Mah Laqa Bai

Mah Laqa Bai "Chanda" (7 April 1768 – August 1824), born Chanda Bibi in Aurangabad, was a tawaif-turned-court-poet of Hyderabad — the first woman Urdu poet with a published diwan. Daughter of the courtesan Raj Kunwar (who had migrated from Rajputana) and Bahadur Khan, a Mughal mansabdar, she was raised by her childless aunt Mehtaab Ma, the favoured courtesan of Nawab Rukn-ud-Daula, who gave her an elite education. The second Nizam, Mir Nizam Ali Khan (Asaf Jah II), conferred the title "Mah Laqa Bai" (Visage of the Moon) and appointed her to the *omarah*, the highest nobility; she advised on state policy, accompanied him to three battles in male attire, and was celebrated as a thumri singer and Deccani Kathak dancer — the first woman of the region to recite in a mushaira. Her diwan, *Gulzar-e-Mahlaqa* (39 ghazals of 5 couplets each), was printed in 1824 after her death — the first published diwan by any woman Urdu poet; her own 1798 manuscript *Diwan-e-Chanda* (125 ghazals, gifted to Captain Malcolm in 1799) survives in the British Museum. She died in Hyderabad in 1824 and lies in the mausoleum she built at Moula-Ali, restored in 2010. She is also held, by some scholars, to be the inspiration behind Mirza Hadi Ruswa's *Umrao Jaan Ada* (1899).