64 Greatest and Famous Poets of India

Kabir Das was a 15th-century Indian mystic poet and saint, whose writings influenced Hinduism’s Bhakti movement and his verses are found in Sikhism’s scripture Guru Granth Sahib. His early life was in a Muslim family, but he was strongly influenced by his teacher, the Hindu bhakti leader Ramananda. Kabir was born in the Indian city of Varanasi.
Kabir is known for being critical of both Hinduism and Islam, stating followers of both were misguided by the Vedas and Quran, and questioning their meaningless rites of initiation such as the sacred thread and circumcision respectively. During his lifetime, he was threatened by both Hindus and Muslims for his views. When he died, both Hindus and Muslims he had inspired claimed him as theirs. Kabir suggested that Truth is with the person who is on the path of righteousness, considered all creatures on earth as his own self, and who is passively detached from the affairs of the world. To know the Truth, suggested Kabir, drop the “I” or the ego. Kabir’s legacy survives and continues through the Kabir panth (“Path of Kabir”), a religious community that recognises him as its founder and is one of the Sant Mat sects. Its members are known as Kabir panthis.

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Ramdhari Singh “Dinkar” (23 September 1908 – 24 April 1974), was an Indian Hindi poet, essayist, patriot and academic, who is considered as one of the most important modern Hindi poets. He remerged as a poet of rebellion as a consequence of his nationalist poetry written in the days before Indian independence. His poetry exuded veer rasa, and he has been hailed as a Rashtrakavi (“national poet”) on account of his inspiring patriotic compositions. He was a regular poet of Hindi Kavi sammelan on those days and is hailed to be as popular and connected to poetry lovers for Hindi speakers as Pushkin for Russians. Dinkar initially supported the revolutionary movement during the Indian independence struggle, but later became a Gandhian. However, he used to call himself a “Bad Gandhian” because he supported the feelings of indignation and revenge among the youth. In Kurukshetra, he accepted that war is destructive but argued that it is necessary for the protection of freedom. He was close to prominent nationalists of the time such as Rajendra Prasad, Anugrah Narayan Sinha, Sri Krishna Sinha, Rambriksh Benipuri and Braj Kishore Prasad.
Dinkar was elected three times to the Rajya Sabha, and he was the member of this house from 3 April 1952 to 26 January 1964, and was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1959. He was also the Vice-Chancellor of Bhagalpur University (Bhagalpur, Bihar) in the early 1960s.
During The Emergency, Jayaprakash Narayan had attracted a gathering of one lakh people at the Ramlila grounds and recited Dinkar’s famous poem: Singhasan Khaali Karo Ke Janata Aaati Hai (“Vacate the throne, for the people are coming”).

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Maithili Sharan Gupt (3 August 1886 – 12 December 1964) was one of the most important modern Hindi poets. He is considered one among the pioneers of Khari Boli (plain dialect) poetry and wrote in Khari Boli dialect, at a time when most Hindi poets favoured the use of Braj Bhasha dialect. He was a recipient of the third highest (then second highest) Indian civilian honour of Padma Bhushan. For his book Bharat-Bharati (1912), widely quoted during India’s freedom struggle, he was given the title of Rashtra Kavi by Mahatma Gandhi.

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Sumitranandan Pant (20 May 1900 – 28 December 1977) was an Indian poet. He was one of the most celebrated 20th century poets of the Hindi language and was known for romanticism in his poems which were inspired by nature, people and beauty within.

6 hours after childbirth, and it appears he did not seek affection from his grandmother, father, or older brother, which later influenced his writing. His father served as the manager of a local tea garden, and was also a landholder, so Pant was never in want financially growing up. He grew up in the same village and always cherished a love for the beauty and flavor of rural India, which is evident in all his major works.

Pant enrolled in Queens College in Banaras in 1918. There he began reading the works of Sarojini Naidu and Rabindranath Tagore, as well as English Romantic poets. These figures would all have a powerful influence on his writing. In 1919 he moved to Allahabad to study at Muir College. As an anti-British gesture he only attended for two years. He then focused more on poetry, publishing Pallav in 1926. This collection established him as a literary giant of the Hindi renaissance that had begun with Jaishankar Prasad. In the introduction to the book, Pant expressed dissatisfaction that Hindi speakers “think in one language and express themselves in another.” He felt that Braj was out of date and sought to help usher in a new national language.
Pant moved to Kalakankar in 1931. For nine years he lived an secluded life close to nature. Simultaneously he grew enamored with the works and thinking of Karl Marx and Mahatma Gandhi, dedicating several verses to them in the poetry he produced during this time. Pant returned to Almora in 1941 where he attended drama classes at the Uday Shankar Cultural Centre. He also read Aurobindo’s The Life Divine, which heavily influenced him. Three years later he moved to Madras and then to Pondicherry, attending Aurobindo’s ashram. In 1946 he returned to Allahabad to resume his role among the country’s other leading writers.

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Suryakant Tripathi (21 February 1896 – 15 October 1961), known by his pen name Nirala, was an Indian poet, novelist, essayist and story-writer. He also drew many sketches.

Most of his life was somewhat in the Bohemian tradition. He wrote strongly against social injustice and exploitation in society. Since he was more or less a rebel, both in form and content, acceptance did not come easily. What he got in plenty was ridicule and derision. All this may have played a role in making him a victim of schizophrenia in his later life and he was admitted to Central Institute of Psychiatry, Ranchi. (Incidentally Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam (who was later declared national poet of Bangladesh) had also been admitted to the same institute for schizophrenia).

