Mir Jafar Zatalli

Mir Muhammad Ja'far Zatalli (birth year disputed — c. 1658/59, Narnaul in the Delhi Subah; died 1713, Delhi) is often called the first satirist of the Urdu language. Born into a Shia Sayyid family of Narnaul (in present-day Haryana), he lived through the reigns of Aurangzeb, Bahadur Shah I and Farrukhsiyar, served princes and amirs — including Prince Kam Bakhsh — and turned his pen into a weapon. His art was hajw: scathing lampoon of the nobles, maulvis, kotwals and officials of a decaying empire, written in rekhta — a crude, living mixture of Urdu and Persian that the refined called nonsense and he made his own (his takhallus Zatalli means exactly that: "the babbler of nonsense"). His verse spares nothing and nobody, and much of it is too profane for the public page — which is why this entry leads with the life, not the lines. The life ended the way the satire demanded: after he parodied Emperor Farrukhsiyar's coronation coin in verse, the emperor had him strangled with a shoelace — tasma-kashi — in Delhi in 1713. His Zatal Nama survives in nineteenth-century lithograph editions, and in him Urdu poetry learns its first, dangerous lesson: that the pen can laugh at a throne.