Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

Nasir Kazmi was the quintessential poet of dusk, moonlight, sorrow, and longing. His simple yet intensely musical ghazals captured the nostalgia and displacement of the post-partition subcontinent.

Habib Jalib was known as the "Shair-e-Awam" (The People's Poet). A fearless dissident who spent years in prison defying military dictatorships, his poem "Dastoor" is an eternal anthem of defiance.

The last Mughal Emperor of India and a poignant master of Urdu ghazals. Exiled to Rangoon after the 1857 war of independence, his elegies mourn the tragic loss of home, empire, and liberty.

Aagha Akbarabadi (d. 1879) was a classical Urdu poet of Agra — Akbarabad, the old Mughal city whose name he carried as his own. His real name was Meerza Aagha Husain, and no birth year is recorded for him anywhere; he lived in the early-to-mid 1800s, a contemporary of Dagh Dehlvi, while the Mughal Empire was falling apart around him. He never chased courts or patrons: his ghazals speak in the plain language of Agra's streets, and their hero is the rind — the free drinker whose prayer-mat is spread at the tavern door, who answers preachers with wit and takes the beloved's glance as both wound and worship. Twenty-four of his ghazals and thirty-two of his sher survive — the work of a poet famous in his own city and collected only long after his death.

Aasi Ghazipuri (1834–1917) was a Sufi mystic poet of Ghazipur, of the Nasikh school — he is regarded as "the most respectable after Meer Dard to have written this kind of poetry." Born Shah Muhammad Abdul Aleem on 21 December 1834 at Sikandarpur in Ballia district, into a well-educated family tracing its lineage to Hazrat Umar Farooq, he took the pen-name Aasi and spent his entire life in Ghazipur, publishing his divan under the title Ain-ul-Maarif. He sought counsel in poetry from Afzal Allahabadi, a disciple of Nasikh, and became the teacher of Fani Ghazipuri; Firaq Gorakhpuri and Majnun Gorakhpuri praised him. His ghazal is essentially mystical: the heart's wealth is won only by losing it, love asks to be parted from both worlds, and the believer asks God for nothing but to go on wanting Him. He died at Ghazipur in 1917 and was buried in Mohalla Nooruddinpura. Eighteen of his ghazals and eighteen of his sher survive.

Abdul Hamid Adam was a Pakistani Urdu poet celebrated for simple, musical ghazals in short metres that speak directly to the heart. After his father's early death he was raised by a relative, educated in Lahore, and spent his working life in military accounts, rising to Deputy Assistant Controller before retiring in 1966. He first used the takhallus Akhtar, then Adam, and wrote ghazals, nazms, masnavis and qataat; 84 ghazals, 111 sher and 25 e-books survive under his name, with about four dozen collections in all. His work keeps classical imagery — wine, candle, moth, garden — but treats it with plain language, patience and quiet contentment, and his romantic ghazals made him a popular mushaira voice. He died in Lahore on 10 March 1981.

Abdul Majeed Salik (1894–1959) was a prominent Urdu poet, journalist and essayist of early-twentieth-century Punjab. Born on 13 December 1894 at Batalah in district Gurdaspur, he began writing poetry at fourteen and became one of the leading editors of his day — of the newspaper Zamindar and the magazines Tahzeeb-e-Niswan and Phool. His first poetic collection, Raah-o-Rasm-e-Manzilha, appeared in 1922, and his patriotic nazms stirred the readers of the freedom era. He was also a scholar of Persian and a biographer of lasting standing: his Zikr-e-Iqbal remains a celebrated life of Iqbal, and his Muslim Sahafat Hindustan Mein is a history of Muslim journalism in India. He died in Lahore on 27 September 1959.

Abid Ali Abid (1906–1971) was a Pakistani Urdu and Persian poet, critic and educator — a critic first and a poet second, by his own field's judgement. Born on 17 September 1906 at Dera Ismail Khan, he graduated in law and joined the bar, but his literary inclination brought him to Lahore, where he took an M.A. in Persian and taught Persian at Dayal Singh College. He wrote books of literary criticism in Urdu and Persian — Usool-e-Inteqaad, Adab Ke Asloob, Al-Bayan and Al-Badi among them — and edited literary journals including Sahifa-Lahore. He was among the first drama and feature writers at Radio Pakistan Lahore in the late 1940s and 1950s, and had worked on the story and dialogue of Heer Ranjha (1931), the first Punjabi talking film. His poetry collection Main Kabhi Ghazal Na Kehta and his fiction Talismaat and Shahbaz Khan stand beside the criticism, but it was the criticism that earned him his place of distinction. His daughter Shabnam Shakeel became a noted poet in her own right. He survived three heart attacks and succumbed to the fourth, dying in Lahore on 20 January 1971, aged 64.

