wijdani (1927), Tarana (1933) and Ganjina (1948) were rescued for posterity in Mushfiq Khwaja's Kulliyat-i Yagana (2003).

Asghar Husain (1884–1936), known by his pen name Asghar Gondvi, was a pre-modern Urdu ghazal poet of rare philosophical depth. Born in the Gorakhpur district in 1884, his family settled in Gonda, where he lived most of his life and from which he took his name. With little formal schooling, he taught himself Urdu, Arabic, Persian, and English, and worked as an editor — first with Urdu Markaz, Lahore, then for many years at Tej Bahadur Sapru's Hindustani Press in Allahabad, editing the magazine Hindustani. A close friend of Jigar Moradabadi (whose Safha profile is in this directory), Asghar was not a prolific writer; he was preoccupied essentially with the idea of perfecting his ghazal. His poetry takes the stock romantic metaphors of the ghazal and re-thinks them in both romantic and spiritualist registers — a soft, melancholic voice that is philosophical without ever losing its music. His best-known sher, "chala jata hun hansta khelta mauj-e-hawadis se / agar aasaniyan hon zindagi dushwar ho jae," has entered the living memory of Urdu. His collections include Nishat-e-Rooh and Surood-e-Zindagi. He died in Allahabad in 1936.

Seemab Akbarabadi (1882–1951), born Aashiq Hussain Siddiqui in Agra, was one of the most prolific poets of twentieth-century Urdu — some seventy-five books, including twenty-two collections of poetry. In 1898 he became a disciple of Daagh Dehlvi (whose Safha profile is in this directory), joining the great classical tradition of the Delhi school. In 1923 he founded the publishing house Qasr-ul-Adab in Agra and launched the monthly Paimana, the weekly Taj, and the monthly Shair — printing not only his own work but that of a generation; his son Aijaz Siddiqi carried Shair on for decades. His ghazals, beloved in the voice of Kundan Lal Saigal, move easily between love, philosophy, and social themes. Late in life he completed Wahi-e-Manzoom, a verse translation of the Quran, published after his death. After Partition he moved to Karachi, where a paralytic stroke in 1949 ended his writing life; he died there on 31 January 1951.