Every literary movement needs someone willing to go further than anyone else dares, and in the story of Urdu free verse, that person was Meeraji. Born Mohammad Sanaullah Dar, he left behind a comfortable Kashmiri household to live as a homeless wanderer, adopted a woman’s name as his own pen name after a love that never came to anything, and, alongside N. M. Rashid, became one of the two central figures of the Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq — the circle of poets who tore Urdu verse away from its centuries-old conventions of rhyme, subject, and respectability. Rashid himself later said that of the poets experimenting with free verse in that era, Meeraji was “bolder and more confident” than any of them.

Meeraji’s life was short, chaotic, and largely unrecognised in its own time; he published only a small fraction of an immense body of work before his death at thirty-seven. But the poetry he did leave behind, dense with psychological insight, Hindu mythology, and Western modernist influence, has since come to be seen as one of the true founding currents of literary modernism in Urdu.

Who Was Meeraji?

Meeraji was an Urdu poet and literary critic regarded as one of the pioneers of symbolism and free verse in the language, and one of the central figures — alongside N. M. Rashid — of the Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq, the influential literary circle that pushed Urdu poetry away from the fixed conventions of radeef and qafia (rhyme scheme) and toward blank and free verse. Where much of Urdu literature of his time still confined itself to socially “acceptable” subjects, Meeraji wrote, with real sensitivity and craft, about sexual and psychological states that had rarely been given serious poetic treatment in the language before.

He lived, by every account, an unusually bohemian existence — leaving behind family, home, and any conventional career, and working only intermittently while giving nearly everything else to his poetry, his reading, and his own restless inner life. Despite this immense creative output, he published only a small portion of his work during his own lifetime, leaving much of his legacy to be assembled and understood only after his death.

A Railway Engineer’s Wandering Son

Meeraji was born Mohammad Sanaullah Dar on 25 May 1912 into a Kashmiri family based in Gujranwala, though he spent his childhood in the Kucha Sardar Shah neighbourhood of Mozang, Lahore. His father, Munshi Mohammad Mahtabuddin, was a railway engineer, and the family’s frequent relocations for his work carried young Sanaullah through Kathiawar, Bostan in Baluchistan, Sanghar, and Jacobabad — a genuinely peripatetic childhood that may have laid the groundwork for the wandering life he would later choose for himself as an adult.

He began writing poetry while still at school, under the early pen name “Sasri.” He is said to have failed his matriculation examination, and against his father’s wishes, took work with the magazine Adabi Duniya for a modest thirty rupees a month — the first sign of a young man determined to build a life around literature rather than convention, whatever the cost.

The Name He Took From an Unanswered Love

It was during these early years that Sanaullah Dar fell deeply in love with Mira Sen, the Bengali daughter of an accounts officer stationed in Lahore. The love, by all accounts, went unanswered — but it left so permanent a mark on him that he took her name for his own pen name, becoming, from that point on, simply “Meeraji.” Few gestures in the history of Urdu poetry capture heartbreak transformed into identity quite so literally.

His friend and former classmate, the poet Mehr Lal Soni Zia Fatehabadi, recalled that the only occasion on which Meeraji ever trimmed his famously long hair was when he took a job at All India Radio, New Delhi — a small, telling concession to institutional respectability from a man who otherwise resisted it at every turn.

Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq and the Birth of Urdu Modernism

Meeraji’s most consequential literary role was as a leading figure, alongside N. M. Rashid, of the Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq — “The Circle of Aesthetes” — a literary group in Lahore that broke decisively from the ghazal’s fixed rhyme scheme and explored the far more open resources of blank verse and free verse. The circle rejected not only formal convention but also the narrow, “respectable” subject matter Urdu poetry had traditionally confined itself to, along with the heavily Persianised diction that had long dominated serious verse, opting instead for language closer to lived, spoken experience.

According to N. M. Rashid himself, Meeraji was, of the small group of poets — including Rashid and Tasadduq Husain Khalid — experimenting with free verse in that era, distinctly “bolder and more confident” in his use of the form than the others. A circle of younger poets, including Mukhtar Siddiqui, Qayyum Nazar, Yusuf Zafar, Zia Jalandhari, and Mubarak Ahmad, gathered around Meeraji’s enigmatic presence and were drawn, through him, into this new modernist current.

