Zafar Ali Khan

The journalist-poet of the freedom movement — *Zamindar*'s editor, whose nazms were acts of resistance. Maulana Zafar Ali Khan (1873–1956), born in Kot Marath in Sialkot district, was the journalist-poet of India's freedom movement. Educated at Mission High School Wazirabad and Aligarh's Anglo Mohammedan College (BA), he took over the Daily *Zamindar* of Lahore in 1908 — the paper his father Maulvi Sirajuddin Ahmad had founded in 1903 — and made it northern India's most influential Urdu daily. His poetry was a mode of resistance: nationalist nazms that opposed the British, supported the Khilafat Movement, and rejected Gandhi's non-violence in favour of direct confrontation. The price was five years' rigorous imprisonment under Punjab's Governor Michael O'Dwyer. His diwans — *Baharistan* (1937), *Nigaristan*, *Chamanistan* (1944), *Raharistan* — carry the same fire, alongside essays, a play (*Jang-e-Rus-o-Japan*), and a celebrated Urdu translation of Kipling's *Jungle Book*. His naats, including "Woh Shama Ujala Jis Ne Kiya" sung by Mehdi Hassan, are classics of the genre. A founding member of the Majlis-e-Ahrar-e-Islam and a close associate of Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar, he was honoured after Partition with a Pakistan Post commemorative stamp. He died on 27 November 1956.