Mustafa Khan Shefta

His early teachers included Mian ji Maal Maal and Haji Muhammad Nur Naqshbandi, and he began composing poetry as a teenager ¹. He became a leading member of the Delhi literary circle that included Ghalib, Zauq and Momin Khan Momin, and his home was known as a venue of mushairas and a centre of poetic activity and patronage ¹. He sought poetic correction (islah) for his own Urdu verse from Momin, and for his Persian verse from Ghalib ¹. The Urdu article adds that it was Shefta who introduced the young Altaf Hussain Hali to Ghalib ².

He was particularly close to Ghalib, standing by him as a friend and patron, helping him in times of need and visiting him in prison when he was in trouble with the authorities ¹.

After the rebellion of 1857 the British arrested him on suspicion of involvement with the rebels, because of his close ties to Bahadur Shah Zafar and his relationships with Walidad Khan and his father-in-law, the general Ismail Beg Hamadani ¹. He was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment and his estates were seized, only half being restored on appeal ¹. The Urdu article records that his great Delhi library was looted and burned in the rising, and that his sentence was remitted and a pension fixed on the intercession of Nawab Siddiq Hasan Khan ². The prison in which he was held was later bought by his son Nawab Ishaq Khan, and the family home known as Mustafa Castle was built on the site, keeping the original prison room within its design ¹.

His poetry was romantic in disposition, and his writing was widely praised for its simplicity, clarity and purity of diction ¹. Among his admirers were Ghalib and Hali, who acknowledged in verse his debt to Shefta's teaching ¹. In prose he authored an early history of Urdu poetry, Gulshan-e-be-khaar ("The Thornless Garden") ¹.

In middle life he performed the Hajj pilgrimage, during which his ship was wrecked on an uninhabited island and he and his fellow travellers were rescued after several weeks; he recorded the journey in a short account ¹. After the Hajj, the sources say, he became more religious and his writing turned spiritual and abstemious in tone ¹. No source read for this record names a legal school or order for him: one of his teachers bore a Naqshbandi name, which is a teacher's affiliation and not his own attested one ¹³.

He died in 1869 at his residence in Kucha Chelaan, Delhi, and was buried in the family graveyard near the Nizamuddin shrine ¹. His son Nawab Ishaq Khan became a leading figure of the Aligarh movement, and his grandson Nawab Mohammad Ismail Khan a leading Muslim League politician and a signatory of the first Indian constitution ¹.

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.