Aish Dehlvi

Aish Dehlvi (1779–1874) was a classical Urdu poet of Delhi, remembered above all as one of the most outspoken critics of Ghalib's poetic style. A physician by profession — he is cited in the Ghalib tradition as Hakeem Agha Jaan Aish — he lived his long life in the Delhi of the late Mughal and early colonial eras, writing in the Delhi idiom at a time when the ghazal's language and obscurity were themselves matters of public debate. He is "one of the most vocal critics of Ghalib's poetic style," and the anecdote that preserves his name is a mushaira exchange in which he teased Ghalib for verse that only its author could understand. His surviving work is small — sixteen ghazals, six selected couplets and one qita, with a modern Kulliyat-e-Aish (1992) as his book — but the couplets that survive show a poet of wit, plain speech and moral clarity: the heart's unnamed ache, the candle burning out at dawn, and a world whose colours and fragrances no longer tempt those who have seen its impermanence.