Arzoo Lucknowi (full name Syed Anwar Husain a.k.a. Manjhoo Saheb) was born on the 16^th of February 1873 in Lucknow, sixteen years after the British Raj of Her Majesty Queen Victoria had been established over India. He was a disciple of the great Urdu poet Jalal Lucknowi.

When you read Arzoo’s poetry it feels like he is a poet from the time that was before Anees and Dabeer.

Arzoo was a multifaceted poet. He has written Ghazal, Nazm, Marsiya, Qaseeda, Na’at (poetry in praise of the Prophet of Islam) Rubaa’ee, Salam, Masnawi and Geet.  Many critics believe that his famous Geet titled SUREELI BANSRI is the first GEET per se in Urdu poetry.  Arzoo has also written Urdu prose.

Arzoo travelled to Calcutta in search of work and was employed there writing songs and dialogues for the New Theatres Film Company ofCalcutta. One of his famous works during that period was the dialogue for the film Devdas (not the Dilip Kumar version, but the one in which K.L. Saigol played the leading role). Later he moved to Bombay and continued with similar work. After the establishment of Pakistan, he migrated toKarachi. He died in Karachi on the 16^th of April, 1951.

The government of Pakistan, in the early days of the Republic organized a competition for the new national anthem of Pakistan. A tune was composed and given to the poets to compose matching poetry. Arzoo wrote one such anthem. The beginning line of that anthem was:

INSANIYYAT KA NISHAN

The striking feature of the opening line is that even though Arzoo was writing for the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, he had made it a point to make it purely secular and resting on the highest level of intellectual pursuit, that is, in search of humanism.

For political reasons, that song was totally ignored and another song that was 99% in Farsi was accepted – that was composed by Hafeez Jalandhari.

It is unfortunate that no serious work has yet emerged on Arzoo’s works. Arzoo had a great insight into the structure and evolution of the language. His book titled Nizam-e-Urdu is an extremely valuable text on that topic. Arzoo was also interested in music.  He had authored a monograph titled Meezan-ul-Huroof, in which he has discussed the volume, quantity and degree of various sounds produced by letters and words. That text is one of its kind.  Back in the 1970’s a person named Muhammad Husain Hasiani was doing a Ph.D. on Arzoo and his works at the University of Bombay, India. I am not sure if Mr. Husaini ever completed his Ph.D.  So far, no work on Arzoo has emerged from Pakistan,  or from anywhere else.

 آرزو لکھنوی