Nirala died in Allahabad on 15 October 1961. The world of Hindi literature is remarkable for ideological and aesthetic divisions. But today, the same reviled Nirala is one of the very few people in Hindi literature who are admired and respected by almost all, across all divisions.

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Khanzada Mirza Khan Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan (17 December 1556 – 1 October 1627), popularly known as simply Rahim, was a poet who lived in India during the rule of Mughal emperor Akbar, who was his mentor, also. He was one of the nine important ministers (dewan) in his court, also known as the Navaratnas. Rahim is known for his Hindi dohe (couplets) and his books on astrology. The village of Khan Khana, which is named after him, is located in the Nawanshahr district of the state of Punjab, India.

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Rabindranath Tagore (born Robindronath Thakur, 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941; sobriquet Gurudev, Kobiguru, Biswakobi) was a Bengali poet, writer, composer, philosopher and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the “profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse” of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European as well as the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore’s poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his “elegant prose and magical poetry” remain largely unknown outside Bengal. He is sometimes referred to as “the Bard of Bengal”.A Bengali Brahmin from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Burdwan district and Jessore, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old. At the age of sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha (“Sun Lion”), which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics. By 1877 he graduated to his first short stories and dramas, published under his real name. As a humanist, universalist, internationalist, and ardent anti-nationalist, he denounced the British Raj and advocated independence from Britain. As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his legacy also endures in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University.Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced) and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed—or panned—for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India’s “Jana Gana Mana” and Bangladesh’s “Amar Shonar Bangla”. The Sri Lankan national anthem was inspired by his work.

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Tulsidas (1497–1623), also known as Goswami Tulsidas, was a Ramanandi Vaishnava saint and poet, renowned for his devotion to the deity Rama. He wrote several popular works in Sanskrit and Awadhi, but is best known as the author of the epic Ramcharitmanas, a retelling of the Sanskrit Ramayana based on Rama’s life in the vernacular Awadhi.
Tulsidas spent most of his life in the city of Varanasi and Faizabad. The Tulsi Ghat on the Ganges River in Varanasi is named after him. He founded the Sankatmochan Temple dedicated to Lord Hanuman in Varanasi, believed to stand at the place where he had the sight of the deity. Tulsidas started the Ramlila plays, a folk-theatre adaption of the Ramayana.He has been acclaimed as one of the greatest poets in Hindi, Indian, and world literature. The impact of Tulsidas and his works on the art, culture and society in India is widespread and is seen to date in vernacular language, Ramlila plays, Hindustani classical music, popular music, and television series

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Mahadevi Varma (26 March 1907 – 11 September 1987) was a Hindi poet, freedom fighter and educationist from India. She was a major poet of the “Chhayavaad”, a literary movement of romanticism in modern Hindi poetry ranging from 1914–1938 and a prominent poet in Hindi Kavi sammelans (Gatherings of poets).
She was the Principal, and then the Vice-Chancellor of Prayag Mahila Vidyapeeth, a woman’s residential college in Prayagraj.

She developed a soft vocabulary in the Hindi poetry of Khadi Boli, which before her was considered possible only in Braj bhasha. For this, she chose the soft words of Sanskrit and Bangla and adapted to Hindi. She was well-versed in music. The beauty of her songs lies in the tone that captures the euphemistic style of sharp expressions.She started her career with teaching. She was the Principal of Prayag Mahila Vidyapeeth. She was married, but she chose to live an ascetic life. She was also a skilled painter and creative translator. She had the distinction of receiving all the important awards in Hindi literature. As the most popular female litterateur of the last century, she remained revered throughout her life. The year 2007 was celebrated as her birth centenary. Later, Google also celebrated the day through its Google Doodle.

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Abu’l Hasan Yamīn ud-Dīn Khusrau (1253–1325), better known as Amīr Khusrau Dehlavī, was a Sufi singer, poet and scholar from India. He was an iconic figure in the cultural history of the Indian subcontinent. He was a mystic and a spiritual disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya of Delhi, India. He wrote poetry primarily in Persian, but also in Hindavi. A vocabulary in verse, the Ḳhāliq Bārī, containing Arabic, Persian, and Hindavi terms is often attributed to him. Khusrau is sometimes referred to as the “voice of India” or “Parrot of India” (Tuti-e-Hind), and has been called the “father of Urdu literature.”Khusrau is regarded as the “father of qawwali” (a devotional form of singing of the Sufis in the Indian subcontinent), and introduced the ghazal style of song into India, both of which still exist widely in India and Pakistan.
Khusrau was an expert in many styles of Persian poetry which were developed in medieval Persia, from Khāqānī’s qasidas to Nizami’s khamsa. He used 11 metrical schemes with 35 distinct divisions. He wrote in many verse forms including ghazal, masnavi, qata, rubai, do-baiti and tarkib-band. His contribution to the development of the ghazal was significant.

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Ghalib (Urdu: غاؔلِب‎), born Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan (Urdu: مِرزا اسَدُاللہ بیگ خان), (27 December 1797 – 15 February 1869), was an Indian poet. He used his pen-names of Ghalib (Urdu: غالِب, ġhālib means “dominant”) and Asad (Urdu: اسَد, Asad means “lion”). His honorific was Dabir-ul-Mulk, Najm-ud-Daula. During his lifetime, the already declining Mughal empire was eclipsed and displaced by the Colonial British Raj and finally deposed following the defeat of the Indian rebellion of 1857, are some of the events that he described through his work.Most notably, he wrote in both Urdu and Persian. His Persian Divan is at least five times longer than his Urdu but his fame rests on his poetry in Urdu.
Today, Ghalib remains popular not only in India and Pakistan but also among the Hindustani diaspora around the world.

