Dagh Dehlvi

He was born in Kucha Ustad Dagh, Chandni Chowk, Delhi, to Nawab Shamsuddin Ahmed Khan, the ruler of Loharu and Ferozepur Jhirka, and Wazir Khanum, a Delhi jeweller's daughter ¹. His father was hanged on charges of conspiracy in the murder of the British official William Fraser, and his mother then married the Mughal crown prince Mirza Fakhru, an heir of Bahadur Shah Zafar, so the boy received a privileged education inside the Red Fort ¹. There he was tutored by the poet laureate Muhammad Ibrahim Zauq, and he later took advice from Ghalib on the finer nuances of Urdu poetry; he was also trained in calligraphy and horse riding ¹.

He began reciting poetry at the age of ten ¹. After Fakhru's death in 1856 and the upheavals of 1857, he left Delhi with his mother for the state of Rampur, where he entered the service of its Nawab and lived well for twenty-four years ¹². He stayed some months in Hyderabad in 1888 but withdrew, court access being limited; he was then invited back and in 1891 appointed court poet and mentor to the sixth Nizam, Mahbub Ali Khan, at the age of sixty, receiving a string of court titles including Dabeer-ud-Dawla and Bulbul-e-Hindustan ¹.

Contrary to the impression given by his verse, he did not drink wine and shunned it ¹. No text read for this record names a religion or school for him; the articles' categories file him among Indian Muslims, which is a filing rather than an attestation ¹³.

His work consists of four volumes — Gulzar-e-Daagh (1878), Aftab-e-Daagh (1885), Mahtab-e-Daagh (1893) and the posthumous Yaadgar-e-Daagh (1905) — together with the Masnavi Fariyad-e-Daagh (1882), amounting to some sixteen thousand couplets ¹. He belonged to the Delhi school (Dabistan-e-Dehli) and never allowed western influences on his poetry, and his simple style was received well by common readers and the elite alike ¹.

His students included Muhammad Iqbal, Hassan Raza Khan, Jigar Moradabadi, Seemab Akbarabadi and Ahasan Marharavi ¹. A widely quoted anecdote relates that, asked to name his successor as the leading Urdu poet of the age, he answered "the two Bekhuds", meaning Bekhud Badayuni and Bekhud Dehlvi ¹. His ghazals are still sung by leading ghazal singers of the subcontinent ¹.

He died on 17 March 1905 at Hyderabad, after a paralytic stroke, and was buried at Dargah Yousufain in Hyderabad ¹.

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.