Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

Maharaja Sir Kishan Prasad Shad (1864 – 13 May 1940) of Hyderabad was a poet first and a prime minister second — or, as Hyderabad liked to say, a poet who happened to rule. A childhood friend of Nizam Mahbub Ali Khan and heir to a family that traced itself to Raja Todar Mal, he became Peshkar of Hyderabad State in 1892 and its Dewan (Prime Minister) in 1901, taking the title Yamin-us-Saltanat, "right hand of the realm", and the rank of Maharaja. In his first tenure he raised the state's revenues, organised relief after the great Musi Flood of 1908, and left the treasury fuller than he found it; after resigning in 1912 he was called back by Nizam Osman Ali Khan in November 1926 and served until March 1937, passing the Mulki regulations that reserved posts for Hyderabad's own people. He was knighted KCIE in 1903 and GCIE in 1910. Through all of it he remained a disciple of Dagh Dehlvi, writing Urdu and Persian poetry under the takhallus "Shad" — happy — in a Sufi key: ghazal, naat and marsiya, collected in Bagh-e-Shad (1890) and later volumes, and shared in his own magazine Mahbub al-Kalam. His house was a morning court of poets, painters and musicians from across India, Persia and Arabia, and his life — seven wives, Hindu and Muslim, each following her own faith — was itself an argument for the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb he championed. At his death in Hyderabad on 13 May 1940, the Nizam said society had witnessed "the departure of the last vestige of the Mughal Empire".

Majeed Amjad (1914–1974) was a Pakistani modern Urdu poet, counted among the founding fathers of modern Urdu poetry and described as a philosophical poet of depth and sensitivity. Born Abdul Majid on 29 June 1914 in Jhang, Punjab, he was taught Arabic and Persian by his maternal grandfather, took his bachelor's degree from Islamia College Lahore in 1934, and edited the weekly Arooj in Jhang. He then served in the Food Department, spending the last twenty-eight years of his life in Sahiwal, where he retired as Assistant Food Controller in 1972 and died on 11 May 1974; he was buried in Jhang. His first collection, Shab-e-Rafta (1958), with a preface in verse, was the only book published in his lifetime; Shab-e-Rafta Ke Baad followed posthumously in 1976, and his complete works, Kuliyat-e-Majeed Amjad, were edited by Khawaja Muhammad Zakariya in 1989. Away from the great literary centres, he built a poetry of striking images and unexpected connections — philosophical, introspective, and deeply personal, in ghazal, nazm and free verse.

Majrooh Sultanpuri (1919–2000), born Asrar ul Hassan Khan in Sultanpur, U.P., was a Progressive Urdu poet and one of Hindi cinema's most celebrated lyricists. A trained Unani physician (Hakim) and disciple of Jigar Moradabadi, he left medicine for poetry, joined films in 1946 with Shahjahan ("Jab dil hi toot gaya"), and served two years in prison in 1949 for his leftist verse. Across six decades he wrote more than two thousand film lyrics — from Andaz and Dosti ("Chahunga main tujhe sanjh savere", Filmfare Best Lyricist 1965) to Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak and Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar ("Pehla nasha") — while his fifty-odd ghazals and two notable nazms carried the Progressive fire; none is more famous than "main akela hi chala tha jaanib-e-manzil magar", which Wikipedia's own article calls one of the best-known verses of Urdu poetry. He became the first lyricist to receive the Dadasaheb Phalke Award (1993), and also received the Ghalib Prize and the Iqbal Samman. He died in Mumbai on 24 May 2000.

Makhdoom Mohiuddin (1908–1969), born Abu Sayed Muhammad Makhdoom Mohiuddin in Andole village, Medak district, Hyderabad State, was the revolutionary Urdu poet known as "Shayar-e-Inquilab" (Poet of the Revolution). He founded the Progressive Writers Union in Hyderabad, taught Urdu literature at City College (1934), joined the Communist Party of India, and stood at the forefront of the 1946–47 Telangana Rebellion against the Nizam; he later became a founder of the CPI in Andhra Pradesh, a member of the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Council (1956–1969) and its opposition leader. His collections *Surkh Savera* (1944) and *Gul-e-Tar* (1961) were gathered with the rest of his verse in *Bisat-e-Raqs*, which won the 1969 Sahitya Akademi Award for Urdu. His ghazals — "Aap Ki Yaad Aati Rahi Raat Bhar," "Phir Chhidi Raat, Baat Phoolon Ki," "Ek Chameli Ke Mandve Taley" — became immortal through Hindi films. He died in Hyderabad on 25 August 1969.

