Imdad Ali Bahr

Shaikh Imdad Ali, known by his takhallus Bahr, was a nineteenth-century poet and scholar of Lucknow and a disciple of Imam Bakhsh Nasikh. Born around 1810, he devoted his life to language itself: he was praised for his precision of expression, his linguistic research, and his art of presentation, and his prose work *Bahrul Bayan* takes up the rules of Urdu. Patronage took him briefly to Rampur, where Nawab Kalb Ali Khan honoured his learning with a salary, but he returned to Lucknow and lived on a small stipend from the daughter of Nawab Amjad Ali Shah. He never compiled his Diwan in his lifetime; after his death in 1878 his friend Syed Muhammad Khan Rand gathered it, and the sole manuscript of *Bahrul Bayan* survives in the Raza Library, Rampur. Bahr's ghazals are those of a craftsman — witty, exact, and fond of turning a familiar image until it surprises.