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Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan (16 March 1929 – 13 July 1993) was an Indian poet and scholar of Indian literature who wrote in both English and Kannada. Ramanujan was a poet, scholar, professor, philologist, folklorist, translator, and playwright. His academic research ranged across five languages: English, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit. He published works on both classical and modern variants of this literature and argued strongly for giving local, non-standard dialects their due. Though he wrote widely and in a number of genres, Ramanujan’s poems are remembered as enigmatic works of startling originality, sophistication and moving artistry. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award posthumously in 1999 for The Collected Poems.

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Surdas was a 16th-century blind Hindu devotional poet and singer, who was known for his lyrics written in praise of Krishna. They are usually written in Braj Bhasha, one of the two literary dialects of Hindi.
Surdas is usually regarded as having taken his inspiration from the teachings of Huzur Malla Ji ,great grandfather of Huzur Malik Parv Ji, whom he is supposed to be met in 1510. There are many stories about him, but most consideringly he is said to have been blind from birth. He is said to have become foremost among the poets the Vallabha Sampradaya designates as its Aṣṭachāp (eight seals), following the convention that each poet affixes his oral signature called chap at the end of each composition.
The book Sur Sagar (Sur’s Ocean) is traditionally attributed to Surdas. However, many of the poems in the book seem to be written by later poets in Sur’s name. The Sur Sagar in its present form focuses on descriptions of Krishna as a lovable child, written from the gopis’ perspective. Surdas was a great religious singer.

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Agha Shahid Ali (4 February 1949 – 8 December 2001) was a Kashmiri-American poet. His collections include A Walk Through the Yellow Pages, The Half-Inch Himalayas, A Nostalgist’s Map of America, The Country Without a Post Office, Rooms Are Never Finished, the latter a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. The University of Utah Press awards the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize annually “in memory of a celebrated poet and beloved teacher.”

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Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar (1 November 1932 – 25 September 2004) was an Indian poet who wrote in both Marathi and English. His poems found humour in everyday matters. Kolatkar is the only Indian poet other than Kabir to be featured on the World Classics titles of New York Review of Books.

His first collection of English poetry, Jejuri won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1977. His Marathi verse collection Bhijki Vahi won a Sahitya Akademi Award in 2005. An anthology of his works, Collected Poems in English, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, was published in Britain by Bloodaxe Books in 2010. Trained as an artist from the J. J. School of Art, he was also a noted graphics designer.

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Subhadra Kumari Chauhan (16 August 1904 – 15 February 1948) was an Indian poet. One of her most popular poems is “Jhansi ki Rani” (about the courageous Queen of Jhansi).

Chauhan has authored a number of popular works in Hindi poetry. Her most famous composition is Jhansi Ki Rani, an emotionally charged poem describing the life of Rani Lakshmi Bai. The poem is one of the most recited and sung poems in Hindi literature. An emotionally charged description of the life of the queen of Jhansi(British India) and her participation in the 1857 revolution, it is often taught in schools in India. A couplet repeated at the end of each stanza reads thus:

बुंदेले हरबोलों के मुँह हमने सुनी कहानी थी,
खूब लड़ी मर्दानी वह तो झाँसी वाली रानी थी।

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Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (born 1947) is an Indian poet, anthologist, literary critic and translator. Mehrotra was nominated for the post of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in 2009. He came second behind Ruth Padel, who later resigned over allegations of a smear campaign against Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott (who had himself earlier withdrawn from the election process). Mehrotra has translated more than 200 literary works from ancient Prakrit language, and from Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati.

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Sampooran Singh Kalra (born 18 August 1934), known professionally as Gulzar, is an Indian lyricist, poet, author, screenwriter, and film director. He started his career with music director S.D. Burman as a lyricist in the 1963 film Bandini and worked with many music directors including R. D. Burman, Salil Chowdhury, Vishal Bhardwaj and A. R. Rahman. He was awarded Padma Bhushan in 2004, the third-highest civilian award in India, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Dadasaheb Phalke Award — the highest award in Indian cinema. He has won several Indian National Film Awards, 21 Filmfare Awards, one Academy Award and one Grammy Award.Gulzar also writes poetry, dialogues and scripts. He directed films such as Aandhi and Mausam during the 1970s and the TV series Mirza Ghalib in the 1980s. He also directed Kirdaar in 1993.

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Dharamvir Bharati (25 December 1926 – 4 September 1997) was a renowned Hindi poet, author, playwright and a social thinker of India. He was the chief editor of the popular Hindi weekly magazine Dharmayug, from 1960 till 1987.Bharati was awarded the Padma Shree for literature in 1972 by the Government of India. His novel Gunaho Ka Devta became a classic. Bharati’s Suraj ka Satwan Ghoda is considered a unique experiment in story-telling and was made into a National Film Award-winning movie by the same name in 1992 by Shyam Benegal. Andha Yug, a play set immediately after the Mahabharata war, is a classic that is frequently performed in public by drama groups.
He was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in Playwriting (Hindi) in 1988, given by Sangeet Natak Akademi, India’s National Academy of Music, Dance and Drama.

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Arundhathi Subramaniam is an Indian poet, writer, critic, curator, translator, Journalist, writing in English. Arundhathi Subramaniam’s volume of poetry, When God is a Traveller (2014) was the Season Choice of the Poetry Book Society, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She is the recipient of various awards and fellowships, including the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize, the Raza Award for Poetry, the Zee Women’s Award for Literature, the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy, the Mystic Kalinga award, the Charles Wallace, Visiting Arts and Homi Bhabha Fellowships, among others. Arundhathi has won the Sahitya Akademi Award for When God is a Traveller .

