Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797-1869) lived at a time of historic change in India a period when the British conquest of India was in its ascendancy and the Mughal empire was coming to an end. He was witness to the ravaging of Delhi and its courtly culture culminating in the uprising of 1857. This trauma accompanied by his personal losses informs his poetry evidenced in Divan-EGhalib containing 235 Urdu ghazals redolent with a sense of loss grief and a plangent longing for a vanished way of lif