"The First Lady of Urdu Poetry" — the first prominent woman poet of the progressive era. Ada Jafri (1924–2015), born Aziz Jahan in Badayun, was the first prominent woman poet of the progressive era — honoured as "The First Lady of Urdu Poetry". Her father died when she was three; raised in a traditional household, she began composing verse at twelve under the name Ada Badayuni, and received guidance from poets including Akhtar Sheerani, who printed her first ghazal in his journal *Rooman*. She married the civil servant and littérateur Nurul Hasan Jafri in Lucknow in January 1947, taking the name Ada Jafarey, and moved with him to Karachi after Partition. Her first collection, *Main Saz Dhoondhti Rahi* (1950), announced a woman's voice writing the ghazal in the romanticist tradition with remarkable confidence; *Shahr-i Dard* (1967) won the Adamjee Literary Award. Later collections, an autobiography (*Jo Rahi So Bekhabari Rahi*), Urdu haiku, and her edited anthology *Ghazal Numa* followed. Pakistan honoured her with the Medal of Excellence (1981), the Pride of Performance (2003), and the Kamal-e-Fun lifetime award (2003) — the first woman to receive it. She died in Karachi on 12 March 2015.

Adil Mansuri (1936–2008) was an Indian modernist poet, calligrapher, painter and playwright, born in Ahmedabad on 18 May 1936 as Farid Mohammad. He spoke Gujarati at home and was educated in Arabic and Urdu; after Partition his family moved to Karachi, where he began writing Urdu ghazals and learning calligraphy, returning to Ahmedabad in 1955. He became a leading modernist who experimented with form and language together, writing ghazals in Gujarati, Hindi and Urdu, and is credited with developing the modern Gujarati ghazal. His Urdu collection *Hashr ki Subh Darakhshan Ho* carries his socio-political consciousness alongside Islamic tradition. He immigrated to New Jersey, USA, in 1985, where he continued to write, paint and practise calligraphy until his death on 6 November 2008. He received the Kalapi Award (1998) and the Vali Gujarati Award (2008).

Agha Shahid Ali was a Kashmiri-American poet who wrote in English and carried the ghazal into American poetry. Born in New Delhi in 1949 and raised in Kashmir, he studied at the University of Kashmir and the University of Delhi, then earned a PhD at Pennsylvania State University and an MFA at the University of Arizona, teaching at universities including Hamilton, Princeton and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His collections include The Half-Inch Himalayas, A Nostalgist's Map of America, The Country Without a Post Office and Rooms Are Never Finished, a National Book Award finalist, and he translated Faiz Ahmed Faiz and edited Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English. His poems return again and again to Kashmir, exile, memory, loss and home. He died in Amherst, Massachusetts, on 8 December 2001.

Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi (1916–2006), born Ahmad Shah Awan on 20 November 1916 at Anga in Khushab district, Punjab, was one of the central figures of modern Urdu literature — poet, short-story writer, critic, journalist and editor. From a family of Sufi pirs, he graduated from the University of the Punjab, Lahore, in 1935, briefly served in the excise department, and then gave his life to letters. He edited Phool, Tehzeeb-i-Niswaan, Adab-i-Lateef, Savera and Naqoosh, edited the daily Imroze, and from 1962 published his own journal Funoon for almost half a century — the nursery of a generation, Parveen Shakir among his mentees. As secretary-general of the Progressive Writers' Movement in Punjab (1948) and then Pakistan (1949), and from 1974 of the Majlis-e-Taraqqi-e-Adab, Lahore, he was repeatedly arrested in the 1950s and 1970s for his convictions. His poetry moves between the traditional ghazal and the modern nazm, and his short stories — Chaupal, Bagooley, Sannata among them — are counted, by some critics, second only to Premchand in their depiction of rural life. He received the Pride of Performance (1968) and the Sitara-e-Imtiaz (1980), and died in Lahore on 10 July 2006.

