Aagha Akbarabadi

Aagha Akbarabadi (d. 1879) was a classical Urdu poet of Agra — Akbarabad, the old Mughal city whose name he carried as his own. His real name was Meerza Aagha Husain, and no birth year is recorded for him anywhere; he lived in the early-to-mid 1800s, a contemporary of Dagh Dehlvi, while the Mughal Empire was falling apart around him. He never chased courts or patrons: his ghazals speak in the plain language of Agra's streets, and their hero is the rind — the free drinker whose prayer-mat is spread at the tavern door, who answers preachers with wit and takes the beloved's glance as both wound and worship. Twenty-four of his ghazals and thirty-two of his sher survive — the work of a poet famous in his own city and collected only long after his death.