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Harivansh Rai Bachchan (27 November 1907 – 18 January 2003) was an Indian poet of the Nayi Kavita literary movement (romantic upsurge) of early 20th century Hindi literature. He was also a poet of the Hindi Kavi Sammelan. He is best known for his early work Madhushala. He is also the husband of social activist, Teji Bachchan, father of Amitabh Bachchan and grandfather of Abhishek Bachchan. In 1976, he received the Padma Bhushan for his service to Hindi literature.

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Geet Chaturvedi (born 27 November 1977, in Mumbai, Maharashtra) is a Hindi poet, short story author and novelist. Often regarded as an avant-garde writer, he was awarded the Bharat Bhushan Agrawal Award for poetry in 2007 and Krishna Pratap Award for Fiction in 2014. He lives in Bhopal, India. He is active both as a fiction writer and critic. In 2011, The Indian Express included him in a list of the ‘Ten Best Writers’ of India. His poems have been translated into seventeen languages worldwide. He translated the work of great Spanish Poet Pablo Neruda in Hindi and many others.
Chaturvedi is the author of seven books including the poetry collections Aalaap me girah in 2010, Nyoonatam Main in 2017, and Khushiyon Ke Guptchar in 2019. He also published two collections of novellas, Savant Anti Ki Ladkiyan and Pink Slip Daddy, in 2010. The novella “Pink Slip Daddy” was considered to be one of the best works of fiction in contemporary Hindi writing by the literary periodical Kathadesh. The English translation of his novella “Simsim”, translated by Anita Gopalan, won the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants, 2016.

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Jaishankar Prasad (30 January 1889 – 15 November 1937) was a prominent figure in modern Hindi literature as well as Hindi theatre. Prasad was his pen name. Prasad started writing poetry with the pen name of ‘Kaladhar’. The first collection of poem that Jai Shankar Prasad penned, named, Chitradhar, was written in Braj dialect of Hindi but his later works were written in Khadi dialect or Sanskritized Hindi.

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Balarama Dasa ( c. 1474-1522) was an Odia poet and litterateur. He was one of the 5 great poets in Odia literature, the Panchasakha during the Bhakti age of literature. He was the eldest of the Pancha sakha . He wrote the Odia Ramayana also known as Jagamohana Ramayana.

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Syed Abdullah Shah Qadri or Syed Abdullah Shah Gilani ( 1680–1757), known as Bulleh Shah was a Punjabi philosopher and Sufi poet during 17th-century Punjab. His first spiritual teacher was Shah Inayat Qadiri, a Sufi murshid of Lahore. He was a mystic poet and is universally regarded as “The father of Punjabi enlightenment”. He lived and was buried in Kasur.

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Jayanta Mahapatra (born 22 October 1928) is an Indian English poet. He is the first Indian poet to win a Sahitya Akademi award for English poetry. He is the author of poems such as Indian Summer and Hunger, which are regarded as classics in modern Indian English literature. He was awarded a Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian honour in India in 2009. He returned the award in 2015 to protest against rising intolerance in India.

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Kālidāsa ( 4th–5th century CE) was a Classical Sanskrit author and is often considered ancient India’s greatest playwright and dramatist. His plays and poetry are primarily based on the Vedas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Puranas. His surviving works consist of three plays, two epic poems and two shorter poems.
Much about his life is unknown, only what can be inferred from his poetry and plays. His works cannot be dated with precision, but they were most likely authored before the 5th century CE.

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Dushyant Kumar (1 September 1933 – 30 December 1975) was an Indian poet of modern Hindi literature. He is famous for writing Hindi Ghazals, and is generally recognised as one of the foremost Hindi poets of the 20th century. Dushyant Kumar was married to Rajeshwari Tyagi.

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Kumar Vishwas (born Vishwas Kumar Sharma; 10 February 1970) is an Indian Hindi poet, politician and a lecturer. He was a member of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and a former member of its National Executive. Vishwas routinely gives performances in which he demonstrates his poetry and love for Hindi, Urdu and Sanskrit literature. He incorporates his comments on topical issues relating to India. He has participated in poetry recitations and functions abroad including the US, Dubai, Oman, Singapore and Japan.

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Achyutananda Das or Mahapurusha Achyutananda was a 16th-century poet seer and Vaishnava saint from Odisha, India. He was considered to have the power to see the past, present and future. He was a prolific author, and one of the group of five, that led a revolution in spirituality in Odisha by translating Sanskrit texts into the Odia language for common people.
He was one of the famous five friends of spirituality and literature Panchasakhā, who transcribed ancient Hindu Sanskrit texts into Odia, for the people of Udra Desha (Odisha). Shri Achyutananda Das was the most prolific writer of the Panchasakhas and wrote numerous books, many of which could be loosely translated as the Book of Prophecies. He is known as the Mahapurusha (a Great Person) for his vast knowledge on many subjects such as spirituality, Yoga, rituals, Buddhist Tantra, Ayurveda (science of life, longevity and medicine), and other various science and social regulations.

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Jasobanta Dasa (also spelled as Jasobanta Das or Yasovanta Das; Odia: ଯଶୋବନ୍ତ ଦାସ; born c. 1487) was an Odia poet , litterateur and mystic. He was one of the five great poets in Odia literature, the Panchasakha during the Bhakti age of literature.He is known for his work Prema Bhakti Brahma Gita .

