Wali Dakhani

Wali Muhammad Wali, known as Wali Dakhani (c. 1667-1707), wrote in the Deccan and is conventionally treated as the father of the Urdu ghazal: the arrival of his divan in Delhi around 1700 is the moment northern poets began writing seriously in Urdu rather than Persian. His grave in Ahmedabad was destroyed in 2002. The couplet here is a manifesto against the idea that everything worth saying has already been said — written, fittingly, at the start of the tradition.