Aish Dehlvi (1779–1874) was a classical Urdu poet of Delhi, remembered above all as one of the most outspoken critics of Ghalib's poetic style. A physician by profession — he is cited in the Ghalib tradition as Hakeem Agha Jaan Aish — he lived his long life in the Delhi of the late Mughal and early colonial eras, writing in the Delhi idiom at a time when the ghazal's language and obscurity were themselves matters of public debate. He is "one of the most vocal critics of Ghalib's poetic style," and the anecdote that preserves his name is a mushaira exchange in which he teased Ghalib for verse that only its author could understand. His surviving work is small — sixteen ghazals, six selected couplets and one qita, with a modern Kulliyat-e-Aish (1992) as his book — but the couplets that survive show a poet of wit, plain speech and moral clarity: the heart's unnamed ache, the candle burning out at dawn, and a world whose colours and fragrances no longer tempt those who have seen its impermanence.

Lisan-ul-Asr — the master of satire who laughed at a changing world.

Akhtar Sheerani (1905–1948), born Muhammad Dawood Khan at Tonk on 4 May 1905, was Lahore's poet of romance. His father, the scholar Hafiz Mahmood Khan Shirani, had the boy taught at home — religious learning, wrestling for the body, poetry for the soul — and when the family was driven from Tonk after a revolt against the Nawab, father and son settled in Lahore, where Dawood passed Munshi Fazil (1921) and Adeeb Fazil (1922) at Oriental College and took the pen name Akhtar under the guidance of Maulana Tajwar Najibabadi. From 1923 to 1939 he edited, in succession, Intikhab, Bahaaristan, Khyaalistan and Romaan, and wrote, at a time when the Progressive movement dominated Urdu letters, a poetry deliberately apart from it: not slogans but youth, beauty, nature and longing, in the spirit of Shelley and Keats — a verse that, in Pakistan Post's words, "exhales verse as a flower exhales fragrance". Woman, for him, was not one figure but beauty itself — beloved, wife, mother, sister — and nature took its colour from her. His life, by contrast, was a succession of losses — a son, a friend, a love called Salma who did not return his love — and drink undid his health. He died at Lahore on 9 September 1948, aged forty-three, two days before Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and lies in Miani Sahib Graveyard.

Pillar of the modern Urdu nazm — Sahitya Akademi laureate and the Filmfare-winning pen behind *Waqt*'s famous dialogues. Akhtar-ul-Iman (12 November 1915 – 9 March 1996), born at Qila Patthargarh near Najibabad in Uttar Pradesh's Bijnor district, was one of the pillars of the modern Urdu nazm. Raised in harsh circumstances — an orphan's upbringing in Delhi — he worked menial jobs while studying, graduated from the Anglo-Arabic (Zakir Husain) College in Delhi, and took his master's in Urdu from Aligarh Muslim University. After a spell as a staff artist at All India Radio, he moved to Bombay in 1945 and became one of Hindi cinema's most respected screenwriters: his dialogues shaped landmark B.R. Films productions including *Kanoon* (1960), *Dharmputra* (1961) and *Waqt* (1965), earning him the Filmfare Best Dialogue award twice (1963, 1966); the famous "glass-house" line of *Waqt* is his. As a poet he deliberately set the ghazal aside, choosing the nazm — in free, conversational verse — to speak of the modern individual's alienation, moral choice and philosophical humanism. His collection *Yadein* won the 1962 Sahitya Akademi Award in Urdu. He died in Mumbai on 9 March 1996.

Ale Ahmad Suroor (1911–2002), born in Badaun, was one of the founders of modern Urdu criticism — a poet who became the conscience of Urdu literary judgement. His father, a postmaster, wanted him to be a doctor, so he first graduated in science from St John's College, Agra; but literature claimed him, and he took an M.A. in English in 1934. He taught English and Urdu at Aligarh and Lucknow, and from 1958 to 1974 was professor and Head of Urdu at Aligarh Muslim University, later founding and directing the Iqbal Institute at the University of Kashmir. His critical books — *Tanqeed Kya Hai?* (1947), *Adab aur Nazriya* (1954) and above all *Nazar aur Nazariya* (1973) — turned Urdu criticism from impressionistic praise into a disciplined, principled art; his lifelong study of Iqbal (*Iqbal: Nazriya aur Shairi*, 1978) remains a landmark. He wrote poetry too, in ghazal and nazm, with a critic's clarity and a poet's heart — the shore's peace weighed against the joy of fighting the storm. India honoured him with the Sahitya Akademi Award (1974) and the Padma Bhushan (1991). He died in Delhi on 9 February 2002.

