Azad Bilgrami

Mir Ghulam 'Ali b. Nuh al-Husayni al-Wasiti Azad Bilgrami was born at Bilgram on 25 Safar 1116 AH (29 June 1704). He had his early education from Mir Tufayl Muhammad Bilgrami and later studied with Mir 'Abd al-Jalil Bilgrami. In 1151 AH (1738) he performed the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina and learnt hadith from Shaykh Muhammad Hayat al-Sindi and 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Tantawi. He returned to India in 1152 AH (1739) and settled at Awrangabad, where he died in 1200 AH (1786); he was buried at Kuldabad in the Deccan. ¹

When his friend Samsam al-Dawla Shah Nawaz Khan, diwan of Hyderabad, was murdered and his house plundered in 1171 AH (1758), Azad recovered most of the scattered fragments of the unfinished manuscript of the latter's Ma'athir al-Umara', which he rearranged and edited. His Arabic qasidas in praise of the Prophet ﷺ earned him the title Hassan al-Hind, after the Prophet's panegyrist Hassan b. Thabit. ¹

In Arabic he wrote Subhat al-Marjan fi Athar Hindustan, printed at Bombay in 1303 AH (1886), which combines two works of his, the Shammamat al-'anbar and the Tasliyat al-fu'ad (the former on references to India in Qur'an commentaries and hadith, the latter on Indian scholars); a three-volume diwan of more than 3000 verses; and an incomplete commentary on al-Bukhari. In Persian he wrote the Khizana-i 'Amira, notices of some 135 Persian poets of India and the Deccan (with a short history of the Marathas); Ma'athir al-Kiram, on the pious and learned men of Bilgram; Sarw-i Azad, biographies of 143 Persian and Urdu poets of India; Yad-i Bayda', the lives of saints compiled at Siwistan in 1145 AH (1732); and Rawdat al-Awliya', on the saints of the Deccan. ²