Mir Taqi Mir

• 1. Introduction

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  Mir Taqi Mir was born in Agra in 1723, into a world that was just beginning to discover what the Urdu language could do. His father, Mir Abdullah, was a religious man with a devoted following who preached the importance of love and the value of compassion. Those lessons never left his son. They became the marrow of his poetry. By the time Mir died on the 21st of September 1810 in Lucknow, he had filled six volumes with 13,585 couplets and earned the kind of reverence that even his rivals could not argue with. Mirza Ghalib, the poet who would later stand as Urdu's other great giant, acknowledged through his own verses that Mir was a genius who deserved respect. How did a boy orphaned in his teens, robbed of his inheritance by his step-brothers, and driven from his beloved Delhi by repeated invasions become the poet who helped shape the Urdu language itself? That is the story this documentary follows.

• 2. A Father's Legacy

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  Mir Abdullah was no ordinary father. A deeply religious man with a large following, he centred his teaching on love and compassion, and his son absorbed those values so completely that they would surface in every ghazal and masnavi Mir ever wrote. When Mir Abdullah died while his son was still a teenager, he left behind not wealth but debt. The step-brothers moved quickly: they seized whatever inheritance remained. First a paternal step-uncle stepped in to care for the young Mir, and then, after that uncle also died, a maternal step-uncle took over. The grief Mir carried from these repeated losses is not incidental to his art. It is his art. His translator C. M. Naim documented at length the many patrons Mir relied on after leaving Agra for Delhi, including the Mughal Amir-ul-Umara and Mir Bakhshi, Khan-i Dauran, who gave him a daily allowance and who was himself, like Mir, a native of Agra. Mir's grandfather had once made his own long journey, migrating from Hejaz to Hyderabad and then to Agra, and that displacement echoed down the generations.

• 3. The Making of Rekhta

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  Syed Sadaat Ali, a Sayyid from the town of Amroha, is the man Mir himself credited with steering him toward Urdu poetry. Mir described it plainly in his own words: "A Sayyid from Amroha took the trouble to put me on to writing poetry in the Urdu medium, the verse which resembled Persian poetry. Urdu was the language of Hindustan by the authority of the king and presently it was gaining currency. I worked at it very hard and practised this art to such a degree that I came to be acknowledged by the literari of the city." At the time, Urdu was still a language being assembled from its parts. Mir built on his native Hindustani, adding a careful measure of Persian diction and imagery rather than drowning the base tongue in it. The result was a poetic register called Rekhta, sometimes Hindui: elegant, natural, and simple enough to reach the ears, as Mir put it, of both the young and the old. His six diwans, collected under the title Kulliyat-e-Mir, contain ghazals on love that remain the anchor of his literary reputation. His masnavi Mu'amlat-e-Ishq, known in English as The Stages of Love, stands as one of the greatest love poems in the Urdu tradition.

• 4. Delhi and Its Wounds

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  Kuchha Chelan in Old Delhi was where Mir lived for much of his adult life, and he watched the city he loved be sacked again and again. Ahmad Shah Abdali's raids on Delhi began in 1748, and the plundering distressed Mir deeply. He poured that distress into his couplets. The grief of seeing Delhi fall apart is woven through his poetry with a specificity that gives his melancholy its particular weight: this was not abstract sorrow but the lament of a man who had walked those streets. His autobiography, Zikr-e-Mir, covers his childhood through his first years in Lucknow, but scholars have noted that it conceals as much as it reveals, with entries that are undated and presented in no particular order. Frances W. Pritchett pointed out a revealing contradiction in the autobiographical masnavis Mu'amlat-e-Ishq and Khwab o Khyal-e Mir: the austere, grief-stricken poet those first-person poems portray sits uneasily beside the picture drawn by Andalib Shadani, whose research suggested a poet quite capable of unabashed eroticism in his verse.

• 5. Exile in Lucknow

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  Mir arrived in Lucknow in 1782 at the invitation of Asaf-ud-Daulah, who ruled there. The welcome was kind, but the fit was poor. The courtiers of Lucknow regarded Mir as old-fashioned, and Mir returned the contempt. He dismissed the work of the Lucknow poet Jur'at as merely "kissing and cuddling." His relationship with Asaf-ud-Daulah grew strained over time, and Mir eventually cut his ties with the court entirely. The final years were isolated ones. His health deteriorated. His daughter, his son, and his wife all died before him, and those losses sharpened the pathos that already ran through everything he wrote. He died on the 21st of September 1810 from an overdose of a purgative and was buried in Lucknow. In modern times, railway construction is believed to have disturbed the marker at his burial site. A cenotaph was built in the 1970s near the actual location, with assistance from Maqbool Ahmed Lari, the founder of the Mir Academy in Lucknow.

• 6. Ghalib's Admission

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  Mirza Rafi Sauda was Mir's famous contemporary, a rival Urdu poet of real standing. But the comparison that has occupied lovers of Urdu poetry for generations is the one between Mir and Mirza Ghalib, who came later. Ghalib acknowledged Mir's genius directly, through couplets of his own that expressed respect rather than rivalry. His contemporary Zauq held the same view. Both poets, though rivals with each other, agreed on Mir's greatness and said so in their verse. The debate over whether Mir surpasses Ghalib or Ghalib surpasses Mir has never been fully resolved, which may be the most fitting tribute to both. Mir's reputation has also found its way into fiction: Khushwant Singh's novel Delhi: A Novel gives details about the poet's life and adventures, and the 2016 Pakistani biographical film Mah e Mir, directed by Anjum Shahzad, featured Fahad Mustafa in the role of Mir Taqi Mir.

• 7. What He Left Behind

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  Beyond the six diwans of the Kulliyat-e-Mir, Mir produced a biographical dictionary of Urdu poets called Nikat-us-Shura, written in Persian. He wrote Faiz-e-Mir, a collection of five stories about Sufis and faqirs, reportedly composed for the education of his son Mir Faiz Ali. His Persian autobiography Zikr-e-Mir remains the main source scholars use when reconstructing his life, however imperfectly. He also left a collection of Persian poems, the Kulliyat-e-Farsi, and a separate collection of rubaiyat. The variety of forms inside his Kulliyat is striking: ghazal, masnavi, qasida, rubai, mustezaad, satire. Mir did not confine himself to any single register. He built Rekhta from Hindustani foundations, made it carry Persian refinement without losing its natural ease, and in doing so created a poetic language that guided the poets who came after him. The cenotaph in Lucknow that Maqbool Ahmed Lari helped build stands near, but not at, the place where Mir actually rests, a small irony for a poet whose life was defined by displacement.