Maulana Altaf Hussain Hali was an Urdu poet, and the last student of Mirza Ghalib. He is also one of the most well-regarded biographers of Ghalib's life, and a commentator of his poetry.
Born Altaf Hussain in Panipat in 1837, he 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, the Musaddas e-Madd o-Jazr e-Islam (An elegaic 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.
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