Poets Directory (شعرائے کرام)

Mohammad Meer Soz Dehlvi — born in Delhi, the son of Syed Ziauddin, whose forefathers had migrated from Bukhara to India — was a prominent contemporary of Mir Taqi Mir. He first took "Mir" as his takhallus, then changed it to "Soz" (burning, passion) when Mir Taqi Mir rose to fame under that name — a change he himself records in one of his couplets. A master of Persian and Arabic, a noted calligrapher, and a skilled archer and horseman, Soz was above all famous as a reciter: his manner of reciting verse was widely imitated in his day. When Delhi lay devastated, he left for Lucknow, where Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula honoured him and even became his disciple. His Urdu diwan holds ghazals, masnavis, quatrains and mukhammas, and his ghazals are praised for directness, simplicity and pathos. In his last years he withdrew into seclusion and prayer, and died in Lucknow.

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.

Mufti Muhammad Sadruddin Khan Azurda (1804–1868) of Delhi was, at once, the city's Grand Mufti, one of its leading scholars of hadith and Islamic law, and a poet of the Delhi school. Son of Lutfullah, he studied under Shah Abdul Aziz — Delhi's great authority on hadith — and Fazl-e-Imam Farooqi Khairabadi, served as Sadr Amin of Delhi from 1827 to 1846, then as Sadr-us-Sudur (Grand Mufti) from 1846 to 1857, and examined Arabic at the Anglo-Oriental College. His Delhi house was a meeting place of rebel leaders, scholars, poets and literary men, and he was an acquaintance and admirer of Ghalib. In 1857 he was one of the thirty Delhi scholars who signed the declaration calling the uprising a jihad; he mediated between the British, the Mughal court and the sepoys, was tried after the fall of Delhi, spent six months in detention, and lost his property — his house was restored through Lord Lawrence's intercession, his library was lost for good. Syed Ahmed Khan counted him an accomplished scholar; Hakim Abdul Hai called him the pride of India. He wrote in Persian and Urdu under the takhallus "Azurda" — the distressed one — a name his later years earned twice over. He died in Delhi in 1868.

Muhammad Abdul-Hayy Siddiqui, known as Bekhud Badayuni (17 September 1857 – 10 November 1912), was a leading late-19th- and early-20th-century poet of Badayun, from a prominent Siddiqui family of Islamic scholarship, Sufism and literature, claiming descent from Abu Bakr. Trained as a lawyer — he practised in Moradabad and Shahjahanpur — he later became a high official in the states of Sirohi and Jodhpur. His poetic masters mark his place in the tradition: he was first a disciple of Maulana Altaf Hussain Hali, Ghalib's protégé, who gave him the pen name Bekhud; around 1879, as Hali turned away from traditional forms, he left Hali and became a disciple of Nawab Mirza Khan Daagh Dehlvi. He stayed aloof from the squabble over Daagh's successor, though Daagh is reported to have answered "Bekhud-ain" — the two Bekhuds — when asked: Badayuni and Dehlvi. He published late: his diwan appeared only in 1910, two years before his death, partly to combat the plagiarism and misattribution of verse that had circulated orally for decades — the very confusion that still mixes his work with Bekhud Dehlvi's. His books include Hosh-o-Khirad ki Dukaan (1889), Sabr-o-Shakeeb ki Loot (1889), Marraat-ul-Khayal — Mirror of Thoughts — (1910) and Afsaanah-e-Bekhud. His subjects are love, philosophy, mysticism and Islam.

Muhammad Husain Azad (1830–1910), born in Delhi on 5 May 1830 into a Persian immigrant family, was the stylist who remade Urdu prose and the critic who wrote its first great literary history. His mother died when he was four; his father, Maulvi Muhammad Baqir, educated at Delhi College, bought a press in 1837 and launched the Delhi Urdu Akhbar — probably the first Urdu newspaper in northern India. Azad graduated from Delhi College in 1854 and joined his father's paper — until 1857, when the paper's support for the uprising cost his father his life: Baqir was executed by the British, and the whole joint family was thrown out of its house. After years of hardship and hiding, Azad migrated to Lahore in 1861, worked at the General Post Office and the Director of Public Instruction's office, and found his place when the Anjuman-e-Punjab was founded: lecturer in 1866, its secretary in 1867, then professor of Urdu and Persian at Government College, Lahore. In 1887 he founded the Azad Library and received the title Shams-ul-Ulama, Sun among the Learned. His Aab-e-Hayat (1880) — lives of Urdu poets and the story of the language itself — remains the foundation stone of Urdu literary history; around it stand Qisas-ul-Hind, Nairang-e-Khiyal, Sukhandan-e-Fars and Darbar-e-Akbari. As a poet he was the pioneer of the new natural nazm, writing on nature and everyday subjects instead of only rose and nightingale, beginning with "Shab-e-Qadr." He died at Lahore on 22 January 1910.

