Daya Shankar Naseem

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.