Ghalib's Persian poems outnumber his Urdu five to one, yet Urdu made him
Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan (1797 to 1869), known as Ghalib, wrote in Persian and Urdu as the Mughal Empire faded and British rule rose. His Persian output is at least five times larger than his Urdu, yet it is the Urdu ghazals that keep him famous across South Asia and its diaspora.
His poems wrestle with love, loss, philosophy and political upheaval, and his ghazals are prized for dense imagery and meanings stacked in layers. A thread runs through them: life as one long painful struggle that ends only with life itself. He lived most of his years in poverty, and he knew grief intimately. None of his seven children survived infancy, and in a letter he called marriage a second imprisonment following the first confinement, which was life.
He was born on 27 December 1797 at Kala Mahal in Agra. On his father's side the family was Seljuq Turkish: grandfather Mirza Qoqan Baig, a descendant of Sultan Berkyaruq, came to India from Samarkand in the reign of Ahmad Shah in the mid-eighteenth century, served in Lahore, Delhi and Jaipur, and settled in Agra. Ghalib's father, Mirza Abdullah Baig, married Izzat-ut-Nisa Begum, a Kashmiri, and served first the ruler of Lucknow, later the Hyderabad court, before dying in battle at Alwar in 1803, when his son was barely five. The uncle who raised the boy died in 1806 after falling from an elephant.
At thirteen, in 1810, Ghalib married Umrao Begum, daughter of Nawab Ilahi Bakhsh, and soon moved to Delhi with his younger brother Mirza Yousuf, who had schizophrenia from youth and died in the turmoil of 1857. Accounts of the marriage conflict; his wife was remembered as devout and conservative.
Recognition eventually came from the throne. In 1850 Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar honoured him with the titles Dabir-ul-Mulk, secretary of state, and Najm-ud-daula, star of the state, marking his entry into Delhi's nobility, along with Mirza Nosha, which let him use Mirza in his name. Because the emperor wrote verse himself, Ghalib became his poetry tutor in 1854. He also tutored Prince Fakhr-ud Din Mirza, the emperor's eldest son, who died in 1856, and served as royal historian of the Mughal court.
Source: Ghalib