Muhammad Nusrati (d. 1674) was a seventeenth-century Dakhni poet of the Adil Shahi court at Bijapur, where he rose to poet laureate. Born in the Carnatic region, he lived for a time as a Sufi dervish before coming to Bijapur, where he became a mansabdar under Sultan Ali Adil Shah II and was named malik al-shu'ara, king of poets, for his 'Ali-nama. That masnavi, patterned on the Persian Shah-nama, celebrates Ali II's wars against the Mughals and Marathas and is the earliest panegyric of a ruler in Dakhni. His earlier romance masnavi Gulshan-i 'Ishq (1657/1658) follows Prince Manohar's quest for Madhumalati to their union in a rose garden. His final poem, Tarikh-i Sikandari, celebrates Bahlol Khan's victory over Shivaji at Umrani in 1672. Writing in archaic, complex Dakhni, Nusrati is remembered as Bijapur's greatest poet, and as a theorist who first separated a poem's theme (mazmun) from its deeper meaning (ma'ni).

Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (1565–1612), the fifth Sultan of Golconda, is remembered by history as a king — and by Urdu as its first true poet. Ascending the throne at fifteen in 1580, he ruled thirty-one years, and in 1591 founded a new capital on the south bank of the Musi: Hyderabad, crowned by the Charminar and the Mecca Masjid. But his deeper founding was literary. He is the first *sahib-e-diwan* of Urdu — the first to compile a full diwan of Urdu verse, the *Kulliyat-e-Quli Qutb Shah*, writing in the Dakhni idiom of the Deccan alongside Persian and Telugu. His court made Dakhni a language of poetry, celebration, and devotion: ghazals, qasidas, masnavis, marsiyas, hamds and manqabats, in an earthy, musical diction full of "na" for "nahin" and "koon" for "ko". He is a Shi'a poet of divine and earthly love alike, and he is called the father of Urdu poetry in India. His famous munajat — "mera shahar logan sun ma'mur kar" (populate my city with people) — is still remembered as the prayer with which Hyderabad was born. He died in Hyderabad on 11 January 1612.

Munawwar Rana was an Indian Urdu poet who brought the mother into the centre of the ghazal, a form long reserved for the beloved. Born in Raebareli, Uttar Pradesh, and long associated with Kolkata and later Lucknow, he wrote in plain Hindi-Urdu mixed with Awadhi, deliberately avoiding heavy Persian and Arabic vocabulary so ordinary listeners could follow him at mushairas. His best-known work, Maa, and collections including Shahdaba, for which he won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2014, celebrate mothers, daughters, labourers, migrants and home. He returned the Akademi award in 2015 in protest against rising intolerance. He died in Lucknow on 14 January 2024, aged 71.

Munir Niazi (1923–2006), born Munir Ahmad at Khanpur, Hoshiarpur district, Punjab (British India), was one of the most distinctive voices of modern Urdu and Punjabi poetry. His early schooling was at Khanpur; after Partition in 1947 his family migrated to Sahiwal, where he passed his matriculation and met the noted poet Majeed Amjad, who became his mentor and friend. He earned an intermediate degree from Sadiq Egerton College, Bahawalpur, and a B.A. from Dayal Singh College, Lahore. In 1949 he launched the weekly Seven Colours from Sahiwal; in 1960 he established the publication institute Al-Misal; he was later associated with Pakistan Television, Lahore. In the 1960s his film songs became super-hits — "Us bewafa ka shehr hai aur hum hain dosto" (Shaheed, 1962) made him one of the foremost movie songwriters of Pakistan. He published thirteen Urdu collections — including Taiz Hawa Aur Tanha Phool, Jungle Mein Dhanak, Dushmanon Ke Darmiyan Shaam and Mah-e-Munir — and three in Punjabi: Safar di Raat, Char Chup Cheezan and Rasta Dassan Walay Tarey. He experimented with poetic forms, forging a new imagery, rhythm and diction; innocence, mythology, nostalgia, dreams, melancholy and romance run through his work. He received the Pride of Performance (1992), the Sitara-e-Imtiaz, and the Pakistan Academy of Letters' Kamal-e-Funn Award (2002). He died of respiratory illness in Lahore on 26 December 2006 and rests in Model Town graveyard.

