Mir Hasan

Mir Hasan (1727–1786), born Mir Ghulam Hasan in Delhi's Syed Wada, was the foremost masnavi poet of Urdu — and the grandfather of Mir Babar Ali Anis, the future king of the marsiya. Trained first by Khwaja Mir Dard, he came of age in a Delhi that was breaking apart: his family moved to Faizabad in Awadh as the invasions pressed, and he later settled at Lucknow, where the displaced Delhi school rebuilt itself under the Nawabs. There he composed, in 1784, the work that made him immortal: Sehr-ul-Bayan, the masnavi romance of Benazir and Badr-e-Munir — a love story told with such sweetness of language that it became the model Urdu narrative poem. Around it stand his other masnavis — Gulzar-e-Iram, the verse-account of the Delhi to Awadh migration; Ramuz-ul-Arifin, a Sufi masnavi; Khwan-e-Nemat, on the dishes of Asaf-ud-Daula's dastarkhwan — plus a ghazal divan and a Persian tazkira of Urdu poets, Tazkira-i-Shuara-i-Urdu. Four of his sons were poets; through Anis, his grandson, his bloodline carried the masnavi's music into the marsiya's age. He died at Lucknow in 1786.