There's a small street running through the old quarter of Delhi. It is on this street that the poet Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797-1869) poured his angst out in poetry. And though he was the best poet of his day, he was never made the court bard. That honour was bestowed on his contemporary, Zauq. One hundred and twenty-nine years after his death, the house where Ghalib wrote is ignored by state and literary historians. If one pauses there in the hope of finding a writer's hallowed space, an empty bottle of wine, yellowing paper, pens, even cooking implements, as one does in Goethe's house in Frankfurt, one would be sorely disappointed.

Today, the house of Mirza Ghalib has a shoe store and an STD booth, these are perhaps, a sign of the times. That of Zauq's is a public latrine ( and a national disgrace.) But it must have been very different when Mirza Ghalib's Shia forebears migrated to Bahadur Shah Zafar's Delhi.

Mirza Ghalib who had established himself as a poet writing in the Persian language, began to write in Urdu. His royal patron and the last of the Mughal emperors, Bahadur Shah Zafar, gave him a sum of Rs 35. This, perhaps, is the reason why he wrote a somewhat laudatory account of the British in his poem on the Mutiny of 1857.There is no doubt, though that he was politically loyal to the British, culturally loyal to the Mughals.

Poor and often inebriated, Mirza Ghalib wrote with a facile pen: the ghazal ( ode ) marsiya ( elegy ), qaseedah ( encomium) tehniyat-namah ( epithalamium ) and hijo (insults ) and epistles. He also wrote poetry that was sometimes lyrical, sometimes argumentative. All in all, he was one of the greatest Urdu poets, indeed, one of the major poets of all times.