Mustafa Zaidi (died 12 October 1970) was a Progressive Urdu poet whose life ended as mysteriously as some of his verse. Born in Allahabad — his birth year is disputed, 1929 against 1930, and is recorded here as Unknown — he was educated there (Modern High School; Ewing Christian College; BA, University of Allahabad, first class), migrated to Pakistan in 1951, and took an MA in English Literature from Government College Lahore (1953). He joined the Civil Service of Pakistan in 1954, served as deputy commissioner and deputy secretary, and was dismissed in June 1970 with 38 other CSP officers under Yahya Khan. He married Vera Zaidi, a German national, and had a son and a daughter. His first book, *Zanjeeren / Roshni*, published when he was 19, was endorsed by Josh Malihabadi and Firaq Gorakhpuri; later books include *Shehr-e-Azar, Qaba-e-Saz, Mauj Meri Sadaf Sadaf, Koh-e-Nida* and *Gareban*, and he received the Tamgha-e-Quaid-e-Azam. His style is poignant, modern and socially aware. On 12 October 1970 he was found dead in Karachi in circumstances never settled — suicide or murder — and lies in Karachi's Wadi-e-Hussain cemetery.

Muztar Khairabadi (1865–1927) was a distinguished Urdu poet of the classical tradition, born in Khairabad into a family steeped in scholarship and poetry. His grandfather was the scholar-poet Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi, and his first teacher in poetry was his mother, herself a learned poet in Urdu, Persian and Arabic. After her death he sent work to Ameer Minai, who returned it saying it needed no correction. Muztar served in the princely states of Tonk and Rampur and spent much of his life in Gwalior, receiving the titles Eitbar-ul-Mulk and Iftikhar-ul-Shaura. He wrote ghazals, marsiyas, naats and long narrative poems, including Nazr-e-Khuda, Milaad-e-Mustafa and Behr-e-Taweel, and edited the literary magazine Karishma-e-Dilbar. Much of his work was later lost; a five-volume collection, Kharman, was published from his surviving papers. He was the father of poet-lyricist Jan Nisar Akhtar and grandfather of Javed Akhtar.

Nasreen Anjum Bhatti (birth year unknown–2016) was a Pakistani poet, painter, broadcaster and rights activist, born in Quetta and raised in Jacobabad, Sindh. She took her M.A. in Urdu from Oriental College, Lahore, in 1970 and joined Radio Pakistan in 1971, where she served as producer, broadcaster and deputy controller, later becoming resident director of the Shakir Ali Museum in Lahore. Writing in both Punjabi and Urdu, she was a feminist voice of resistance — against General Zia's martial law and against patriarchy. Her first Punjabi collection, *Neel Karaiyan Neelkan* (1979), contains the long poem "Bhutto di Vaar" on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's hanging; *Athay Pehr Tarah* (2009) followed, with the Urdu collections *Bin Bass* and *Tera Lehja Badalne Tak*. She received the Tamgha-i-Imtiaz in 2011 and died of cancer in Karachi in January 2016.

Nawab Mustafa Khan Shefta (1809–1869), born in Delhi into a prominent Bangash Pathan landowning family — Nawab of Jahangirabad, holder of the Palwal and Jehangirabad jagirs — was a poet, critic and patron at the heart of Delhi's literary circle, alongside Ghalib, Zauq and Momin. He wrote Urdu verse as "Shefta" and Persian verse as "Hasrati," consulting Ghalib in Persian and Momin in Urdu, and his Delhi house was famous for its weekly mushairas, where he encouraged younger poets — it was Shefta who introduced Altaf Hussain Hali to Ghalib. His tazkira Gulshan-e-Bekhar (compiled 1834), cataloguing 671 poets, remains a trusted source for the literary history of the age. The 1857 uprising broke his world: suspected for his ties to Bahadur Shah Zafar and his rebel kinsmen, he was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment, his estates seized — half restored on appeal — and much of his poetry was lost in the sack of Delhi. His son later bought the very prison and built the family home, Mustafa Castle, over it, keeping the prison room. After the Hajj he turned increasingly to religious practice. He died at his house in Kucha Chelaan, Delhi, in 1869, and lies in the Bangash family graveyard at Hazrat Nizamuddin, near Ghalib.

