Bekhud Dehlvi

Biography

Bekhud Dehlvi grew up in a household where poetry was already a living thing. Born in Bharatpur in 1863, he was the son of the poet Syed Shamsuddin Saalim. As a young man he was brought to Delhi, where Maulana Hali guided his studies in Arabic, Persian, and the craft of verse. From there he entered the orbit of Daagh Dehlvi and found the lineage that would define his art.

The Delhi he knew was a city of salons and mushairas, a place where language mattered and reputations were made by a single couplet. Bekhud Dehlvi fit this world well. He wrote with elegance, measured feeling, and a respect for the inner music of the ghazal. His collections, Guftar e Bekhud and Shahsavaar e Bekhud, show a poet attentive to diction and rhythm, alive to romance and time, and loyal to the idiom that made Delhi famous.

He shared a curious bond with his near namesake in Badayun. Listeners often spoke of the two Bekhuds as twin strands of the same tradition. Where Bekhud Badayuni’s life took him into courts and service, Bekhud Dehlvi’s remained anchored in the literary city, teaching by example how to keep the classic line supple without losing its manners.

Little is publicly recorded about his marriage or children, which suits the privacy he seems to have preferred. What is recorded is the respect of his peers and the steady affection of readers. His ghazals are quoted for their poise, their clean metaphors, and the ease with which they carry deep feeling.

Bekhud Dehlvi died in Delhi in 1955 at the age of ninety two. He saw the turn of the century, the fall of empires, and the making of new nations, and through it all he kept faith with the craft he had inherited. His poetry remains a gentle lesson in how tradition can breathe when handled with patience and love.