Momin Khan Momin

Momin Khan Momin wrote one line that Ghalib is said to have offered his entire divan for. He was born in Delhi into a family of Kashmiri physicians attached to the Mughal court, was trained in medicine himself, and practised it alongside astrology, chess and poetry - a combination that was normal for a cultivated man of his class and city. He belonged to the last generation of the Delhi school, writing under the patronage of Akbar II's court and its successors, alongside Ghalib and Zauq. His subject was almost entirely love, and his distinction is a compression that reads as conversation rather than declamation. The famous line - that you were with me when nobody else was - turns on an ambiguity that can mean both a lover's presence and her absence, and the story that Ghalib offered his whole collected works in exchange for it has been repeated for two centuries and is probably not true. He was also a religious conservative who wrote in support of the jihad movement of Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi, which sits oddly beside the love poetry. He was a practising physician throughout and is said to have treated patients without charging them, on the principle that medicine was not a trade. He died in 1852 of a fall from a roof, five years before the rising that destroyed the world he wrote in. Ghalib survived it and described a Delhi with nobody left to read to, and the Delhi school of Urdu poetry ends with that generation. Momin is the least read of its three great names and the one poets tend to prefer.

• Lived: 1800 CE – 1852 CE
• Nationality: Indian
• Roles: poet