Ali Sardar Jafri, a close friend and fellow poet, once described Majaz’s life as “an incomplete ghazal” — and said that the entire beauty of his poetry lay precisely in that incompleteness. It is a devastating and precise image. Around 1930, a brilliant new star appeared on the horizon of Urdu poetry; people looked up at it with wonder and delight; and then, before anyone quite realised what was happening, it had already streaked across the sky and was gone. Majaz Lucknawi died at forty-four, but in the years he had, he became one of the two or three poets most closely associated with the romantic spirit of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, wrote the anthem still sung today by Aligarh Muslim University, and earned a title that, however imperfect the comparison, has stuck to his name for nearly a century: the Keats of Urdu.

His was a poetry that held two seemingly opposite energies at once — tender, often achingly personal romantic longing, and a genuine revolutionary passion for social justice — without ever letting either one crowd out the other. That fusion, along with a life marked by both extraordinary charm and real suffering, is what makes Majaz’s story one of the most affecting in modern Urdu literature.

Who Was Majaz Lucknawi?

Majaz Lucknawi, born Asrar-ul-Haq, was an Indian Urdu poet and one of the founding figures of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, celebrated for a body of work that fused personal romantic longing with genuine revolutionary conviction. Though he composed both ghazals and nazms, he is remembered chiefly for his nazm, which he wrote not in free verse but within the strict formal disciplines of the ghazal — a technical choice that gave his revolutionary and romantic sentiments alike an unusually polished, musical shape.

He came from a family already steeped in poetry: his ancestors included the noted master Muztar Khairabadi, and his own sister, Safia, married the poet Jan Nisar Akhtar, making Majaz the maternal uncle of the celebrated lyricist and screenwriter Javed Akhtar. Poetry, in other words, ran directly through his bloodline in both directions.

A Zamindar Family, A Sufi Hometown

Majaz was born on 19 October 1911 in Rudauli, a town in the Bara Banki district of the United Provinces long associated with Sufi spirituality, into a family of modest, land-owning gentry that traced its lineage back to the Sufi and Persian poet Hazrat Usman Harooni. His father, Siraj-ul-Haq, came from this zamindar background, though the family’s actual means were limited. Majaz received his early education first in Lucknow’s Aminabad Inter College and then at St. John’s College in Agra for his intermediate studies.

Agra proved formative in ways that had nothing to do with formal coursework. Freed for the first time from his mother’s close supervision and given a small cash allowance, the teenage Majaz did what many teenagers do — neglected his studies, spent his time and money as he pleased, and failed his exams. But his particular waywardness took the form of attending mushairas and music concerts rather than any more ordinary teenage mischief, and it was here that he met senior and emerging poets, including his eventual ustad, Fani Badayuni, who happened to be his neighbour in Agra, along with Ale Ahmad Suroor and Moin Ahsan Jazbi.

Aligarh: Where a Star Began to Shine

After finally clearing his intermediate exams in 1931, Majaz enrolled at Aligarh Muslim University for his BA, studying philosophy, economics, and Urdu, and graduating in 1936. His years at Aligarh coincided with an extraordinary concentration of Urdu literary talent on campus, and it was here, under the influence of the university’s Progressive Writers’ Movement circle led by figures like K. M. Ashraf and Abdul Aleem, that Majaz’s own poetic voice fully emerged.

It was during these years that Majaz composed what remains, perhaps, his most enduring single work — the tarana (anthem) of Aligarh Muslim University, “Yeh Mera Chaman, Hai Mera Chaman” (“This is my garden, this is my garden”), a piece so beloved that it was formally adopted as the university’s anthem in 1951 and is still sung there today, nearly a century after it was written.

Delhi, Heartbreak, and a Job Abandoned

Financial pressure forced Majaz to abandon his planned MA and move to Delhi, where he found work as sub-editor for the journal Awaaz and became actively involved with the Delhi branch of the Progressive Writers’ Association. It was in Delhi that Majaz fell deeply in love with a married woman from the city’s high society — a love that could never be reciprocated or fulfilled, and that left him, by every account, permanently altered.

He wrote memorable lines inspired directly by her, including the often-quoted couplet praising the white scarf she wore and imagining it transformed into a revolutionary banner — a lovely fusion of his two great themes, romance and revolution, condensed into a single image. The heartbreak, combined with growing differences with his supervisor at All India Radio, Pitras Bukhari, eventually drove Majaz to abandon his job and Delhi altogether, returning to Lucknow with, in the words of one account, his heart “reduced to nothing.” He never married, and this unresolved love remained a visible undercurrent in his poetry for the rest of his life.