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Meera, also known as Mirabai, was a 16th-century Hindu mystic poet and devotee of Lord Krishna. She is a celebrated Bhakti saint, particularly in the North Indian Hindu tradition.Mirabai was born into a Rajput royal family in Kudki, Pali district, Rajasthan, Mira then spent her childhood in Merta, Rajasthan. She is mentioned in Bhaktamal, confirming that she was widely known and a cherished figure in the Bhakti movement culture by about 1600 CE. Most legends about Meera mention her fearless disregard for social and family conventions, her devotion to Lord
Krishna, her treating Lord Krishna as her husband and being persecuted by her in-laws for her religious devotion. She has been the subject of numerous folk tales and hagiographic legends, which are inconsistent or widely different in details. Millions of devotional hymns in passionate praise of Lord Krishna are attributed to Meerabai in the Indian tradition, but just a few hundred are believed to be authentic by scholars, and the earliest written records suggest that except for two hymns, most were written down only in the 18th century.

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Bharatendu Harishchandra (9 September 1850 – 6 January 1885) is known as the father of Hindi literature as well as Hindi theatre. He is considered one of the greatest Hindi writers of modern India. A recognised poet, he was a trendsetter in Hindi prose-writing. He was an author of several dramas, life sketches and travel accounts; he used new media like reports, publications, letters to the editor, translations and literary works to shape public opinion.Writing under the pen name “Rasa”, Harishchandra represented the agonies of the people, country’s poverty, dependency, inhuman exploitation, the unrest of the middle class and the urge for the progress of the country. He was an influential Hindu “traditionalist”, using Vaishnava devotionalism to define a coherent Hindu religion
.

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Abdul Hayee (8 March 1921 – 25 October 1980), popularly known by his takhallus (pen name) Sahir Ludhianvi, was an Indian poet and film song lyricist who wrote in the Urdu and Hindi languages.His work influenced Indian cinema, in particular Bollywood film. Sahir won a Filmfare Award for Best Lyricist for Taj Mahal (1963). He won a second Filmfare Award for Best Lyricist for his work on Kabhie Kabhie (1976). He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1971. On 8 March 2013, the ninety-second anniversary of Sahir’s birth, a commemorative stamp was issued in his honour.

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Sarojini Naidu (née Chattopadhyay; 13 February 1879 – 2 March 1949) was an Indian political activist and poet. A proponent of civil rights, women’s emancipation, and anti-imperialistic ideas, she was an important figure in India’s struggle for independence from colonial rule. Naidu’s work as a poet earned her the sobriquet ‘Nightingale of India’ by Mahatma Gandhi. She was called ‘Bharat Kokila’ by Rabindranath Tagore.
Born in a Bengali family in Hyderabad, Naidu was educated in Madras, London and Cambridge. Following her time in England, where she worked as a suffragist, she was drawn to Indian National Congress’ movement for India’s independence from British rule. She became a part of the Indian nationalist movement and became a follower of Mahatma Gandhi and his idea of swaraj. She was appointed the President of the Indian National Congress in 1925 and later became the Governor of the United Provinces in 1947, becoming the first woman to hold the office of Governor in the Dominion of India.
Naidu’s poetry includes both children’s poems and others written on more serious themes including patriotism, romance, and tragedy. Published in 1912, “In the Bazaars of Hyderabad” remains one of her most popular poems. She was married to Govindarajulu Naidu, a general physician, and had five children with him. She died of a cardiac arrest on 2 March 1949.

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Pandit Makhanlal Chaturvedi (4 April 1889 – 30 January 1968), also called Pandit ji, was an Indian poet, writer, essayist, playwright and a journalist who is particularly remembered for his participation in India’s national struggle for independence and his contribution to Chhayavaad, the Neo-romanticism movement of Hindi literature. He was awarded the first Sahitya Akademi Award in Hindi for his work Him Taringini in 1955. The Government of India awarded him the civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan in 1963.

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Sisu Ananta Dasa ( born c. 1475) was an Odia poet , litterateur and mystic. He was one of the five great poets in Odia literature, the Panchasakha during the Bhakti age of literature.He is known for his work Hetu Udaya Bhagabata .

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Amrita Pritam ( 31 August 1919 – 31 October 2005) was an Indian novelist, essayist and poet, who wrote in Punjabi and Hindi. She is considered the first prominent female Punjabi poet, novelist, essayist and the leading 20th-century poet of the Punjabi language, who is equally loved on both sides of the India–Pakistan border. With a career spanning over six decades, she produced over 100 books of poetry, fiction, biographies, essays, a collection of Punjabi folk songs and an autobiography that were all translated into several Indian and foreign languages.She is best remembered for her poignant poem, Ajj aakhaan Waris Shah nu (Today I invoke Waris Shah – “Ode to Waris Shah”), an elegy to the 18th-century Punjabi poet, an expression of her anguish over massacres during the partition of India. As a novelist, her most noted work was Pinjar (“The Skeleton”, 1950), in which she created her memorable character, Puro, an epitome of violence against women, loss of humanity and ultimate surrender to existential fate; the novel was made into an award-winning film, Pinjar (2003).When India was partitioned into the independent states of India and Pakistan in 1947, she migrated from Lahore, to India, though she remained equally popular in Pakistan throughout her life, as compared to her contemporaries like Mohan Singh and Shiv Kumar Batalvi.
Known as the most important voice for the women in Punjabi literature, in 1956, she became the first woman to win the Sahitya Akademi Award for her magnum opus, a long poem, Sunehade (Messages), later she received the Bharatiya Jnanpith, one of India’s highest literary awards, in 1982 for Kagaz Te Canvas (“The Paper and the Canvas”). The Padma Shri came her way in 1969 and finally, Padma Vibhushan, India’s second highest civilian award, in 2004, and in the same year she was honoured with India’s highest literary award, given by the Sahitya Akademi (India’s Academy of Letters), the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship given to the “immortals of literature” for lifetime achievement. she wrote her poems mostly for the partition.