Nazar Muhammad Rashid, known as Noon Meem Rashid (1 August 1910 – 9 October 1975), was the pioneer of free verse in Urdu and, with Miraji, is regarded as a father of modern Urdu poetry; Faiz Ahmed Faiz called him *Malik-ush-Shoara*, King of Poets. Son of Raja Fazal Ilahi Chishti, a District Inspector of Schools and lover of Ghalib, he took an MA in Economics from Government College Lahore. His first poem, *Jurrat-e-Parwaz*, appeared in 1932, and his first free-verse book, *Mavra* (1940/41), broke Urdu poetry open. He served as a captain in the Royal Indian Army in the Second World War, then worked for All India Radio and Radio Pakistan, Voice of America, and the United Nations in New York, Jakarta, Karachi and Tehran. His collections include *Mavra*, *Iran Mein Ajnabi* (1955), *La-Insan* (1969) and the posthumous *Gumaan Ka Mumkin* (1977). His style is intellectual, philosophical and cosmic — poetry of thought and of the "new man" (*Adam-e-Nau*), breaking religious, geographical and linguistic boundaries; deliberately difficult — a poet of qualities, not of the people.

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.

Rais Amrohvi, born Syed Muhammad Mehdi in Amroha in 1914, was a Pakistani Urdu poet, scholar, journalist and psychoanalyst, and the elder brother of Jaun Elia. After migrating to Pakistan in 1947 he settled in Karachi, where for decades he wrote quatrains for the daily Jang, becoming famous for qata-nigari — the topical quatrain as a daily comment on politics, society and morals. He founded the Rais Academy for emotional and moral well-being and wrote widely on metaphysics, meditation and yoga, besides attempting an Urdu translation of the Bhagavad Gita. His books include Masnavi Lala-e-Sehra (1956), Pase Ghubar (1969), the Qattat volumes, Hikayaat (1975) and Aasaar (1985). His most famous poem, on the threatened fate of Urdu, opens "Urdu ka janaza hai zara dhoom se nikle." He was assassinated in Karachi on 22 September 1988.

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.

Safi Lakhnavi (1862–1950) was a Lucknow Urdu poet of the people, honoured as Lassan-ul-Qaum, the spokesman of the people. Born Syed Ali Naqi Zaidi in Lucknow, he received his early education from his father, learnt Persian from Najmuddin Kakorvi and Arabic from Maulvi Ahmad Ali, took his Entrance degree from Canning College, and taught English in the school attached to that college. In 1883 he joined government service in the revenue department. He began writing verse at the age of thirteen without an ustad, when having a teacher was the norm, and his poetry broke from traditional Urdu verse in its plain, sweet language of the common folk. He preferred the nazm to the traditional ghazal, wrote patriotic poems on the social, political and cultural condition of his times, and also practised qasida, mathnawi and rubai. His works are gathered in Aagosh-e-Maadar, Tanzeem-ul-Hayaat and Deewan-i-Safi.

Muhammad Akhtar "Saghar" Siddiqui (1928–1974), remembered as the Shaair-e-Dard (Poet of Pain), was born in Ambala in British India's Punjab and began writing poetry as a child. He first wrote under the pen name Nasir Hijazi before becoming known as Saghar. After Partition in 1947 he migrated to Pakistan and settled in Lahore, where his melodious ghazals made him a beloved mushaira voice. He wrote for films and founded a literary magazine that won critical praise but failed commercially. Disappointment, financial ruin and addiction followed, and in his later years he lived on the streets of Lahore, still composing verse and still holding mushairas by candlelight on the footpaths. In July 1974 he was found dead on a street corner in Lahore, aged 46, and was buried at the Miani Sahib graveyard. Much of his later work is lost or unpublished, which is part of why the voice that survives — pain stated plainly, without ornament — still moves readers so directly.