Ali Sardar Jafri (1913–2000), born in Balrampur, Gonda district, U.P., was one of the most prominent Urdu poets of the twentieth century — a progressive poet, critic, and film lyricist. Raised in Lucknow's religious atmosphere, he could reportedly recite a thousand verses of Anis by age eight. Admitted to Aligarh Muslim University in 1933, he was expelled in 1936 for political reasons; he graduated from Zakir Husain College, Delhi (1938), and his Lucknow University postgraduate studies ended with his 1940–41 arrest for anti-war poems. He presided over the first conference of the Progressive Writers' Movement in Lucknow (1936), co-edited *Naya Adab* (1939–1949), and later edited *Guftagu*; his poetry collections — *Nai Duniya Ko Salaam* (1948), *Asia Jaag Utha* (1951), *Ek Khwab Aur*, *Mera Safar*, *Sarhad* — carry his romantic lyricism and revolutionary hope. He wrote film lyrics (*Dharti Ke Lal*, 1946; *Pardesi*, 1957), produced the documentary *Kabir, Iqbal and Freedom* and the 18-part TV serial *Kahkashan* on Urdu poets. He received the Padma Shri (1967), the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship (1971) and the Jnanpith Award (1997). He died in Mumbai on 1 August 2000.

Allama Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi (birth year disputed, 1796 or 1797 – 19 August 1861) of Khairabad, Sitapur, was one of the great scholar-poets of nineteenth-century India — a Hanafi mufti, a Kalam theologian, and a master of logic and philosophy whom scholars called the final authority on fatwas. Son of Fazl-e-Imam Khairabadi, the Mughals' Sadr al-Sadur, he completed his education by the age of thirteen, taught from that age, studied Hadith with Shah Abd al-Qadir and Shah Abd al-Aziz, and became mufti in the Department of Qaza in 1828. He edited the first diwan of Ghalib at Ghalib's own request, and moved in the Delhi circle of Ghalib, Mufti Sadruddin Azurda and Bahadur Shah Zafar. In 1825 he issued his famous refutation of Ismail Dehlvi, Tahqeeq al-Fatwa fi Abtal al-Taghwa. On 26 June 1857, as Bakht Khan's army reached Delhi, he gave the Friday sermon and issued the edict supporting jihad against British rule — the fatwa signed by Azurda and other Delhi scholars that carried the uprising. After the rebellion failed he was arrested at Khairabad on 30 January 1859, defended himself at his own trial, was sentenced to life transportation, and was shipped to the Andaman Islands on 8 October 1859 aboard the Fire Queen. There, in captivity, he wrote Arabic qasidas as eyewitness accounts of 1857 and his book al-Thawra al-Hindiyya — the first book ever written on the events of 1857. He died in exile on the Andaman Islands on 19 August 1861. His son Abdul Haq, his grandson Muztar Khairabadi and his great-grandson Jan Nisar Akhtar carried the family's literary line forward.

Allama Shibli Nomani (1857–1914), born at Bindwal in Azamgarh district, was the scholar who gave Urdu its modern historiography. Taught first by the rationalist Maulana Muhammad Farooq Chirayakoti and then, on Hajj, by scholars in Arabia, he joined Sir Syed Ahmad Khan's Anglo-Mohammedan College, Aligarh, in 1882 as professor of Arabic and Persian, where sixteen years beside Thomas Arnold opened him to Western thought without loosening his oriental roots. After Sir Syed's death he advised Hyderabad State on education, then served as principal of Nadwatul Ulama (1908–1913), before returning to Azamgarh. His biographies — above all Al-Farooq — set a new standard: history written from sources, in lucid Urdu prose, rather than panegyric. As a critic, Sher-ul-Ajam made him a founder of Urdu literary criticism. He founded Shibli National College in 1883 and, in his last year, bequeathed his house and orchard for Darul Mussanifin (the House of Writers) at Azamgarh; its first formal meeting was held on 21 November 1914, three days after his death, and his disciple Syed Sulaiman Nadvi carried the house — and Sirat-un-Nabi — forward. His poetry, small in bulk beside his prose, carries the same mind: a reformer's grief for a community that had lost its learning, and a believer's address to eternity.

Agha Hasan Amanat — Amanat Lakhnavi (birth year disputed; died 1858) — is the man who put Urdu poetry on a stage. Attached to the court of Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Awadh, he wrote in 1853 Indar Sabha, the first complete Urdu stage play — a musical opera in verse, some 830 couplets and 72 songs, telling the love story of Sabz Pari and Gulfam in a blend of ghazal, thumri, holi and savan songs, chhand and chaubola. Staged at the Nawab's court, it became the seed of Urdu musical theatre — the ancestor of the Parsi stage and, through it, of the film song. Sayyid Mohammad Abdullah credited Amanat with beginning the geet tradition in Urdu. Beyond the play he was a Lucknow-school poet of the old mold: hundreds of ghazals and marsiyas in Urdu and Persian, in the flowery, artificial diction his age loved. He lost his speech at twenty and only partly recovered it — a poet who knew what silence was, and filled it with music. He died in 1858, the year the world his play had been written for came to an end.