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Kazi Nazrul Islam, (24 May 1899 – 29 August 1976) was a Bengali poet, writer, musician and the national poet of Bangladesh. Popularly known as Nazrul, he produced a large body of poetry and music with themes that included religious devotion and rebellion against oppression. Nazrul’s activism for political and social justice earned him the title of “Bidrohi Kobi” (Rebel Poet). His compositions form the avant-garde music genre of Nazrul Geeti (Music of Nazrul).Born into a Bengali Muslim Kazi family hailing from Burdwan district in Bengal Presidency (now in West Bengal), Nazrul Islam received religious education and as a young man worked as a muezzin at a local mosque. He learned about poetry, drama, and literature while working with the rural theatrical group Letor Dal, Leto being a folk song genre of West Bengal usually performed by the people from Muslim community of the region. He joined the British Indian Army in 1917. After serving in the British Indian Army in the Middle East (Mesopotamian campaign) during World War I, Nazrul established himself as a journalist in Calcutta.

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Michael Madhusudan Dutt, or Michael Madhusudan Dutta ( 25 January 1824 – 29 June 1873) was a Bengali poet, writer and dramatist. He was a pioneer of Bengali drama. His famous work Meghnad Badh Kavya, is a tragic epic. It consists of nine cantos and is exceptional in Bengali literature both in terms of style and content. He also wrote poems about the sorrows and afflictions of love as spoken by women.

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Shiv Kumar Batalvi (8 Oct 1937- May 1973) was an Indian poet, writer and playwright of the Punjabi language. He was most known for his romantic poetry, noted for its heightened passion, pathos, separation and lover’s agony.He became the youngest recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1967, given by the Sahitya Akademi (India’s National Academy of Letters), for his epic verse play based on the ancient legend of Puran Bhagat, Loona (1965), now considered a masterpiece in modern Punjabi literature, and which also created a new genre, of modern Punjabi kissa. Today, his poetry stands in equal footing, amongst that by stalwarts of modern Punjabi poetry, like Mohan Singh (poet) and Amrita Pritam, all of whom are popular on both sides of Indo-Pakistan border.

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Jeet Thayil (born 13 October 1959) is an Indian poet, novelist, librettist and musician. He is best known as a poet and is the author of four collections: These Errors Are Correct (Tranquebar, 2008), English (2004, Penguin India, Rattapallax Press, New York, 2004), Apocalypso (Ark, 1997) and Gemini (Viking Penguin, 1992). His first novel, Narcopolis, (Faber & Faber, 2012), which won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, was also shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and The Hindu Literary Prize.

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Nissim Ezekiel (16 December 1924 – 9 January 2004) was an Indian Jewish poet, actor, playwright, editor and art critic. He was a foundational figure in postcolonial India’s literary history, specifically for Indian Poetry in English. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1983 for his collection, “Latter-Day Psalms”, by the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters. Ezekiel has been applauded for his subtle, restrained and well crafted diction, dealing with common and mundane (simple) themes in a manner that manifests both cognitive profundity, as well as an unsentimental, realistic sensibility, that has been influential on the course of succeeding Indian English poetry. Ezekiel enriched and established Indian English language poetry through his modernist innovations and techniques, which enlarged Indian English literature, moving it beyond purely spiritual and orientalist themes, to include a wider range of concerns and interests, including familial events, individual angst and skeptical societal introspection.

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Sri Aurobindo (15 August 1872 – 5 December 1950) was an Indian philosopher, yogi, guru, poet, and nationalist. He joined the Indian movement for independence from British rule, for a while was one of its influential leaders and then became a spiritual reformer, introducing his visions on human progress and spiritual evolution.
Aurobindo studied for the Indian Civil Service at King’s College, Cambridge, England. After returning to India he took up various civil service works under the Maharaja of the Princely state of Baroda and became increasingly involved in nationalist politics in the Indian National Congress and the nascent revolutionary movement in Bengal with the Anushilan Samiti. He was arrested in the aftermath of a number of bomb outrages linked to his organization in a public trial where he faced charges of treason for Alipore Conspiracy. However Aurobindo could only be convicted and imprisoned for writing articles against British rule in India. He was released when no evidence could be provided, following the murder of a prosecution witness, Narendranath Goswami, during the trial. During his stay in the jail, he had mystical and spiritual experiences, after which he moved to Pondicherry, leaving politics for spiritual work.
At Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo developed a spiritual practice he called Integral Yoga. The central theme of his vision was the evolution of human life into a divine life. He believed in a spiritual realisation that not only liberated but transformed human nature, enabling a divine life on earth. In 1926, with the help of his spiritual collaborator, Mirra Alfassa (referred to as “The Mother”), he founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.
His main literary works are The Life Divine, which deals with theoretical aspects of Integral Yoga; Synthesis of Yoga, which deals with practical guidance about Integral Yoga; and Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, an epic poem.

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Vikram Seth (born 20 June 1952) is an Indian novelist and poet. He has written several novels and poetry books. He has received several awards such as Padma Shri, Sahitya Academy Award, Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, WH Smith Literary Award and Crossword Book Award. Seth’s collections of poetry such as Mappings and Beastly Tales are notable contributions to the Indian English language poetry canon.

