Abdul Ahad Azad

Abdul Ahad Dar (1903 – 4 April 1948), known by his final pen name Azad, was a Kashmiri poet, historian and literary critic from Rangar village in Chadoora, Budgam. Educated in a madrassa by his father Muhammad Sultan Dar and qualified through the Punjab University's Munshi Alim examination, he earned his living as a government schoolteacher of Arabic, posted to Zowhama and then Tral.¹² He is regarded as the first revolutionary poet of Kashmiri literature and the founder of its literary criticism, and his three-volume Kashmiri Zaban aur Shairi, published posthumously by the Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages (1959–1963), is the first history of the Kashmiri language and its poetry.¹

Braj Kachru divided his poetry into three phases, one for each pen name he adopted: the love and devotional verse of Ahad, the nature poetry of Janbaz, and from 1931 the revolutionary verse of Azad.¹ Suspected of activism in the 1931 resistance, he was transferred to remote postings and his house was raided; his four-year-old son died while he was posted at Tral, a loss Bazaz held to have made him "a skeptic and a rationalist".¹³ His seventy-three-verse Shikwa-i-Iblis, which puts a complaint against God's existence in Satan's mouth, scandalised orthodox opinion, and his Dariyav ("The River") became the emblem of his egalitarian, Marxist call for a classless society.¹⁴ He died of appendicitis at Srinagar on 4 April 1948.¹⁵