Asghar Gondvi

Asghar Husain was born in 1884 at Gorakhpur; his father, Munshi Tafazzal Hussain, a law officer, had moved the family to Gonda for his livelihood, and the poet was raised there, taking his pen name Gondvi from the town.¹² His early education was at home and he had little formal schooling, but by private study he achieved mastery of Urdu, Arabic and Persian, and a working knowledge of English.² He showed his early verse for correction to Munshi Jalilullah Wajd Bulgarami and to Munshi Amirullah, until his style settled and he no longer needed correction.¹

He worked at various occupations, traded in optical goods and served in the railway engineering department, before joining Tej Bahadur Sapru's Hindustani Press at Allahabad, where he edited the Urdu magazine Hindustani for many years.¹² He was a close associate of the poet Jigar Moradabadi, who guided him in his poetry; the two were also fellow-disciples — the Diwan's description calls them pir-bhai, brothers in discipleship under Abdul Ghani.³

His collections are Nishat-e Rooh and Surood-e Zindagi, and his complete verse survives as the Kulliyaat Asghar Gondvi; a selection, Intikhab-e-Kalam: Asghar Gondvi, was published by Oxford University Press in 2016.¹² Rekhta describes a poet who was not prolific, who worked at perfecting the ghazal rather than writing incessantly, and whose verse carries metaphysical thought in a soft, melancholic voice.²

The Urdu article states that he formally took bay'ah — the oath of discipleship — at the hand of Shah Abdul Ghani and remained steeped in tasawwuf, and the published Diwan describes him as a murid (disciple) of Abdul Ghani Manglori.⁴³ His early verse was written under the influence of Sufi poets before he found a voice of his own.²

He died of paralysis in 1936; the English article places his death at Allahabad, while the Urdu article's infobox gives Gonda.¹⁴

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