Mirza Ghalib: Life, Poetry and Letters

Ghalib was born in Agra on 27 December 1797 into a family of Central Asian Turkish descent; his father and uncle were soldiers and both died when he was a child. He married at thirteen and soon moved to Delhi, where he lived the rest of his life. None of his seven children survived infancy.

He lived largely on pensions and patronage, and money troubles never left him: he travelled to Calcutta in the late 1820s to plead his pension case, and in 1847 he was briefly imprisoned for gambling. In 1850 the emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar gave him titles and the task of writing a history of the Mughals, and he became the emperor's poetry teacher. He lived through the uprising of 1857 in Delhi and recorded it in a Persian diary, Dastanbuy. He died on 15 February 1869 and is buried near the shrine of Nizamuddin.

Ghalib's Urdu divan is small, under two thousand couplets, and he himself thought his Persian poetry finer. Yet it is the Urdu ghazals that made him immortal: dense, paradoxical and modern in their doubt. A famous example: hazaaroñ KHwaahisheñ aisii ki har KHwaahish pe dam nikle / bahut nikle mire armaan lekin phir bhii kam nikle ("Thousands of desires, each worth dying for; many of my longings came true, and still too few"). See What is a ghazal?

He admired his great predecessor and said so in a celebrated couplet: he was not the only master of Urdu poetry, for "they say there was a Mir in times gone by". Read Mir's ghazals on this site.

Late in life Ghalib wrote his letters in Urdu rather than Persian, and wrote them as if talking to his friends face to face. Published as Ud-e-Hindi (1868) and Urdu-e-Mu'alla (1869), they are among the founding works of modern Urdu prose and a vivid record of Delhi before and after 1857.