About Ghalib

You may know a great deal already, and in that case you may want to go straight to the ghazals. If you don't know much, let me say a few introductory things. Mirza Asadullah Khan (1797-1869) was born in Agra into a military family of Central Asian immigrants; he lost his father and then his uncle in childhood, and lived for most of his life on his share of a pension from the British East India Company (his uncle had served as a Company military officer). He was well-educated and precocious: by the age of twelve, he claims, he was already writing prose and poetry. In both Persian and Urdu, he wrote most extensively in the traditional mystical-romantic genre of lyric poetry called ghazal.

His family were well-connected, and he was married at the age of thirteen to a girl from an even loftier family. Soon thereafter he moved to Delhi, where he lived for the rest of his life, except for one long trip to Calcutta. He was lively and sociable, ironic, witty, liberal-minded, with a humanity and a sense of humor that delighted his many friends. Writer of some of the most irresistible letters in Urdu, he revelled in the new English postal service and conducted a lifelong correspondence with his many Muslim, Hindu, and English friends.

Financial difficulties were a constant headache: he never owned books, or a house, or any property except an inadequate patchwork of pensions and stipends from patrons. But even when the roof collapsed during the monsoon, he never for a moment abandoned his vision of the world. He maintained at all costs the leisured, Persianized lifestyle of the Mughal aristocrat he knew himself to be. He tried hard to induce the British to become the kind of literary patrons the Mughals had been; the Rebellion of 1857 was the most painful time of his life. He died in 1869, in straitened circumstances. His wife did not long survive him; they had had a number of children, but all had all died in infancy.