Like all poets of the ghazal, Mirza Asadullah Khan (1797-1869) is best known by his takhallus, Ghalib, the pen-name with which he signed his ghazals. He was born in Agra, moved to Delhi at an early age, and but for an absence of three years during which he visited Calcutta, he never left Delhi again, not even during the great rebellion of 1857.