Sail Dehlvi (1867–1945), born Nawab Sirajuddin Ahmad Khan, was a later-classical poet of the Delhi school and a carrier of Dagh Dehlavi's tradition. Born in Delhi on 29 March 1867, he was the son of Mirza Shahabuddin Ahmad Khan Saaqib and the grandson of the Loharu jagirdar Nawab Ziyauddin Ahmad Khan Nayyar Darakhshan; his name is said to have been suggested by Ghalib himself. He studied Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit and Unani medicine, became Dagh's disciple and later his son-in-law, and was a remarkable presence in the mushairas of his day. After Dagh's death, his rivalry with Bekhud Dehlvi over Dagh's legacy grew so bitter that Sail withdrew from mushairas altogether. His divan remained unpublished. He died in Delhi on 25 September 1945 and was buried at Mehrauli.

Saqib Lucknawi (1869–1946), born Mirza Zakir Hussain Qizilbash in Akbarabad (Agra), was the model Lucknow-school poet of the neo-classical tradition — "the very model of a Lakhnavi shayar." Raised in a family of Persian descent, he was educated in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, and in English at St. John's College, Agra. After his father's death left the family in difficulty, he tried his hand at business in Lucknow, served as personal secretary to the Iranian consul in Calcutta, and finally — in 1908 — accepted a post at the court of the Raja of Mahmudabad in Sitapur, where he remained until his death. His succinct, polished couplets — many of which attained the status of Urdu proverbs — made him beloved; the filmmaker S.U. Sunny was so taken by "Bade shauq se sun raha tha zamana" that he used it as the recited motto of his films *Mela* (1948) and *Kohinoor* (1960). His diwan, *Tajalli-e-Shahab-e-Saqib*, was published in 1936. He died at Sitapur on 24 November 1946.

Shabnam Shakeel (1942–2013), born in Lahore, was a modern Urdu poet whose ghazals carry a deep feminist consciousness in a classical frame. She grew up in a literary home: her father, Syed Abid Ali Abid, was a poet and academician, and her childhood circle included Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum and Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Educated at Kinnaird College and Islamia College, Lahore, she took her M.A. in Urdu from Oriental College, Lahore, and lectured at several colleges. Her first book, *Tanqeedi Mazameen* (1965), was criticism; her poetry collections — *Shab Zaad* and *Masaafat Raigaan Thi* (2008) among them — speak in a woman's voice about love, failure, dignity and the road's dust, with the ghazal's discipline intact. Rekhta, which carries 53 of her ghazals, describes her as a poet who "deeply expresses feminist consciousness". Pakistan honoured her with the Pride of Performance. She died in Karachi on 2 March 2013, ten days short of her seventy-first birthday, and was buried in Islamabad.

Shad Azimabadi (1846–1927), born Syed Ali Mohammad in Azimabad (Patna), was a master of the ghazal and the marsiya and one of Bihar's greatest literary figures. Born into a wealthy and respected Syed family, he received a classical education in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, and trained under several masters of the age — chief among them Shah Ulfat Hussain Faryaad. The British government titled him Khan Bahadur, and he served Patna as Honorary Magistrate and Municipal Commissioner. The Urdu scholar Ali Jawad Zaidi called him "a saviour of the ghazal"; the critic Kalimuddin Ahmad placed him, with Mir and Ghalib, as the third pillar of the Urdu ghazal — a judgment Allama Iqbal himself shared in his admiration. His five volumes of verse blend feeling, thought and richness of expression. Beyond ghazals and marsiyas he wrote *Hayat-e-Faryaad* (his master's biography), the historical tract *Nawa-e-Watan*, and *Fikr-e-Baligh*, an account of marsiya poets. He died in Patna on 7 January 1927.

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.

Akhlaq Mohammed Khan "Shahryar" (16 June 1936 – 13 February 2012) was one of modern Urdu poetry's defining voices and the fourth Urdu poet to receive the Jnanpith Award (2008). Born at Aonla in Bareilly district, Uttar Pradesh, he studied at Aligarh Muslim University, where he taught Urdu for decades — becoming professor in 1986 and retiring as chairman of the Urdu Department in 1996 — and co-edited the literary magazine Sher-o-Hikmat. His collections include Ism-e-Azam (1965), Satvan Dar (1969), Hijr ke Mausam (1978) and Khwab ka Dar Band Hai (1987), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award. He also wrote lyrics for Muzaffar Ali's films Gaman (1978) and Umrao Jaan (1981). He died in Aligarh on 13 February 2012.

