Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

Sachal Sarmast (1739–1829) was a Sindhi Sufi saint-poet of Daraza, a small village near Ranipur in Khairpur, Sindh. Born Abdul Wahab Faruqi, into a family that traced its line to the second caliph Umar, he lost his father as a child and was raised by his uncle, Khwaja Abdul Haq, who became his spiritual master. The name his disciples gave him says what he stood for: Sachal, the truthful one, and Sarmast, drunk with God. He lived his whole life at Daraza — born there, teaching there, and dying there at about ninety — and his shrine still stands in the village, where a three-day gathering is held every year in the month of Ramadan. He is remembered as the poet of seven languages — Sindhi, Saraiki, Persian, Urdu, Punjabi, Arabic and Balochi — though his most celebrated verse is in Sindhi and Saraiki, above all the kafi, the sung Sufi lyric. His poetry sings the unity of being: God is not far away but present in every form, and the lover's cry "I am the Truth" is not defiance but the soul's homecoming. Nine compilations of his Persian verse survive, among them the Diwan-e-Ashkar and the Dard Nama, alongside five Persian masnavis; his collected verse was first printed in 1933.

Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai (1689–1752) is the greatest poet of the Sindhi language — a Sufi saint of Sindh whose verse was sung before it was ever written down. Born at Hala Haveli to Shah Habib, of a family tracing its line to Herat, he left home young and wandered Sindh, Punjab and the Thar desert, learning from mystics and Jogis, before settling at the mound of Bhit — the "Bhittai", the man of the mound — where his shrine stands today. His disciples gathered his sung verses after his death into Shah Jo Risalo, thirty chapters set to the ragas, in which the folk heroines of Sindh — Sassui, Sohni, Marui, Momal, Noori, Sorath and Lila — become figures of the soul's search for the Beloved. He also wrote in Persian, and his message was simple and wide: one God, love of the Prophet, tolerance, and the dignity of every human being.

Shah Alam II (1728–1806), born Mirza Ali Gauhar at Shahjahanabad, Delhi, was the Mughal emperor who reigned from 1759 until his death — a king who kept his throne and lost his empire, and a serious poet who wrote under the pen-name Aftab, "the Sun". Son of Alamgir II, he was crowned a fugitive in Bihar and did not return to Delhi until 1772; in 1788 the Afghan chief Ghulam Qadir blinded him, and he ended his life in Delhi under British protection, still universally regarded as emperor. As his power faded, poetry became his chief pursuit: his Persian and Urdu ghazals, guided and collected by Mirza Fakhir Makin, fill a diwan (Nadirat-e-Shahi, compiled around 1797), and he also wrote Ajaib-ul-Qasas, one of the earliest works of Urdu prose. He composed in Persian and Urdu as Aftab, in Braj Bhasha under his own title "Shah Alam", and knew Arabic, Sanskrit and Turkish besides. He died in Delhi on 19 November 1806.

The soldier-poet who gave Delhi its first Urdu impulse — and purified its diction a century before the Lucknow reformers. Shah Hatim (1699–c. 1783), born Shaikh Zahuruddin in Delhi, was a soldier who became one of the founding voices of Urdu poetry in Delhi. When Wali Dakhni's diwan reached the capital around 1720, Hatim and his friends Naji, Mazmun and Abru took up Rekhta poetry — Delhi's answer to the Deccan. By profession a sepoy (he served as an inspector under Nawab Amdat-ul-Mulk of Allahabad and in the households of several nobles), he spent his last days in seclusion near the Delhi Fort. His lasting act was editorial: mid-century he discarded his early diwan and recompiled his work in a purified, standardised Rekhta idiom, naming it *Divan Zadeh* ("Descendant of the Diwan") — the first conscious program of Urdu poetic reform, a century before Nasikh and Aatish are credited with it. Deeply influenced by Khan Arzu (though not formally his disciple), he was proudest of his own pupil: Mirza Muhammad Rafi Sauda. His *Divan Zadeh* holds ghazals, mukhammas, rubais, a saqi-nama, two masnavis in praise of tobacco and qehwa, and a shehr-ashob on Muhammad Shah's Delhi.

Shah Mubarak Abro (birth year disputed — 1683 or 1685, Gwalior; died 1733, Delhi) is one of the founding fathers of Urdu poetry. A grandson of the saint Muhammad Ghaus Gwaliori, he came to Delhi as a young man and became a disciple of the great scholar-poet Siraj-ud-Din Ali Khan Arzu — in whose circle the young Khwaja Mir Dard also studied. Abroo's place in history rests on a surviving fact: his Diwan-e-Abroo endures, making him the first authenticated sahib-e-diwan — master of a collected divan — of Rekhta in northern India. His art was iham, the double meaning: a single line that says two things at once, witty, idiomatic, rooted in Hindustani and Braj speech rather than Persian loftiness. He pioneered a whole genre on the grace of an imaginary beloved — love addressed to a beauty who never existed, and all the truer for it. He died in Delhi in 1733 — one tazkira says, kicked by a horse — and lies near Syed Hasan Rasul Numa. Where he stands in the line is clear: the generation that taught Urdu to smile and to mean two things at once.