Three Rivers of Influence: West, Psyche, and Myth

What distinguished Meeraji’s poetry, in Rashid’s own analysis, was the unusual breadth of its sources: Western literary tradition, modern psychology, and ancient Hindu mythology, woven together into something genuinely new in Urdu letters. From his teenage years, Meeraji felt a deep pull toward Hindu mythology and Bhakti devotional poetry, and Hindi vocabulary surfaces frequently throughout his poetry, prose, and letters. He translated the Sanskrit poet Damodar Gupta’s classical work Kuttanimatam into Urdu as Nigar-Khana, and acknowledged a debt to the ancient Sanskrit poet Amaru as well as to the French Symbolist Charles Baudelaire — a combination that gave his work a genuinely unusual, cross-cultural depth.

He was explicit that formal innovation alone was not enough to make a poet modern. “My employment of free verse for poetic expression is not enough to make one a modern poet,” he once said — insisting that a truly modern sensibility required a far deeper engagement with the unconscious mind and with symbol than mere technical novelty could provide.

A Vast, Unpublished Body of Work

Despite his enormous output — a consolidated total of 223 nazms, 136 geet, 17 ghazals, 22 verse translations, and 5 parodies, alongside substantial literary criticism — Meeraji published only a handful of collections during his own lifetime, among them Meeraji Ke Geet, Miraji Ki Nazmain, and Teen Rang, along with a volume of critical essays, Iss Nazm Mein. His complete works, Kulliyat-e-Meeraji, were not assembled and published until 1988, nearly four decades after his death, edited by the scholar Dr. Jameel Jalibi — a striking reminder of how much of his legacy had to wait for posthumous recognition to reach its full audience.

Radio, Editing, and a Life Without Ground

Meeraji worked, when he worked at all, in literary journalism and broadcasting — associated with the magazine Adabi Duniya in Lahore, later with All India Radio in Delhi, and writing literary columns for the monthly Saqi. After Partition, he settled for a time in Bombay, hoping to find work in the film industry, an effort that came to little after several frustrating months. He moved briefly to Pune before returning, once again disappointed, to Bombay, where he eventually found work as an editor for his friend Akhtar-ul-Iman’s magazine Khayal, earning a hundred rupees a month.

Decline and Death

Meeraji’s final years were marked by serious physical and psychological decline. His friend Akhtar-ul-Iman, with whom he spent his last days in Poona and Bombay, later reported that years of excessive drinking, heavy smoking, and a generally dissolute lifestyle had drained his strength and seriously damaged his liver. Alongside this physical deterioration came a psychiatric crisis serious enough to require hospitalisation, where he underwent electroconvulsive treatment — a procedure he is said to have dreaded profoundly.

Meeraji died at 4 p.m. on 3 November 1949, at King Edward Memorial Hospital in Bombay, at the age of thirty-seven — a life that had burned through its resources of health and stability far faster than its resources of creative vision.

Legacy: The Forerunner of Modern Urdu Poetry

Meeraji’s initial reception was often harsh; early readers, particularly traditionalists, found his verse odd, morally shocking, and simply puzzling, and were, if anything, even more baffled by his eccentric personal behaviour than by his poetry. But over time, critical opinion shifted decisively in his favour. Scholars now widely regard him not as a marginal, “lost” poet but as a genuine architect of a new poetic style — one whose deliberate, patient search through Western modernism, psychology, and ancient Indian tradition gave Urdu literature access to symbolic and psychological territory it had never before attempted with such ambition.

Comparisons to T. S. Eliot’s observation that modernism without reference to tradition is a term without meaning feel especially apt for Meeraji, whose radical formal innovation was always paired with a deep, serious engagement with ancient myth and classical poetry. Decades after his death, and after his complete works were finally gathered into print, Meeraji has settled into the place his contemporaries were slow to grant him: not a curious footnote to N. M. Rashid’s modernist revolution, but one of its two indispensable founders.

Frequently Asked Questions

Explore more: All Shayars · N. M. Rashid · Browse Categories