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Jibanananda Das (17 February 1899 – 22 October 1954) was an Indian poet, writer, novelist and essayist in the Bengali language. Popularly called “Rupashi Banglar Kabi” (Poet of Beautiful Bengal), Das is the most read poet after Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam in Bangladesh and West Bengal. While not particularly recognised initially, today Das is acknowledged as one of the greatest poets in the Bengali language.Born in Barisal to a Vaidya-Brahmo family, Das studied English literature at Presidency College, Kolkata and earned his MA from Calcutta University. He had a troubling career and suffered financial hardship throughout his life. He taught at many colleges but was never granted tenure. He settled in Kolkata after the partition of India. Das died on 22 October 1954, eight days after being hit by a tramcar. The witnesses said that though the tramcar whistled, he did not stop, and got struck. Some deem the accident as an attempt at suicide.Jibanananda Das was very underrated poet in his time; he wrote profusely, but as he was a recluse and introvert, he did not publish most of his writings during his lifetime.

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Ilavenil Meena Kandasamy (born 1984) is an Indian poet, fiction writer, translator and activist from Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.Meena published two collections of poetry, Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010). From 2001-2002, she edited The Dalit, a bi-monthly alternative English magazine of the Dalit Media Network.She represented India at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and was a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom. She writes columns for platforms like Outlook India and The Hindu,

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Pash (9 September 1950 – 23 March 1988) was the pen name of Avtar Singh Sandhu, one of the major poets of the Naxalite movement in the Punjabi literature of the 1970s. He was killed by Khalistani extremists on 23 March 1988. His strongly left-wing views were reflected in his poetry.

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Sarala Dasa (Odia:ସାରଳା ଦାସ) was a 15th-century Poet and scholar of Odia literature. Best known for three Odia books — Mahabharata, Vilanka Ramayana and Chandi Purana — he was the first scholar to write in Odia. As an originator of Odia literature, his work has formed an enduring source of information for succeeding generations.

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Atibadi Jagannatha Dasa  was an Odia poet and litterateur. He was one of the 5 great poets in Odia literature, the Panchasakha. He wrote the Odia Bhagabata. Dasa was born in Kapileswarpur Sasana (one of the 16 traditional Sasana villages in Puri) on Radhastami in 1491, in an established Brahmin family of Kaushiki Gotra. His mother was Padmabati Debi and his father was Bhagabana Dasa.

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Sachchidananda Hirananda Vatsyayan (7 March 1911 – 4 April 1987), popularly known by his nom de plume Agyeya (also transliterated Ajneya, meaning ‘the unknowable’), was an Indian writer, poet, novelist, literary critic, journalist, translator and revolutionary in Hindi language. He pioneered modern trends in Hindi poetry, as well as in fiction, criticism and journalism. He is regarded as the pioneer of the Prayogavaad (experimentalism) movements in modern Hindi literature.
Son of a renowned archaeologist Hiranand Sastri, Agyeya was born in Kasia, a small town near Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh. He took active part in the Indian freedom struggle and spent several years in prison for his revolutionary activities against British colonial rule.
He edited the Saptak series which gave rise a new trends in Hindi poetry, known as Nayi Kavita He edited several literary journals, and launched his own Hindi language weekly Dinaman, which set new standard and trends in Hindi journalism. Agyeya translated some of his own works, as well as works of some other Indian authors to English. He also translated some books of world literature into Hindi.
Agyeya was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award (1964), Jnanpith Award (1978) and the internationally reputed Golden Wreath Award for poetry.

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Kamala Surayya (born Kamala; 31 March 1934 – 31 May 2009), popularly known by her one-time pen name Madhavikutty and married name Kamala Das, was an Indian poet in English as well as an author in Malayalam from Kerala, India. Her popularity in Kerala is based chiefly on her short stories and autobiography, while her oeuvre in English, written under the name Kamala Das, is noted for the poems and explicit autobiography. She was also a widely read columnist and wrote on diverse topics including women’s issues, child care, politics among others.
Her open and honest treatment of female sexuality, free from any sense of guilt, infused her writing with power and she got hope after freedom, but also marked her as an iconoclast in her generation. On 31 May 2009, aged 75, she died at a hospital in Pune.

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Keki N. Daruwalla (born 1937) is an Indian poet and short story writer in English. He is also a former Indian Police Service officer.
He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1984 for his poetry collection, The Keeper of the Dead, by the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters. He was awarded Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award in India, in 2014.

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Ranjit Hoskote (born 29 March 1969) is an Indian poet, art critic, cultural theorist and independent curator. He was honoured with Sahitya Akademi Award for lifetime achievement in 2004. Ranjit Hoskote was born in Mumbai and educated at the Bombay Scottish School, Elphinstone College, where he studied for a BA in Politics, and later at University of Bombay, from where he obtained an MA degree in English Literature and Aesthetics.

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Rukmini Bhaya Nair is a linguist, poet, writer and critic from India. She won the First Prize for her poem kali in the “All India Poetry Competition” in 1990 organised by The Poetry Society (India) in collaboration with British Council. She is currently a Professor at the Humanities and Social Sciences department of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT Delhi). Nair is known for being a trenchant critic of the Hindutva ideology and the religious and caste discrimination that it promotes.

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Jayadeva ( born c. 1170 CE), also known as Jaidev, was a Sanskrit poet during the 12th century. He is most known for his epic poem Gita Govinda which concentrates on Krishna’s love with the gopi, Radha in a rite of spring. This poem, which presents the view that Radha is greater than Krishna, is considered an important text in the Bhakti movement of Hinduism.Little is known of his life, except that he was a loner poet and a Hindu mendicant celebrated for his poetic genius in eastern India. Jayadeva’s ashtapadis are central to the repertoire of Odissi music, the traditional classical music of the state of Odisha. Jayadeva is the earliest dated author of hymns that are included the Guru Granth Sahib, the primary scripture of Sikhism – a religion founded in the Indian subcontinent centuries after his death.

