Ghalib—pen name of Mirza Asadullah Khan—was born in Agra in 1797. In 1810, he moved to Delhi and in 1855 became poet-tutor to the figurehead Mughal, emperor of India. He stayed in Delhi through the uprising of 1857 and died there in 1869. Most of his writings are in Persian but his literary reputation rests almost entirely on his slim Urdu diwan (much of it written before he was eighteen) and several volumes of his Urdu letters.