Shahzad Ahmad (1932–2012) was a Pakistani Urdu poet, psychologist and translator, and a prominent voice of the new Urdu ghazal. Born on 16 April 1932 in Amritsar, he migrated to Pakistan after Partition and took an MSc in Psychology (1956) and an MA in Philosophy (1958) from Government College, Lahore. He wrote about thirty books of poetry — including Sadaf, Jalti Bhujti Aankhein, Tuta Hua Pal, Utray Meri Khak par Sitar and Bichar Jane Ki Rut — alongside books on psychology, and translated non-Urdu poetry into Urdu. As director of Lahore's Majlis-e-Taraqqi-e-Adab he tended one of Pakistan's oldest literary libraries, and in the 1990s he received the Pride of Performance for his contributions to Urdu literature. He died in Lahore on 1 August 2012.

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

Shakeel Badayuni (1916–1970), born Shakeel Ahmed on 3 August 1916 in Badayun, Uttar Pradesh, was the celebrated Urdu poet and film lyricist of the 1950s and 60s — Hindi cinema's definitive poet of love. Educated at home in Arabic, Urdu, Persian and Hindi, he graduated from Aligarh Muslim University (B.A., 1942), where mushaira successes and the encouragement of Jigar Moradabadi shaped his poetic voice. After a clerical job in Delhi's Supply department, he moved to Bombay in 1944 and broke through with Dard (1947), beginning the legendary partnership with composer Naushad that produced Baiju Bawra (1952), Mother India (1957) and Mughal-e-Azam (1960); he also wrote for Hemant Kumar and Ravi. His pen gave Hindi cinema Chaudhvin Ka Chand, Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam and Mere Mehboob, and immortal songs — 'Chaudhvin ka chand ho', 'Pyar kiya to darna kya', 'Suhaani raat dhal chuki', 'Kahin deep jale kahin dil', 'Husnwale tera jawab nahin' — the last three winning him three consecutive Filmfare Best Lyricist awards (1961, 1962, 1963), a record. Beyond films he published poetry collections including Ranaaiyan (1950), Sanam-o-Haram (1950), Ranginiyan (1961), Naghma-e-Firdaus (1968) and Shabistan. He died in Mumbai on 20 April 1970, aged 53; India Post honoured him with a commemorative stamp in 2013.

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (1935–2020) was an Indian Urdu poet, author, critic and theorist, above all the critic who ushered modernism into Urdu literature. Born at Pratapgarh on 30 September 1935 and raised in Azamgarh and Gorakhpur, he took his M.A. in English from Allahabad University in 1955 and served in the Indian Postal Service from 1960 to 1994, rising to chief postmaster-general. In June 1966 he founded the modernist literary journal Shabkhoon, which he edited and published for nearly four decades. He formulated fresh models of literary appreciation that joined Western criticism to the aesthetics of Arabic, Persian and Urdu, most famously in his four-volume study of Mir Taqi Mir, Sher-e-Shor Angez. He also wrote the novel Kai Chand The Sar-e-Aasman (translated by himself as The Mirror of Beauty) and, with his nephew Mahmood Farooqui, revived the storytelling art of Dastangoi. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1986, the Saraswati Samman in 1996 and the Padma Shri in 2009, and died at Allahabad on 25 December 2020.

Shauq Bahraichi was a humor and satire poet from Bahraich in Uttar Pradesh, remembered as one of Urdu's most prominent poets of tanz-o-mizah. Born into a middle-class Shia Muslim family, he lost his father early, which cut short his higher education, and he took small jobs in the municipality. He began by singing ghazals and gradually worked in all forms of poetry, but his lasting mark is laconic, audacious verse that lampooned social evils, corrupt leaders and hollow pieties with sarcasm rather than sermonising. He was a critic of government and of a desolate society who turned poverty and public life into sharp comedy. His collection *Toofan* (also spelled *Thoofaan*) was collected and published after his death by Shameem Iqbal Khan and Mohammad Shafqat Nadvi.

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.