Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan - known to  posterity as Ghalib, a `nom de plume' he adopted in the tradition of all classi-cal Urdu poets, was born in the city of Agra, of parents with Turkish aristocr-atic  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