Ambar Bahraichi (1949–2021) was a prominent modern Urdu poet and a well-known Sanskrit scholar. Born Mohammad Idris at Bahraich on 5 July 1949, he made Lucknow his home and his literary base. He was a Sahitya Akademi award winner, and his bibliography joins the two traditions he lived in: Urdu collections such as Doob (1990), Khali Seepiyon Ka Iztirab (2000) and Malang Malhar (2013) stand beside Sanskrit and critical works including Maha Bhinishkarman (1987) and studies of Anand Vardhan. His ghazal is spare, image-driven and quietly philosophical — rivers and thirst, faces and masks, victories won outside the house and lost within it. A man who seems to have been a river himself, carrying the thirst of every stream he passed, he wrote of success as a face that changes colour, and of solitude as the silence of a forest of faces. He died at Lucknow on 7 May 2021, leaving a body of work that bridges Urdu poetry and Sanskrit learning.

Ameeq Hanafi (1928–1988) was one of the most prominent modern Urdu poets and a critic of wide range. Born Abdul Aziz Hanfi at Indore on 3 November 1928, he was educated at Mhow, matriculating in 1946 and taking two M.A. degrees, in Political Science in 1952 and in History in 1954. Alongside the social sciences he cultivated a deep interest in music and Indian philosophy. He joined All India Radio and retired from a senior position, remaining a broadcaster at heart. He began writing poetry at Mhow. His first collection, Sang-e-Pairahan (1958), still carried the imprint of Progressive poetics, but his later work — Shajar-e-Sada, Shab Gasht, and the long poem Salsalat-ul-Jaras — established him as a modernist of great promise and fulfilment. He also wrote criticism, including work on Amir Khusro and the study of poetry and poetics Sher Cheeze Deegar Ast, which ranges across Eastern and Western poetics. In both verse and criticism, he joined modern experiment to a classical sense of form.

Ameer Khusro (1253–1325), born Abul Hasan Yaminuddin Khusro in Patiyali (Etah, U.P.), is the first poet of Rekhta/Hindavi — the founding voice of Urdu — and an icon of the Delhi Sultanate. The son of a Turkic Central-Asian father and an Indian mother, he became a devoted disciple of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya and served as court poet under the sultans of Delhi. His primary works are in Persian — the Khamsa, the masnavis Hasht Bihisht and Nuh Sipihir, and the prose chronicle Khazain-ul-Futuh — but it is his Hindavi verse that made him immortal: the playful pahelis (riddles) woven into Indian folklore, and the qawwali kalams still sung seven centuries on. His ghazal "Ze-hal-e-miskin" — Persian and Hindavi alternating line by line — is regarded as the first ghazal ever written in Rekhta. Honoured as Tuti-e-Hind (Parrot of India) and called the father of qawwali, he fused Persian and Indian music, created the khayal and tarana forms, and is traditionally credited with the invention of the tabla and sitar. He died in Delhi in October 1325, months after his master, and lies buried beside Nizamuddin's grave.

Amjad Islam Amjad (4 August 1944 – 10 February 2023) was the poet Pakistan invited into its living rooms — through verse, and through television dramas that became household names. Born in Lahore to a family originally from Sialkot, he took an MA in Urdu literature from Punjab University (1967), lectured at Govt. M.A.O. College Lahore (1968–1975), directed at Pakistan Television Corporation (1975–1979), and later served as Director General of the Urdu Science Board (1989) and project director of the Children's Library Complex. Poet, playwright, lyricist, columnist, critic and translator, he authored more than seventy books. His first poetry book appeared in 1974; his collections include Barzakh (1974), Satvan Dar (1978), Fishar (1982), Barish ki Aawaz (1997) and Yahiin Kahiin (2006). His TV dramas — Waris (1979), Dehleez, Samandar, Raat, Waqt, Apnay Log — made him a household name, as did his famous ghazal "Insha Ji Utho", sung by Ghulam Ali, and the lyric "Mann Ki Lagan". His style is simple, humanistic and philosophical, emotionally direct — everyday feeling with depth. He received the Pride of Performance (1987), Sitara-e-Imtiaz (1998) and Hilal-e-Imtiaz (2023).

