Bekhud Dehlvi

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.