Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah

Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (1565–1612), the fifth Sultan of Golconda, is remembered by history as a king — and by Urdu as its first true poet. Ascending the throne at fifteen in 1580, he ruled thirty-one years, and in 1591 founded a new capital on the south bank of the Musi: Hyderabad, crowned by the Charminar and the Mecca Masjid. But his deeper founding was literary. He is the first *sahib-e-diwan* of Urdu — the first to compile a full diwan of Urdu verse, the *Kulliyat-e-Quli Qutb Shah*, writing in the Dakhni idiom of the Deccan alongside Persian and Telugu. His court made Dakhni a language of poetry, celebration, and devotion: ghazals, qasidas, masnavis, marsiyas, hamds and manqabats, in an earthy, musical diction full of "na" for "nahin" and "koon" for "ko". He is a Shi'a poet of divine and earthly love alike, and he is called the father of Urdu poetry in India. His famous munajat — "mera shahar logan sun ma'mur kar" (populate my city with people) — is still remembered as the prayer with which Hyderabad was born. He died in Hyderabad on 11 January 1612.