Ghalib Academy

To perpetuate the memory of Mirza Ghalib in India and abroad, and to preserve, promote and disseminate his literary legacy and the traditions of the Urdu language.

Ghalib Academy is an educational, cultural and research institution of national standing in Delhi, founded in 1969 by Hakeem Abdul Hameed and inaugurated by the then President of India, Dr Zakir Husain, during the Ghalib centenary celebrations. Established in memory of the nineteenth-century Urdu poet Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, it stands in the Nizamuddin area near the tomb of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya and the mausoleum of Ghalib himself. Its facilities include a Ghalib museum, a rich research library, an art gallery, an auditorium, a publication centre and a computerised calligraphy training centre run in collaboration with the National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language, and it is visited by scholars, writers and poets from India and abroad.

Founded during the 1969 centenary of Ghalib's death by the physician and philanthropist Hakeem Abdul Hameed, the Ghalib Academy set out to preserve the literary legacy of one of the greatest poets of the Urdu language and the intellectual and cultural heritage of his era. Over the decades it built a museum and a library holding rare materials on Ghalib and Urdu literature, published scholarship, trained calligraphers, and became a centre for seminars and celebrations of Urdu, sustaining the memory of Ghalib and the wider traditions of the language near the very place where he is buried.