Arsh Malsiani (1908–1979) — born Balmukund on 20 September 1908 in Malsiyan, Punjab — was a distinguished Urdu poet, translator, prose writer and editor, known as the Raj Kavi of Punjab. His father, Labhu Ram "Josh" Malsiyani, was a celebrated Urdu-Persian scholar-poet and disciple of Dagh Dehlvi; that Dagh lineage is Arsh's literary inheritance. He began as an overseer in the Punjab Irrigation department, then taught for about fifteen years at the Government Industrial School, Ludhiana, earning his F.A. and B.A. along the way. From 1948 to 1968 he served in the Publications Division of the Government of India — Assistant Editor of the Urdu monthly Aajkal under Josh Malihabadi, and its editor from 1954. His poetry collections are Haft Rang, Chang-o-Aahang, Sharar-e-Sang and Aahang-e-Hijaz; he translated Umar Khayyam's rubais (Hast-o-Bood), gathered his humorous prose as Post-mortem, and published a biographical sketch of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (1976). He died in Delhi on 15 December 1979.

Syed Anwar Hussain 'Arzoo' Lakhnavi (1873–1951) was a leading poet of the Lucknow school of Urdu poetry. Born in Lucknow into a cultured, well-off literary family, he was the son of Mir Zakir Hussain 'Yas' and the younger brother of Mir Yusuf Hussain 'Qayas', both poets. Educated at home and later in Arabic and Persian under Lucknow scholars, he wrote his first marsiya at twelve and became a disciple of Syed Zaman Ali 'Jalal' Lakhnavi, succeeding him as guide to Jalal's disciples. Though he wrote in nearly every genre — marsiya, qasida, masnavi, rubai, naat and more — he is remembered above all for his ghazals, collected in Fughan-e-Arzoo, Jahan-e-Arzoo and Nishan-e-Arzoo. His hallmark was plain, conversational language: he brought the ghazal closer to everyday speech without abandoning its Lucknow elegance. In 1942 he moved to Bombay and became one of the first mainstream Urdu poets to write for Hindi cinema, later migrating to Karachi, where he joined Radio Pakistan and died in 1951.

Asar Lakhnavi (1885–1967), born Mirza Jafar Ali Khan, was a prominent poet of the later Lucknow School, a critic, scholar and civil servant. Born on 12 July 1885 in Katra Abu Turab, Lucknow, he was educated at Canning College, served as Deputy Collector and held other important administrative posts, and later worked as a minister in the Government of Jammu and Kashmir, for which service India conferred on him the Padma Bhushan. A disciple of Aziz Lakhnavi, he wrote on traditional subjects with great linguistic finesse. His poetry collections include Baharaan, Naubaharaan and Uroos-e-Firtrat, his critical studies include Anis ki Marsiya Nigari, Mutala-e-Ghalib and Chhan Been, and his dictionary Farhang-e-Asar remains a landmark. He died in Lucknow on 6 June 1967.

Ashraf Ali Khan Fughan (died 1772) was a prominent 18th-century poet of Delhi and a contemporary of Mir Taqi Mir. His birth year is not settled — 1725/6 is one given year, while other accounts place him vaguely in the early 1700s — so his birth year is recorded here as Unknown rather than choosing between them. His Diwan-e-Fughan survives in modern editions, and 15 of his ghazals survive. He is praised for fresh imagery, elegant diction, and a playful satire and wit that set him beside Mir and Sauda among the Delhi masters. One fuller life story — foster brother of Emperor Ahmad Shah Bahadur, pupil of Ali Quli Nadeem, bearer of the title Zarif-ul-Mulk, later in Murshidabad, Awadh and Azimabad (Patna) — is also told of him, though it remains uncertain; the title itself is also known as a name variant.

Aziz Hamid Madni (1922–1991) was a Pakistani poet, critic and translator, and one of the stalwarts of the new Urdu ghazal in Pakistan. He was born on 15 June 1922 in Raipur, in British India, the son of Mohammad Hamid Saqi — a student of Shibli Nomani and a classmate of Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar. In 1948 he moved to Pakistan and settled in Karachi. After a master's degree in English, he taught and worked in journalism for a short while, then joined Radio Pakistan as a programme executive. Three collections of his poetry appeared in his lifetime — Chashm-e-Nigaraan (1962), Dasht-e-Imkaan (1964) and Nakhl-e-Gumaan (1983) — and his two-volume critical survey of modern Urdu poetry, Jadeed Urdu Shaeri, remains a landmark study. His translations of Shakespeare's Othello and Antony and Cleopatra, and most of his translations of French poetry into Urdu, were never published. Forty-three of his ghazals and thirty-seven of his sher survive, and some of his ghazals have been set to music. He died in Karachi on 23 April 1991.

