Where Paradise Meets Phalgun: Ghalib, Nazir, and the City They Loved by Sandeep Kulshrestha
Agra, the city that breathes chaos in the wire-ridden streets of the old town, was once a thriving citadel. It was the heart of Emperor Akbar’s aspirations as well as his secular and cultural experiments. The syncretic culture of Agra is also contextual to the early Mughals’ deep engagement and absorption of local traditions. And of course, the reader of this blog would know that Akbar’s reign was a great time for poets and creative people, and it was a patronage that continued till the rule of Emperor Shah Jahan and persisted, albeit more quietly, even during the more fundamentalist reign of Aurangzeb thereafter. Agra was also known as Akbarabad, the city of the Great Mughal, Akbar. In this historical city, a poet called Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan, popularly known as Mirza Ghalib, was born in 1797, in an area called “Kala Mahal,” where he lived until the age of 13. He spent his remaining life in Delhi, where he passed away in 1869. Though Ghalib rarely wrote about Agra in his poems, he ...
