Mirza Ghalib

Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan, known as Mirza Ghalib, was an Indian poet and letter writer of the Mughal Empire who lived from 1797 to 1869, writing during the empire's final years and the rise of British colonial rule. Composing in both Persian and Urdu, with a Persian body of work roughly five times longer than his Urdu output, his fame nonetheless rests chiefly on his Urdu ghazals, noted for intricate imagery and layered meanings addressing love, loss, philosophy and the human condition, and he spent most of his life in poverty despite his later renown. He remains one of the most widely read poets in South Asia and among the South Asian diaspora today.