- Lived:
- 1723, Agra (then Akbarābād) → Delhi, the city of his making and unmaking → Lucknow from 1782, where he died on 21 September 1810
- Field:
- poetry — the master of the Urdu ghazal in its first great century, and the language's first memoirist and first anthologist
- The Big Idea:
- Poetry does not need ornament; it needs a wound and the courage to speak plainly about it. Mīr took the polished Persian lyric, filled it with street Urdu and personal grief, and made the record of what it felt like when Mughal Delhi died.
- In their words:
- "Breathe gently — the most delicate of work goes on here: the universe is a workshop of glass." (his couplet le sāṅs bhī āhista, translated in this chapter)
- If you remember one thing:
- Ghālib — the greatest of Urdu poets, and famously stingy with praise — looked back at Mīr and conceded in verse: you are not the only master of Rekhta, Ghālib; they say in a past age there was someone called Mīr.