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Maulana Altaf Hussain Hali
(1837-1914) (Urdu: مولانا الطاف حسین حالی) was an Urdu poet, and the last pupil
of Mirza Ghalib. He is also one of the most well-regarded biographers of
Ghalib's life, and a commentator of his poetry.
Born in Panipat in 1837, Altaf Hussain was educated in the same city and later
ran away to Delhi where he wished to gain further education in the Indo-Islamic
poetic tradition. It was here he chose the cognomen of "Khastah" (The Spent One,
or The Tired One). He was forced to return home, and pursued a government job
until displaced by the Mutiny of 1857.
After this turning point in his life, he drifted from job to job for several
years, arriving eventually in Lahore in the mid 1870s, where he began to compose
his epic poem on the request of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the Musaddas e-Madd o-Jazr
e-Islam ("An elegiac poem on the Ebb and Tide of Islam") under the new poetic
pseudonym of "Hali" (The Contemporary). The Musaddas, or Musaddas-e-Hali, as it
is often known, was published in 1879 to critical acclaim, and considered to
herald the modern age of Urdu poetry. Hali also wrote one of the earliest works
of literary criticism in Urdu, Muqaddamah-i Shi'r-o-Sha'iri.
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