Josh Malihabadi

Josh was born at Malihabad near Lucknow to an Urdu-speaking Muslim family of Afridi Pashtun origin. He began composing poetry at eleven, studied at Lucknow and at Rabindranath Tagore's Visva-Bharati, and entered the service of Hyderabad State as a translator.¹

Exiled from Hyderabad State in 1925 over a poem against the Nizam, Josh moved to Delhi and founded the magazine Kaleem. In the 1940s he edited the government Publications Division's magazine Aaj-Kal, gathering Delhi's Urdu literary circle around it, and left over its pro-British wartime line.¹

Josh migrated to Pakistan in 1956 despite Jawaharlal Nehru's opposition, worked at the Board for the Advancement of Literature in Lahore and edited the daily Jang; Pakistan awarded him the Hilal-i-Imtiaz posthumously in 2013. He died at Islamabad on 22 February 1982.¹²

No edition of Josh's articles names a branch or school in its text: the English article gives his Muslim family of Afridi origin, and the Shia reading stands only in Wikidata's single structured value and in the Urdu article's 'Pakistani Shia' category, a filing. His Husayn elegies are treated by the articles as literary works.¹³²

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