Balwant Singh

Balwant Singh is introduced on stage as 'Professor Balwant Singh', and the compère's affectionate wordplay gives the game away — here, he says, is a man with experience of both ishq and of teaching, of love and of the lecture hall, which is why only he could have written the couplet about students who do well at their books yet cannot do love well. He belongs to the circuit of living poets whose reputation is made in the hall and on the recording rather than on the printed page, carrying the Urdu ghazal to mushaira audiences across India and the Gulf.

He is, by the standards of the classical masters on this shelf, lightly documented — a working performance poet rather than a settled literary biography — and we do not invent what the record does not hold. What the recitation itself shows is a clear and likeable signature: a defiance that will not bow to fear, to power, or to a charity that arrives with strings; a tenderness about the daily struggle of keeping a household; and a wit that can name Socrates in one breath and the blister on a working man's foot in the next. He stands on this shelf for one of the plainest truths it exists to tell — that great Urdu verse has never been the property of any one community, and a professor named Balwant Singh, reciting to a mushaira crowd, is as much its keeper as anyone.