Mirza Ghalib

Mirza Ghalib, pen name of Asadullah Beg Khan Ghalib (1797-1869), Urdu- and Persian-language poet of India, best known for his lyrical and spiritual ghazals, a form of poetry in couplets. In a ghazal, each couplet is self-contained and generally unconnected with the next. The poet's skill lies in the full expression of a thought or idea in a single couplet.

Ghalib was born in Āgra, in northern India, and was raised by his uncle. Ghalib had no formal education, but was tutored in Persian by Muhammad Mu'azzam, a noted scholar of the time. It was through his marriage in 1810 to Umrao Begum, the niece of Nawab Ahmad Baksh Khan, ruler of Ferozepur and Loharu, that Ghalib was introduced to the elite circle of intellectuals and artists that surrounded the Indian royal family in Delhi. Such company spurred Ghalib to develop his studies of Urdu and Persian literature, and in 1821 he compiled his first collection of Urdu verse. The following year Ghalib switched to writing entirely in Persian, also known as Farsi. In 1826, on the death of Ghalib's uncle, the British government began providing Ghalib and his family with a small pension for the military services of his uncle. Despite this income, Ghalib remained nearly destitute for most of his life.

Ghalib traveled to Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1928 and was greatly influenced by the Urdu poets he met there. In 1850, the last member of the Mughal imperial line of India, Bahadur Shah, commissioned him to write a history of Bahadur Shah's lineage, the House of Timur, and Ghalib soon became Bahadur Shah's adviser on literary matters.

Ghalib wrote in Urdu and Persian, primarily ghazals and qasidas (odes). His Urdu poetry, while the source of his fame, is small in quantity. His works widened the scope of Urdu poetry, which had tended to be restricted to traditional themes of love and mysticism inherited from its Persian roots. Ghalib's own difficult life, his journey to Calcutta—where he was exposed to the harsh new industrial world beyond the fading Mughal courts—and his experiences of the sacking of Delhi during the anti-British Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 to 1859—in which he witnessed the death of many friends—drove him to write of feelings of alienation and the pain of the human condition. His poetry is also infused with spirituality and the search for the absolute.

Ghalib also wrote much poetry in Persian, as well as several prose works on Mughal and Indian history. His collected letters in Urdu provide an interesting insight into 19th-century India.