Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

Muhammad Mazharuddin Ibn-e-Nishati was a seventeenth-century Dakhni court poet of Golconda under Sultan Abdullah Qutb Shah, remembered for a single great work: the masnavi Phulban ("Flower Garden"), composed in 1656. In about 3,500 lines and 2,000 couplets, Phulban retells in Dakhni Urdu the Persian Basatin ("Gardens") of Ahmad Zubairi, a fourteenth-century work from the reign of Muhammad bin Tughluq. It is a romance of adventures, anecdote leading into anecdote, opening with a tale told by a dervish to the king of a mythical city of gold, and following, among others, Princess Samanbar's search for Prince Humayun. Literary histories place Nishati among the major poets of the first Dakhni period, beside Wajhi, Ghawwasi and Nusrati. His surviving ghazal, in the same Dakhni, is a poet's boast in garden language: his garden is ever fresh, his bouquet always in bloom, and every verse stands out in delicacy like the brow of the beauties.

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.

Lucknow's dazzling wit — the poet-linguist who gave Urdu its first grammar and its most playful tales.

Imam Bakhsh Nasikh (birth year disputed — d. 16 August 1838, Lucknow), known as Sheikh Imam Bakhsh Nasikh, was born in Faizabad and made Lucknow his home, becoming the founder of the Lucknow school of Urdu poetry. He is celebrated less as a poet of deep feeling than as the supreme craftsman of the art: he deliberated upon language, syntax, and poetic device with unmatched technical virtuosity, expanding Urdu's vocabulary and refining its idiom while respecting classical norms. His legendary rivalry with Khwaja Haidar Ali Aatish — Nasikh the polished craftsman against Aatish the soulful natural — shaped the literary life of Lucknow in the 1830s. Forced into exile by court politics, he returned to Lucknow after the death of minister Hakim Mehdi in 1837 and died there in 1838. His diwans, later printed together as the *Kulliyat-e-Nasikh*, remain monuments of the Lucknow style.