Mohsin Naqvi

Mohsin Naqvi (1947–1996), born Syed Ghulam Abbas Naqvi in 1947 at the village of Sadat near Dera Ghazi Khan, Punjab, was the voice in which modern Urdu grief learned to speak plainly — and the poet Pakistan calls the "Shayar-e-Ahl-e-Bayt". His father, Syed Chirag Hussain Shah, was a saddlemaker and food vendor; Mohsin graduated from Government College, Bosan Road, Multan, and took his master's degree from the University of the Punjab, Lahore, where he was already known by his pen name. His ghazals — collected in Azaab-e-Deed, Khaima-e-Jaan, Barg-e-Sehra, Band-e-Qaba and others — move between romantic longing and Karbala: love's separation and Husain's grief are, in his verse, two faces of one devotion, which is why his lines are recited as readily in majalis as in mushairas. He wrote with a direct, unadorned diction that made him beloved far beyond literary circles, and he did not spare the rulers of his day. On 15 January 1996 he was assassinated in Lahore, near Moon Market; he was buried at Dera Ghazi Khan, mourned by thousands.