ألطاف حسين حالي

Life1837–1914

Hali was born in Panipat in 1837. As a young man he ran away to Delhi to study, and there he came to know Ghalib, whose pupil and friend he became. After 1857 he worked for years as tutor and companion to the poet-nobleman Nawab Mustafa Khan Shefta, then in Lahore at the Punjab Government Book Depot, revising Urdu translations of English books, an experience that changed his ideas of what poetry could do. He later taught in Delhi and, with a stipend from the Nizam of Hyderabad, devoted himself to writing. He died in Panipat in 1914.