Ustad Daman
Tailor-poet of Lahore, the people's poet of the Punjabi language, who mocked every government from the stage.
Chiragh Din, called Ustad Daman, was born in Lahore in 1911 and worked as a tailor. He began reciting his Punjabi poems at gatherings and political meetings, and became the poet of the city's lanes and the voice of its poor.
In the riots of 1947 his shop and his papers were burnt. Soon after, at a mushaira in Delhi, he recited a poem asking why the two countries, now free, still wept in each other's arms, and Nehru is said to have wept. In Pakistan he mocked dictators and politicians alike, and was jailed for it.
He died in 1984. He lived for decades in a single room in the old city, and his poems were passed on by word of mouth before they were printed.
