Ghulam Rabbani Taabaan is considered to be a prominent poet associated with Progressive Writers Movement. He subscribed to this movement both as a poet and an activist.

Taabaan was born on 15 February at a small place called Patwar near Qayamgunj in the district of Farrukhabad, Uttar Pradesh. He took his degree of LL. B, from Agra University and practiced law for some time. Not quite suited to this profession, he relinquished his law practice and shifted to Delhi where he worked at Maktaba Jamia Ltd., a prominent publishing house of Urdu books, where he continued working as its General Manager for a fairly long period.

His poetry represents a fine blend of classical poetics with Progressive poetics of the 1930s. In spite of his deep sympathies with revolutionary ideals, his poetry is characterised by a unique creative resilience which is not usually found in other poets who subscribed to Progressive ideology. He began his career by writing nazm but after the publication of his first collection called Saaz-e-Larzaan (1950), he started writing ghazals. His collections of ghazals include Hadees-e-Dil, Zauq-e-Safar, Nawa-i- Aawaara, and Ghubar-e-Manzil. In order to popularise his socio-political views, he also wrote essays in prose which were published in Siyasiyaat se Sheriyaat Tak.

Taabaan received several awards for his overall contribution to literature. These include Sahitya Akademi Award, Soviet Land Nehru Award, UP Urdu Akademi Award, and Bahadur Shah Zafar Awrad, apart from the prestigious Padm Sri Award from the Government of India which he later returned in protest against the rising communal violence in the country.   Taabaan passed away on 07 February, 1993    

Sayyad Ehtisham Hussain, former Chairman, Department of Urdu, Allahabad, UP, was one of India’s top Marxist critic of Urdu who published more than half a dozen volumes of his literary essays, besides several other books.

He was born in 1912 in Mahul, a small village in Azamgarh. He attended high school on Azamgarh, and then studied at Allahabad for his M.A. His first assignment as a teacher of Urdu was at Lucknow University in 1938. From there he went on a study tour of U.S. in 1952, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. The impressions of this travel are told in his travelogue ‘Sahil Aur Samandar’. In 1961 he was appointed to the Urdu chair at the Allahabad University.

Sayyad Ehtisham Hussain has written extensively on classical and modern literature. He has been one of the lending lights of the Progressive Writers Movement and has given Urdu criticism a new basis and a new direction. His prose presents him as a calm, quiet, and detached writer; actually, he possesses an interesting, agreeable, and charming personality. His Urdu is close to the basic common core speech. The use of high-flown or ornate language does not find favor with him, and his prose is marked for simplicity, candor and insight.