Mirza Ghalib Poetry

Life

Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan was born in Agra in 1797 into a family of Turkish descent that had served as soldiers. His father died when he was a small child, and he was brought up by an uncle. He was married at thirteen and soon settled in Delhi, the city he would live in for the rest of his life.

He began writing as a boy, first under the pen name Asad, later Ghalib (“the dominant”). Money troubles followed him all his life; his family pension from the British was a long struggle. In 1850 the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, gave him the titles Najm-ud-Daula and Dabir-ul-Mulk and asked him to write the history of the Mughal house. He lived through the revolt of 1857 and the ruin of Delhi that followed, and wrote about it in his Persian diary Dastanbuy and in his letters. He died in Delhi in 1869 and is buried at Nizamuddin.

Poetry and style

Ghalib’s ghazal does more than sigh over love. It questions, argues and laughs at itself. A single sher can hold a philosophical doubt, a joke and a heartbreak at once, which is why his lines are still quoted in conversation, in politics and on WhatsApp statuses. His early Urdu was dense with Persian; his later verse became simpler and sharper.

He also changed Urdu prose. His letters, written to friends as if he were talking to them, broke with the flowery style of his day and are counted among the first modern Urdu prose.

Books

• Diwan-e-Ghalib: his collection of Urdu ghazals, the most printed Urdu book of poetry
• Ud-e-Hindi and Urdu-e-Mualla: collections of his Urdu letters
• Dastanbuy: his Persian account of 1857
• Kulliyat-e-Ghalib (Persian): his Persian poetry, which he himself valued most