Brij Narayan Chakbast

Brij Narayan Chakbast (1882-1926) was a Kashmiri Pandit lawyer from Lucknow who wrote in Urdu, and one of several Hindu poets central to a tradition usually assumed to be exclusively Muslim. He wrote an Urdu Ramayan in verse and nationalist poetry alongside his ghazals. His best-known couplet defines life and death in physical rather than religious terms — arrangement and its undoing — and is quoted at funerals by people who have never heard his name.