Aziz Lakhnavi, born Mirza Mohammad Hadi in Lucknow in 1882, was a distinguished Persian and Urdu scholar and poet of the Lucknow school. His family, descended from migrants from Shiraz who first settled in Kashmir and later moved to Lucknow under the Awadh nobles, was renowned for scholarship. Educated at home after his father's death when he was seven, he later taught Persian and Urdu at Aminabad School and then became guardian to the siblings of Ali Mohammad Khan, Maharaja of Mahmudabad, spending the rest of his life there. A disciple of Safi Lakhnavi, he practised every poetic form and earned a particular reputation as a qasida poet, praised for the magnanimity of his language and the vitality of his imagination. His works include Gulkadah and the collected Kulliyat-e-Azeez.

Balraj Komal (1928–2013) was one of the leading modern poets of the Urdu nazm in India. Born on 25 September 1928 at Sialkot, he fled to Delhi in the Partition of 1947, carrying the displacement into a lifetime of poetry. After retiring as an Education Officer with the Delhi Administration, he wrote full-time — poems, short stories and criticism — and served on the Delhi Urdu Akademi and the Sahitya Akademi's advisory board. His collection Parindon Bhara Aasman (Sky Full of Birds) won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1985; he also won the Uttar Pradesh Urdu Academy Award twice (1971, 1982) and received the Padma Shri in 2011. His nazms — above all 'A Girl Alone' (1948), a Partition-orphaned girl begging a stranger to become her family — made him a poet of displacement, tenderness and quiet revolt. He died in Delhi in 2013, aged 85.

Bismil Azimabadi (1901–1978) was an Indian freedom-fighter poet from Patna, born Syed Shah Mohammad Hasan into a zamindar family of Azimabad. He took "Bismil" — the wounded one — as his pen name and became a disciple of Shad Azimabadi, frequenting the Qutub-khana Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu Library in Patna. He took part in the independence movement and is reported to have recited his poem "Sarfaroshi" at the Calcutta Congress session of 1920. Most of his poetry was lost; what survived was compiled after his death as *Hikayat-e-Hasti* (1980), and he left a short memoir, *Yaraan-i-Maikadah* (1976). He died in Patna on 20 June 1978. The Bihar Urdu Academy's Bismil Azimabadi Award keeps his name alive.

Bulleh Shah (c. 1680–1757), born Sayyid Abdullah Shah Qadri, was a Punjabi Sufi poet of Kasur, and one of the greatest voices Punjab has ever produced. He was born around 1680 — Uch is the place most often named, though some accounts give Pandoke, near Kasur, where his family settled when he was six. His father, Shah Muhammad Darwaish, was a village mosque preacher who taught him his first lessons while the boy worked as a herder; his higher learning came at Kasur, under Hafiz Ghulam Murtaza, and then at Lahore, where he became the disciple of the Qadiri Sufi Shah Inayat — a gardener of the Arain caste. That choice cost him everything respectable: a Sayyid bowing to a man of low caste shocked his family, and the town's clerics declared him a non-believer. He answered them in the people's own tongue. His kafis — short, song-like poems built on a refrain — ask the simplest and hardest questions: who am I, if I am neither believer nor unbeliever, neither Moses nor Pharaoh? More than 150 kafis and 94 other compositions survive, carried for over a century by singers before they were first printed. When he died at Kasur in 1757, the clerics who had condemned him refused to lead his funeral prayer; it was led instead by Syed Zahid Hamdani, and a shrine grew over his grave. Three centuries on, his verses are still sung — by qawwals, by rock bands, in village gatherings and concert halls — wherever Punjabis gather. He is remembered as the Poet of the People.

Chaman Lal Chaman (1934–2019) was an Indian-British Punjabi and Urdu poet, lyricist and radio broadcaster based in London. Born on 15 May 1934 in Pasla, in Jalandhar district, he lost his mother as a child and was called by his father to Nairobi, where he became a presenter on The Voice of Kenya. Moving to Britain, he worked for the BBC's Asian service and Panjab Radio, started London's first Indian commercial radio programme, *Geetmala*, and anchored weekly programmes on BBC TV One and BBC Radio Four in the 1990s. His lyrics were sung by Asha Bhosle and Jagjit Singh — his Punjabi song "Saun da Mahina" (1979) remains his best-known lyric — while his Urdu ghazals, including those in *Shora-e-London* (1985) and the collection *Phool Khile Chaman-Chaman* (2010), carry a quieter, city-wise voice. He received the Asian Achievers Gold Award in London in 2010 and died in London on 4 February 2019.

