Mirza Abdul-Qadir Bedil

Mirza Abdul-Qadir Bedil (1642–1720), born at Azimabad (present-day Patna) into a Chaghatay Barlas family, was the foremost Persian poet of the Indian style (Sabk-e-Hindi) and a Sufi thinker of the school of wahdat al-wujud — the unity of being. Orphaned young and raised by his uncle, he taught himself Persian, philosophy, medicine, astrology and music, and spent most of his life in Delhi, where his gatherings drew scholars, Sufis and poets. He refused court patronage and panegyric, writing instead for truth as he saw it, on the side of the common people against a corrupt clergy. His sixteen books hold nearly 147,000 verses — ghazals, rubais and four great philosophical masnavis (Muhit-e-Azam, Tilism-e-Hairat, Tur-e-Marifat, Irfan), plus the prose autobiography Chahar Unsur. His verse is famously difficult: dense, paradoxical, riddle-like, building meaning out of startling compounds and metaphors. That difficulty became his gift to Urdu poetry — Ghalib learnt his "meaning-creating" art from Bedil and called him, in effect, Ghalib's Ghalib; Iqbal too read him deeply. He died at Delhi in 1720, where his shrine-garden, Bagh-e-Bedil, still stands.