The bohemian who freed the Urdu nazm — symbolism, free verse, and Hindu myth in a life lived by the tavern's edge. Meeraji (1912–1949), born Muhammad Sanaullah Dar into a Kashmiri family of Gujranwala, was one of the founding fathers of the modern Urdu nazm — the pioneer who carried symbolism and free verse into Urdu poetry. Raised in Lahore, he first wrote under the takhallus "Sasri"; a one-sided love for a Bengali girl, Meera Sen, gave him the pen name by which he is remembered. Though brought up in comfort — his father Munshi Mohammad Mahtabuddin was a railway engineer — he left home and family to live as a bohemian wanderer, staying with friends and making a living by selling his songs. He served as poetry editor of the Lahore magazine *Adabi Duniya* (1938), worked for All India Radio in Delhi, wrote literary columns for the monthly *Saqi*, and briefly helped edit *Khayal* in Bombay, settling in Bombay after Partition. Drawn from his teens to Hindu mythology, he wove Hindi vocabulary into his poetry, prose, and letters; he acknowledged his debts to the Sanskrit poet Amaru and the French Baudelaire, and translated Damodar Gupta and Omar Khayyam. His collections include *Meeraji ke Geet*, *Meeraji ki Nazmein*, *Geet hi Geet*, *Paband Nazmein*, and *Teen Rang*; the *Kulliyat-e-Meeraji* appeared in 1988. He died in Bombay in November 1949, aged only thirty-seven.

Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa (1857–1931), born in Lucknow in the year of the great uprising, was the Urdu novelist who gave the language its first great novel — and a poet in his own right. His ancestors had come from Persia; his great-grandfather was an adjutant in the Nawab of Awadh's army, and the family lane in Lucknow was still called Adjutant's Lane. Educated at Thomson Engineering School (Thomason College, Roorkee), he taught at Lucknow's Central High School and Christian College, worked as a civil servant and railwayman, and later moved to Hyderabad to work at the Dar-ut-Tarjuma, Osmania University's translation bureau. He knew Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, English, Latin and Greek, wrote on religion, philosophy and astronomy, and even invented a system of Urdu shorthand. His literary career began in 1887 with a verse Laila-Majnu; then came the novels — Afshai Raz, Zaat-e-Shareef, Shareef Zada, Akhtari Begum — and, above all, Umrao Jan Ada (first published Lucknow, 1899; often cited as 1905), the courtesan-poet's life story told as memoir, regarded by many as the first Urdu novel and later filmed in Pakistan and India. His ghazals — 31 sher catalogued on Rekhta — carry the same world as the novel: two ruined cities, a lifetime's weariness, love as affliction. He died at Hyderabad on 21 October 1931.

Mohammad Ali Jauhar (1878–1931) was an Indian Muslim leader, journalist, scholar and Urdu poet, a leading figure of the Khilafat Movement. Born on 10 December 1878 at Rampur, he studied at Aligarh and at Lincoln College, Oxford, then served the Rampur state and the Baroda civil service before turning to journalism — founding the English weekly The Comrade in 1911 and the Urdu daily Hamdard in 1913. He co-founded the All-India Muslim League and Jamia Millia Islamia, led the Khilafat delegation to Europe in 1920, was imprisoned for sedition, and presided over the Indian National Congress in 1923. His Urdu poetry, collected in Deewan-e-Jauhar, carries the same fire as his politics: faith, sacrifice and resistance — above all his Karbala couplet, "the killing of Husain was in truth the death of Yazid", quoted for decades. He died of a stroke in London on 4 January 1931, days after the first Round Table Conference, and was buried in Jerusalem as he had wished.

Mohammad Alvi (1927–2018) was one of the most prominent modernist poets of Urdu, praised for his "layered simplicity" — short, plain lines that carry a philosophical weight. Born on 10 April 1927 at Ahmedabad, he had little formal schooling in his youth and completed his higher education at Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi. He began writing as a progressive poet in the late 1940s, but found his own voice in the late 1950s, when he turned to modern Urdu poetry. His collections — *Khali Makaan* (1963), *Aakhiri Din Ki Talash* (1968), *Teesri Kitab* (1978), *Chautha Aasmaan* (1992) and *Raat Idhar Udhar Roshan* (1995) — made him one of the most-read modern ghazal writers; *Chautha Aasmaan* won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1992, and he also received the Ghalib Award. He died at Ahmedabad on 29 January 2018, aged 90.

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.

Moin Ahsan Jazbi was an Indian Urdu poet and a major voice of the Progressive Writers' Movement who struck a different chord with it — representing the classical literary tradition and blending it with contemporary poetics. Born on 21 August 1912 at Mubarakpur in Azamgarh district, he began composing poetry at the age of nine, sought guidance from Hamid Shahjehanpuri, and first used the takhallus Malaal before becoming Jazbi. He took his B.A. from Anglo-Arabic College, Delhi (1932), his M.A. in Urdu from Aligarh Muslim University (1934), and his Ph.D. in 1938 on Hali's political consciousness, published as Hali Ka Siyasi Shuoor (1959). After working as assistant editor of the Urdu monthly Aajkal, he joined Aligarh's Urdu department in 1945 and retired as Reader in 1974. His collections are Firozaan (1951), Sukhan-e-Mukhtasar (1960) and Gudaaz-e-Shab (1985); his ghazal 'Marne ki duaen kyun maangun…' became widely sung. He received the Ghalib Award in 1975 and died on 13 February 2005.