In the classic Persian legend, the stonecutter Farhad carves a channel through an entire mountain out of love for Shirin, earning the title Kohkan — “the mountain-cutter.” When the great writer Ali Sardar Jafri introduced Makhdoom Mohiuddin to television audiences in the 1990s, he reached for exactly that image: “Just as Farhad cut the mountain with his hoe for Shirin’s love and became Kohkan, Makhdoom cut away the mountains of the dark nights of slavery, and his hoe was his poetry.” It is hard to find a better single sentence for a man who spent his life doing two things at once, with equal seriousness: organising peasants and workers against feudal tyranny, and writing some of the tenderest, most sensuous romantic verse in modern Urdu.

Orphaned at five and raised sweeping the floor of his village mosque, Makhdoom rose to become a leading voice of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, a founder of the Communist Party in what is now Telangana, a wanted man with a price on his head during the Telangana peasant rebellion, and, eventually, a Sahitya Akademi Award–winning poet whose ghazals of love have long outlived the political battles that filled the rest of his biography.

Who Was Makhdoom Mohiuddin?

Makhdoom Mohiuddin was an Urdu poet and Marxist political activist from the former princely state of Hyderabad, remembered as one of the central figures of the Progressive Writers’ Movement and one of the very few Urdu poets whose life matched, action for action, the revolutionary convictions expressed in his verse. He founded the Progressive Writers’ Union in Hyderabad, helped establish the Communist Party of India in the Andhra region, and stood at the forefront of the 1946–1951 Telangana peasant rebellion against the Nizam’s rule — all while continuing to write ghazals and nazms admired equally by political comrades and connoisseurs of pure poetic craft.

Contemporaries often compared him to Faiz Ahmad Faiz in Pakistan, Nazrul Islam in Bengal, and the Telugu poet Sri Sri — a trio of poets across South Asia who found in Marxism not a constraint on lyric beauty but a fresh source of it. Unusually for a poet whose songs would later fill Hindi films, Makhdoom himself never wrote for the cinema at all; filmmakers simply borrowed his already-beloved verses because audiences already knew and loved them.

An Orphan Who Swept a Village Mosque

Makhdoom was born on 4 February 1908 in the village of Andole (recorded elsewhere as Tokapalli) in the Medak district of Hyderabad State, into a lower-middle-class family of Sufi pirs — spiritual guides — who expected the boy to carry that religious tradition forward. Orphaned by around the age of five, Makhdoom spent much of his childhood sweeping the floor of the village mosque and serving its devotees, a stark, humble beginning for a life that would eventually touch national politics and literature alike.

He moved to Hyderabad city for higher education, completing both a BA and an MA in Urdu at Osmania University, finishing his master’s degree in the early 1930s. It was during these university years that his political and poetic consciousness began to crystallise together, shaped by his exposure to the rising currents of global socialist thought and the progressive literary movements of the era.

Fascism Abroad, Radicalism at Home

Makhdoom’s political awakening had a specific, traceable origin: he was deeply disturbed by fascist Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia) in the mid-1930s, and it was this international outrage that produced his first openly political poem. He began writing highly political verse from around 1935, and joined the Comrades’ Association — the Communist Party’s representative body in Hyderabad State — around the same period, an affiliation that would later evolve into the Nizam State Communist Committee and eventually the Communist Party of India’s Andhra Pradesh unit.

In 1934, Makhdoom began lecturing at City College, Hyderabad, teaching Urdu literature for nearly seven years. But when Hitler’s Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Makhdoom resigned his teaching post entirely and became a full-time worker for the Communist Party — a decisive choice that traded a stable academic career for the far riskier life of a professional revolutionary.

Trade Unions, Prison, and a Bounty on His Head

Makhdoom’s activism was never confined to the printed page. He joined the trade union movement directly, serving as the workers’ representative in a major labour dispute at the Vazir Sultan Tobacco factory (makers of Charminar cigarettes) in 1941, and by 1946 had risen to become President of the All Hyderabad Trade Union Congress, a branch of the All India Trade Union Congress. He was jailed twice in these years, in 1941 and 1944, for inciting rebellion against colonial and princely authority.

The Telangana Armed Struggle (1946–1951) became the central political drama of Makhdoom’s life. He inaugurated the short-lived “Paritala Republic” within a Nizam-controlled enclave and remained at the movement’s forefront even as the Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, grew furious enough to place a bounty on his head. Makhdoom went underground for roughly two years to evade capture. He was arrested again in 1951, during which imprisonment he wrote the poem “Qaid” (“Captivity”), reflecting on the rebellion’s eventual, painful suppression. He was released the following year and, remarkably, went on to contest and later win elected office — losing his first race in Hyderabad city but winning a subsequent by-election in Huzurnagar, and eventually rising to become Leader of the Opposition in the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Council.

