Fani Badayuni

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.