Mirza Muhammad Fakhir Makin Dehlavi

Delhi's Persian voice of ten thousand verses — the Indian-style master who walked his own road. Mirza Muhammad Fakhir Makin Dehlavi (birth year unknown – 1757) was a Persian poet of Delhi, of Iranian descent, whose verse belongs to the Indian style. Makin — "the dweller" — was his pen name, and Delhi the city of his life. Some ten thousand of his Persian verses survive, and they show a poet committed to the manner of the Indian-style masters while keeping his own road: of all the Persian poets of India, he leans least on the poets of Iran, and his work carries its own independent music. Little else of his life has come down — no birthplace beyond his Delhi name, and no firm record of the year of his death beyond 1757. He stands in the directory, then, as the record stands: a considerable Persian voice of eighteenth-century Delhi, remembered for the scale and independence of his verse.