Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan - known to  posterity as Ghalib, a `nom de plume' he adopted in the tradition of all classical     Urdu poets, was born in the city of Agra,    of parents with Turkish aristocratic  ancestry, probably on December 27th,   1797. As to the precise date, Imtiyaz Ali Arshi has conjectured, on the basis of Ghalib's horoscope, that the poet might   have been born a month later, in January 1798. Both his father and uncle died while  he was still young, and he spent a good    part of  his early boyhood with his mother's   family. This, of course, began a psychology of ambivalences for him. On the one hand, he grew up relatively free of    any oppressive dominance by adult, male-dominant figures. This, it seems   to me, accounts for at least some of the independent spirit he showed from  very early child-  hood. Click here For More