A Poet Who Never Abandoned Beauty for Politics

What set Makhdoom apart from many of his politically committed contemporaries was his refusal to let revolutionary conviction crowd out romantic sensibility. Even amid an unrelenting schedule of trade union meetings, underground organising, and prison terms, his poetry retained a genuinely sensuous, tender register when it turned to love — a rare combination that made him, in the words of one biographer, “the reluctant progressive”: a poet whose politics were entirely sincere, but whose deepest artistic instincts remained lyrical rather than purely didactic.

His ghazal “Aap Ki Yaad Aati Rahi Raat Bhar” (“Your memory kept returning all night long”) remains one of the most beloved romantic ghazals in the Urdu language, later given exquisite voice by singer Chhaya Ganguly in Muzaffar Ali’s directorial debut Gaman (1978). The great poet Firaq Gorakhpuri was so moved by another of Makhdoom’s ghazals — one ending on the line urging a grief-stricken soul to sharpen its axe against the mountain of sorrow, since the night would not last forever — that he wrote an entire ghazal of his own in the same form, simply to honour that closing couplet.

An Anti-War Poet and a Reluctant Film Presence

Makhdoom’s political range extended to a sharp critique of militarism itself. His poem “Jaane Wale Sipahi Se Poochho” (“Ask the Departing Soldier”) questioned the jingoism that sends young men to fight and die in wars not their own, and was later used as a song in Moni Bhattacharjee’s 1960 film Usne Kaha Tha, based on a 1915 story about the horrors of the First World War. Though Makhdoom, notably, never wrote directly for the film industry himself, his poems’ emotional power and existing popularity meant that filmmakers repeatedly reached for his verses — several only after his death — to anchor pivotal scenes.

His biographer, Aleksey Sokhavich, recorded a detail that captures the depth of Makhdoom’s internationalist conviction: he kept a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica, the great anti-war painting depicting the horrors of fascist bombing during the Spanish Civil War, on his own writing table — and was reportedly so affected by that war that he wanted to travel to Spain himself to fight the fascists.

Recognition and Later Political Life

After the suppression of the Telangana rebellion and the Communist Party’s turn toward electoral politics, Makhdoom continued serving in public office, elected twice to the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly on the ticket of the People’s Democratic Front, then a proxy for the still-banned Communist Party. He was elected to the National Council of the CPI in 1958 and later chaired the state Housing Board, applying his lifelong commitment to workers’ welfare directly to questions of housing policy.

His literary standing was formally recognised in 1969, when his two major poetry collections, Surkh Savera (“Red Dawn”) and Gul-e-Tar (“Dew-Tipped Rose”), were republished together as the single volume Bisat-e-Raqs (“The Dance Floor”), for which he received the Sahitya Akademi Award in Urdu — recognition that arrived, poignantly, in the very year of his death.

Death in Delhi, Mourning in Hyderabad

Makhdoom Mohiuddin died of a massive heart attack on 25 August 1969 in New Delhi, where he had travelled to attend meetings of the All India Trade Union Congress and the National Council of the Communist Party of India — dying, fittingly, in the midst of the same trade union work that had defined so much of his adult life. His funeral procession in Hyderabad was attended by thousands, a measure of just how deeply he had embedded himself in the city’s political and cultural memory.

Legacy: The Poet the People Claimed as Their Own

Makhdoom Mohiuddin’s legacy operates simultaneously in Hyderabad’s political history and in the wider canon of Urdu literature. As a political figure, he remains a celebrated symbol of the Telangana peasant struggle and the broader Indian left, honoured with a birth centenary celebration in 2008 that drew scholars and cultural figures from across the country, and commemorated in the acclaimed television serial Kahkashan, where his character was memorably played by the actor Irrfan Khan, with his poetry set to music by Jagjit Singh.

As a poet, his verses continue to be sung at political rallies and cultural gatherings across Telangana, proof that his fusion of love and labour, tenderness and revolution, never felt like a contradiction to the ordinary people who first embraced his work. He remains, in the truest sense, exactly what Ali Sardar Jafri called him: a mountain-cutter who used his poetry as a hoe, clearing a path through the darkest nights of his era toward something better.

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