Romance and Revolution, Fused

Majaz was, by his own temperament, more romantic than revolutionary, even as he stood among the founding figures of a movement built on political conviction. He rarely advertised revolution directly in his verse; instead, he sang, as contemporaries put it, “sweet songs of love and romance” that nonetheless carried a genuine undertow of social consciousness — a quiet but real opposition to injustice and constricting social custom, expressed through the lyricism of the ghazal rather than through overt political sloganeering.

This nazm, “Awara” (“The Wanderer”), is widely considered one of the finest examples of the form in the Urdu language — a portrait of urban alienation and restless longing that captures the loneliness of the modern individual with an intensity that has kept the poem alive and quoted for nearly a century. Notably, Majaz also held an unusually progressive view of women for his era, treating them, in his verse, not as passive objects of desire but as comrades and equals in the wider project of social change — a distinctive humanist thread running through his romantic subject matter.

Breakdown, Ranchi, and a Meeting with Nazrul Islam

Majaz’s personal life continued to unravel through repeated crises. He suffered multiple nervous breakdowns over the following years, and with the help of his friend, the poet Josh Malihabadi, he was admitted for treatment to the mental hospital in Ranchi. There, in a moment that has become one of the most poignant anecdotes told about him, Majaz encountered the great Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, himself a patient at the same institution and by then largely unable to speak. Recognising him, Majaz is said to have addressed him with characteristic dark wit: “Why are you silent, Nazrul? Let’s go to Lahore or Dhaka — though they are foreign countries now, at least they have asylums there too.”

Even in his worst moments, those close to Majaz recalled a personality leavened by genuine humour and self-awareness — friends remembered his quick, witty repartee, and critics who knew him described him as remarkably modest for a poet of his stature and popularity.

A Cold Night in Lalbagh

Majaz’s struggle with heavy drinking, worsened by unresolved heartbreak and recurring depressive episodes, defined the last years of his life. Accounts agree that on the night of 5 December 1955, following a night of drinking with companions at a tavern in the Beldari Lane of Lalbagh, in the heart of Lucknow, Majaz was left alone — some accounts specifically describe companions leaving him on the roof or premises of the tavern — on a bitterly cold winter night. He died there, alone, that night, at the age of forty-four.

He was buried in the Nishatganj graveyard in Lucknow, close to the home where he had spent his final years living with his devoted sister, Safia Akhtar. She was later laid to rest beside him — the sister who, by every account, never left his side through the worst of his struggles, resting with him still.

A note on this article: Majaz Lucknawi’s life involved serious struggles with alcohol use and mental health crises that ultimately contributed to his early death. This is presented here as historical and literary biography. If these themes resonate with something you or someone you know is going through, please know that support is available from a trusted person or a mental health or addiction support professional.

Legacy: A Star That Still Lights the Sky

Majaz’s admirers have never stopped insisting on the scale of what was lost. Ali Sardar Jafri, narrating the celebrated Doordarshan television serial Kehkashan about Majaz’s life, said that Aligarh Muslim University counted him among the sons it was proudest of, and structured his biographical portrait of the poet around three stages — Zuhoor (emergence), Urooj (ascendance), and Zawaal (decline) — a framework that has shaped how generations of readers have understood his brief, brilliant arc. The critic Ehtasham Husain predicted his poetry would live forever; Firaq Gorakhpuri said the span of verse Majaz left behind would forever shine bright.

The comparison to Keats, while imperfect — critics have noted that Majaz’s social realism, shaped by the Marxist currents of his own era, has no real equivalent in Keats’s very different historical moment — has nonetheless endured as shorthand for the intensity and lyrical beauty of his romantic verse. The Government of India honoured his memory with a commemorative postage stamp in 2008, and his songs, including “Aye Gham-e-Dil Kya Karoon” (recorded by Talat Mahmood and, later, by Jagjit Singh for the Kehkashan series), continue to reach audiences who may never have read his name in a book. Nearly seven decades after that cold December night in Lalbagh, the star Ali Sardar Jafri once described streaking silver across the sky has, if anything, only grown brighter with distance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Explore more: All Shayars · Fani Badayuni · Jigar Moradabadi · Browse Categories