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Purandara Dāsa (c. 1484 – c. 1565) was an Indian philosopher, a Haridasa, a renowned composer of Carnatic music, a great devotee of Lord Krishna, a Vaishnava poet, a saint and a social reformer. He was a disciple of the Dvaita philosopher-saint Vyasatirtha, and a contemporary of yet another Haridasa, Kanakadasa. His guru, Vyasatirtha, glorified Purandara Dasa in a song thus: Dāsarendare purandara dāsarayya. He was a composer, singer and one of the chief founding-proponents of South Indian classical music (Carnatic music). In honor of his significant contributions to Carnatic music, he is widely referred to as the Pitamaha (lit. “father” or “grandfather”) of Carnatic music. He is respected as an Avatara (incarnation) of the great sage Narada (a celestial being who is also a singer).

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Thiruvalluvar, commonly known as Valluvar, was a celebrated Tamil poet and philosopher. He is best known as the author of Tirukkuṟaḷ, a collection of couplets on ethics, political and economical matters, and love. The text is considered an exceptional and widely cherished work of the Tamil literature.Almost no authentic information is available about Valluvar, states Kamil Zvelebil – a scholar of Tamil literature. His life and likely background are variously inferred from his literary works by different biographers. There are unauthentic hagiographic and legendary accounts of Valluvar’s life, and all major Indian religions, as well as Christian missionaries of the 19th century, have tried to claim him as secretly inspired (crypto-) or originally belonging to their tradition. Little is known with certainty about his family background, religious affiliation, or birthplace.

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Gieve Patel (born 18 August 1940) is an Indian poet, playwright, painter, as well as a practising physician. He belongs to a group of writers who have subscribed themselves to the ‘Green Movement’ which is involved in an effort to protect the environment. His poems speak of deep concerns for nature and expose man’s cruelty to it. His works include poems, How Do You Withstand (1966), Body (1976) and Mirrored Mirroring (1991). He has also written three plays, Titled Princess, Savaska and Mr. Behram.

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R. Parthasarathy also known as Rajagopal Parthasarathy (born 1934) is an Indian poet, translator, critic, and editor. His works include Poetry from Leeds in 1968, Rough Passage published by Oxford University Press in 1977, a long poem ( Preface “a book where all poems form part of a single poem, as it were” – R. Parthasarathy ) and Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets, edited by him and published by Oxford University Press in 1976. He also translates from Tamil to English. His translation into modern English verse of the 5th-century Tamil epic, The Tale of the Anklet: An Epic of South India was published by Columbia UP in 1993. It received the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize in 1995 and The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. – A.K. Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation in 1996. He was also awarded the Ulka Poetry Prize of Poetry India in 1966. He was a member of the University of Iowa Writing Program during 1978–79, and member of the Advisory Board for English of the Sahitya Akademi – the National Academy of Letters, New Delhi, India.

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Mir Muhammad Taqi Mir (February 1723 – 20 September 1810), also known as Mir Taqi Mir or Meer Taqi Meer, was an Urdu poet of the 18th century Mughal India, and one of the pioneers who gave shape to the Urdu language itself. He was one of the principal poets of the Delhi School of the Urdu ghazal and is often remembered as one of the best poets of the Urdu language. His takhallus (pen name) was Mir. He spent the latter part of his life in the court of Asaf-ud-Daulah in Lucknow.

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Syed Ibrahim Khan (1548-1628) was a poet of Pashtun origins, who became a devotee of Lord Krishna. He is known to have lived in Amroha near Delhi, India. Raskhan was his takhallus in Hindi. In his early years, he became a follower of Lord Krishna and learned the bhakti marga from Goswami Vitthalnath and began living in Brindavan and spent his whole life there. He accepted Lord Krishna as the Supreme God and became a Vaishnav. He died in 1628 A.D. His samadhi is at Mahaban which is situated about six miles east of Mathura.

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Eunice de Souza (1940–2017) was an Indian English language poet, literary critic and novelist. Among her notable books of poetry are Women in Dutch painting (1988), Ways of Belonging (1990), Nine Indian Women Poets (1997), These My Words (2012), and Learn From The Almond Leaf (2016). She published two novels, Dangerlok (2001), and Dev & SImran (2003), and was also the editor of a number of anthologies on poetry, folktales, and literary criticism.

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Bihari Lal Chaube or Bihārī (1595–1663) was a Hindi poet, who is famous for writing the Satasaī (Seven Hundred Verses) in Brajbhasha, a collection of approximately seven hundred distichs, Kumar which is perhaps the most celebrated Hindi work of poetic art, as distinguished from narrative and simpler styles. Today it is considered the most well known book of the Ritikavya Kaal or ‘Riti Kaal'(an era in which poets wrote poems for kings) of Hindi literature.The language is the form of Hindi called Brajbhasha, spoken in the country about Mathura, where the poet lived. The couplets are inspired by the Krishna side of Vishnu-worship, and the majority of them take the shape of amorous utterances of Radha, the chief of the Gopis or cowherd maidens of Braj, and her divine lover, the son of Vasudeva. Each couplet is independent and complete in itself. The distichs, in their collected form, are arranged, not in any sequence of narrative or dialogue, but according to the technical classification of the sentiments which they convey as set forth in the treatises on Indian rhetoric.

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