Chandar Bhan Kaifi Dehelvi (1878/79–1941) was a Delhi poet of the late classical tradition, educated in Persian and Urdu, who taught Persian for a long period of time. Known for poems on interesting topics as well as patriotic poems, he carried classical discipline into the colonial era: his ghazals hold personal longing beside national consciousness, and his nazm "Nai-Dehli" mourns and questions the new capital rising over old Delhi's ruins. Thirteen of his ghazals and ten of his nazms survive, with Risala-e-Qaumi Nazm (1908) among his books and Khumnistan-e-Kaifi published posthumously in 1951. He died in 1941.

Chandra Parkash Jauhar Bijnauri (1923–1995) was a traditional-style Urdu poet and beloved mushaira voice, born at Bijnor, Uttar Pradesh, in 1923. His father, though not a poet himself, was a connoisseur who loved listening to poets in mushairas, and in that atmosphere the young Bijnauri found his calling, taking counsel on his ghazals from Izhar Hussain Khan Izhar Rampuri. After Partition he made his life in Lahore, where his clear, musical ghazals — of love, separation, the sorrows of the age and the praise of Urdu itself — won him a devoted mushaira following. His collection Auraq-e-Gul appeared in 1986. He died in 1995, leaving 21 ghazals that still carry the traditional ghazal's grace without stiffness.

Chandu Lal Bahadur Shadan (birth year disputed, 1761–62 / 1763 / 1766 – 15 April 1845) was a Maharaja, statesman and poet of Hyderabad. Born in Hyderabad to a Khatri family from Rai Bareilly, he rose from a clerk of the vegetable market to become Prime Minister of Hyderabad State, serving from after Munir-ul-Mulk's death in 1832–33 until his resignation in 1844. He received the title of Maharaja from Sikandar Jah in 1819–20 and was famed for a generosity that drew poets and men of letters to his court — he even invited Zauq from Delhi, who declined. He studied Persian poetry with Qatil and Hafiz and Urdu poetry with Shah Nasir, and wrote extensively in Persian — a Kulliyat, a 4,025-couplet masnavi, three divans of ghazals — alongside Urdu verse, of which one divan has been published. He died at Hyderabad on 15 April 1845.

Chhannu Lal Dilgeer (c. 1780 – 1848) was Lucknow's great marsiya poet — the man who gave up ghazal for Karbala. Born in Lucknow, the brother of Raja Jhau Lal, deputy prime minister under Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula, he first studied under Mirza Khani Nawazish and later under Nasikh, and was praised by Mushafi. He began as a ghazal poet under the takhallus Tarab, but, captivated by Karbala, he abandoned ghazal entirely — famously throwing his ghazal diwan into Moti Jheel, Lucknow — and devoted himself to marsiya and salam. He converted to Islam and took the name Ghulam Hussain. A speech impairment kept him from reciting his own marsiyas, but he innovated in composition, was popular under Ghazi-ud-Din Haider, and received Rs. 400 from Nawab Mohammad Ali Shah for a masnavi in praise of Hussainabad. He is credited with 417 marsiyas; his Majmua Marasi Mirza Dilgeer (Nawal Kishore Press) is preserved in the Tagore Library of Lucknow University. His most famous marsiya, Ghabraye Gi Zainab, on Zainab's arrival after Karbala, is still recited worldwide in majlis and Sham-e-Ghareeba. He died in 1848 and lies in Lucknow's "tilted grave".

Chiragh Hasan Hasrat (1904 – 26 June 1955) was a Kashmiri-born poet and journalist, famous for his humorous columns. Born at Poonch in Kashmir, he learned Arabic, Persian and Urdu at home, matriculated from Poonch and took his B.A. from Lahore. He worked for *Zamindar*, *Insaaf* and *Ehsaan*, edited *Fauji Akhbar* during the Second World War, and wrote beloved humorous columns — as Columbus in *Nai Dunya*, as Koocha Gard in *Asr-e-Jadeed*, and as Sindbad Jahazi in the daily *Imroz*. In 1926 he launched his own journal *Aftab* from Calcutta. He wrote sixteen books, including the long poetical narrative *Saguzasht-e-Islam* and studies of Jinnah and Iqbal, though no collection of his poetry was ever published. He died at Lahore on 26 June 1955.