Shah Nasir (1756–1838) — also spelled Shah Naseer — was a prominent poet and Sufi of 18th-century Delhi. Born Mohammad Naseeruddin, known as Mian Kallu, he succeeded his father as Sajjada Nashin of the family dargah in 1768, and learned his craft as the pupil of Shah Mohammad Mail, a disciple of Qayem Chandpuri, in the company of Khwaja Mir Dard. He travelled to Meerut and Lucknow, meeting Jur'at, Mushafi, Aatish and Nasikh, and became master guide to members of the royal family. He was a trend-setter of his age, famed for complicated metres and difficult radifs — and the teacher of the next generation: Momin, Zauq and Zafar were his pupils. His ghazal holds the Sufi and the lover in one voice: the beloved's name as rosary and meditation, the mosque and the temple both set aside, and the heart's pain measured out in proverbs. 71 of his ghazals and 97 of his sher survive.

Shah Niyaz Ahmad Barelvi (1742–1834), takhallus 'Niyaz', was a Chishti-Sufi saint, scholar and poet who founded the Niyaziya Silsila and the Khanqah-e-Niyazia in Bareilly. Born in Sirhind, Punjab, into an Alvi-Rizvi Syed family, he moved with his family to Delhi, where by his teens he had mastered Qur'an, Hadith, Tafsir, Fiqh and Arabic at Madrasa Faqriya, and became a leading disciple and khalifa of Fakhr-ud-Din Dehlvi (Fakhr-e-Jahan) in the Chishti-Nizami order — also receiving initiation in the Qadiri, Suhrawardi and Naqshbandi orders. On his master's direction he settled in Bareilly, where his khanqah became a major centre of Sufi teaching whose deputies carried his message to Badakhshan, Samarqand, Kabul and Mecca. His *Diwan-e-Niyaz* — published more than fifty times — holds poetry in Persian, Urdu, Arabic and Hindavi on divine love and Wahdat-ul-Wujood; his Urdu ghazals, in simple, direct diction, remain favourites of qawwali gatherings across India and Pakistan. He died in Bareilly in 1834; his shrine at Khanqah-e-Niyazia is a living pilgrimage site.

Poet laureate of the Mughal court and ustaad of Bahadur Shah Zafar — master of crystal-clear classical Urdu.

The Deccan's Sufi ascetic — one immortal ghazal that dissolves lover, beloved, and self into pure unknowing. Siraj Aurangabadi (1715–1763), born Syed Sirajuddin in Aurangabad, is the Deccan's great Sufi ghazal-voice. He began in Persian, under the spell of Hafiz, then turned to Urdu and wrote over five thousand shers — a bridge between the old Deccani style and the new idiom taking shape in the north. In 1734, at about twenty, he took bai'at with Shah Abdul Rahman Chishti; on his murshid's order he renounced poetry after 1740 and lived as an ascetic — younger poets still gathered at his house for instruction. His youth had its own wandering: he left home as a mendicant and was brought back and kept under guard. His fame rests on one ghazal, "Khabar-e-tahayyur-e-ishq" — hear the wonder-tale of love, where neither madness nor the beloved remains — sung in our own time by Abida Parveen and others. His *Kulliyat-e-Siraj* gathers ghazals, qasidas and rubais, and his masnavi *Bostan-e-Khayal* is a long narrative in verse. Divine love is the centre of everything he wrote. He died in Aurangabad in 1763.

Siraj-ud-Din Ali Khan Arzu (1687–1756), born in Agra, was the great scholar-poet of eighteenth-century Delhi — a Persian poet of the first rank, a pioneering linguist and lexicographer, and the mentor of a whole generation of Urdu poetry. Writing mainly in Persian (seven divans, five masnavis), he nevertheless championed rekhta — early Urdu — at a time when Persian still ruled the literary world: he urged poets like Sauda to compose in the vernacular, and groomed his own nephew Mir Taqi Mir alongside Mazhar Jan-e-Janan and Shah Mubarak Abroo. His home mushaira in Delhi was the city's literary court; poets sent their manuscripts to him for correction, and Mir wrote that every master of rekhta was, in effect, Arzu's student. As a scholar he stood a century ahead of his time: his dictionaries — *Siraj-ul-Lughat*, the Urdu–Persian *Nawadir-ul-Alfaz* (1751), and the *Chiragh-e-Hidayat* glossary of poetic idiom — laid the foundations of Urdu lexicography, and in his philological treatise *Muzmir* he was the first scholar to place Sanskrit in the Indo-European language family, decades before Sir William Jones. He moved to Lucknow in 1754 and died there in 1756.