Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

Qamar Jalalvi (1887–1968) was a classical Urdu ghazal poet celebrated for the simplicity and clarity of his expression. Born Syed Mohammad Hussain in Jalali, near Aligarh, he began writing poetry at the age of eight and was already popular by his twenties. He earned his living for many years repairing bicycles; the title "Ustad" — first given to him as a skilled workman — stayed with him as critics recognised his mastery of the ghazal, and he became known as Ustad Qamar Jalalvi. He lived in great financial hardship despite his fame. After the Partition of 1947 he moved to Karachi, where he spent the rest of his life. His ghazal collections include Rashk-e-Qamar, Auj-e-Qamar, Tajalliyat-e-Qamar and Gham-e-Javedan. Many of his ghazals were set to music and sung, but his reputation rests on the chaste classical ghazal itself: direct language, a complete thought in two lines, and a maqta that turns on his own name, Qamar — the moon.

Qateel Shifai (1919–2001), born Muhammad Aurangzeb Khan on 24 December 1919 at Haripur in the Hazara Division, was Urdu's great lyrical poet — a ghazal writer whose lines travelled, without losing their literary shape, into the mouths of millions through film. His father's death in 1935 cut short his education; small businesses failed, and in 1946 he was called to Lahore as assistant editor of the monthly Adab-e-Latif. He showed his early verse to Hakim Yahya Shifa Khanpuri, from whom he took "Shifai", and then became the disciple — and neighbour and friend — of Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi. From Teri Yaad (1947) he wrote film lyrics for over five decades, more than two thousand songs, while publishing some twenty collections of ghazals and nazms — Guftagu, Bargad, Amokhta among them — in a diction deliberately simple, musical and close to ordinary speech. He received the Adamjee Literary Award (1964) and the Pride of Performance (1994); his autobiography Ghungroo Toot Gaye appeared posthumously. He died in Lahore on 11 July 2001; Haripur and a Lahore street now carry his name.

Qayem Chandpuri (1722–1793), born Sheikh Qayam-ud-din at Chandpur in Bijnor district, was one of the prominent poets of the eighteenth-century Delhi school — the contemporary, and the self-declared rival, of Mir Taqi Mir, Mirza Sauda and Khwaja Mir Dard. He began as a disciple of Mir Dard and then of Mir himself, but made his own road: a plain, simple, idiomatic rekhta, stripped of ornament, that claimed dignity for the spoken tongue. Delhi in his lifetime was a city of invasions and upheaval — he wrote shahr-ashobs on the turmoil of Shah Alam II's Delhi — and his long years at Rampur, and a spell at Lucknow under Raja Ticket Roy's patronage, gave him the full canvas of the declining Mughal world. Alongside the divan, he left a prose tazkira, Tazkira-e-Makhzan-e-Nikaat, keeping the record of his age's poets. His famous boast — that he gave rekhta itself "the robe of acceptance" — is the claim of a whole school: that Urdu, the plain tongue, needs no apology before any master.

Yahya Aman, known to poetry as Qalandar Bakhsh Jur'at (1748–1809), was the Lucknow school's most exuberant voice. Born in Delhi and raised in Faizabad, he settled in Lucknow, where he entered the service of Mirza Sulaiman Shikoh and became a beloved fixture of the nobility's gatherings with his wit, humour and mischievous storytelling. A disciple of Mirza Ja'far Ali Hasrat and the lifelong friend of Insha Allah Khan 'Insha', Jur'at lost his eyesight in the prime of his youth — yet no other poet, blind or sighted, ever painted the colours of love as he did. Mir Taqi Mir called him a "skirt-chasing poet"; his ghazals depict romantic encounters with unabashed sensuality, though some of his verses also carry the melancholy of the political chaos around him. His *Kulliyaat-e-Jurat* appeared in print in 1968. He died in Lucknow in 1809.