Mirza
Asadullah Khan (the pseudonym Ghalib means superior)
was court poetto the Mughal
emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, and also the
last great classical and the first modern poet of India.
Urdu
literature enjoyed a great flowering after Aurangzeb's
death, but the Muslim
conquest was undone by foreign invasion, religious intolerance,
British imperialism, ineffective Mughal rulers and the 1857
Mutiny. Ghalib was born in 1797 at Agra, son a high-ranking
army officer and descendent of the ancient Seljuq
kings. At 13 he married a daughter of a Mughal nobleman
and moved to Delhi. He enjoyed titles and annuities from
the Moghul court, but was never far from poverty. On personal
matters, Ghalib maintained an aristocratic reserve, and
his life is not well known. Though now a household name
on the subcontinent, he died in Delhi in 1869, stone-deaf
and with achievements largely unrecognized.
Ghalib's poetry
Ghalib's poetry is full of intense grief and yearning —
for an earlier love affair, death of an adopted son, for
the disappearance of court life and a world of beauty and
reflection. His period was one of political, religious and
intellectual controversy, when oriental concepts were invaded
by western rationalism, and the poetry
is not primarily one of feeling but of sensuous expression
of an uniquely perceptive, original and synthesizing mind.
In this sense, Ghalib is a contemporary, and he employed
many of the techniques of western modernism. In their different
ways, Mir,
Nazir
and Ghalib are the masters of Urdu poetry, and if Ghalib's
life was not a happy one, the same was largely true of other
Urdu poets: Atish,
Siraj,
Daud,
Mir, Insha,
Bahadur Shah,
and Zauq.
Reading
the Urdu
Urdu,
a vernacular fusion of Persian and native Indian languages,
appeared
as poetry in the courts of Bijapur and Golconda in the 16th
century and spread to the courts of Lucknow
and Delhi in the late 18th century. Poets assigned themselves
to a master, and their work was generally not written down
but promulgated through musha'irahs or formal readings.
The poetry is quantitative and formal, the common
forms including qasida (panegyric), haju
(satire) masnavi (reflective narrative) and ghazal
(love, erotic or metaphysical). Ghalib was a master of the
qasida and ghazal.
Ghazals are written in she'rs or hemistiches, which
rhyme in a simple but unvarying way. Imagery can be original
but tends to the conventional, drawing from Asian history,
religion and mysticism. The loved one addressed is male, and
the conception is always sublime. To these difficulties facing
a western reader, Ghalib adds unusual use of words, a more
persianized diction, fractured syntax and lacunae of argument.
Not a easy poet, therefore, and not as accomplished as Mir
or Nazir, but probing and individual.
Books and Internet resources
Urdu poetry is available, in the original and translation,
from bookshops and the Internet. Those wishing to speak the
language, or at least pronounce
the poetry correctly, should try courses on cassette,
CD
and the Internet at Ukindia
and VitalStar.
Examples of Ghalib's poetry can be found at Mirza
Ghalib, Asad
Archive, Archives
of Urdu Poetry and Pakdata,
in hindi here,
and in both Urdu and English at urdumedia.
For Urdu anthologies try UrduPoetry.
eUrduBazaar and
Urdu
Poetry Plaza and the excellent Amin
Rajwani search engine. Indian history and culture is covered
by Internet
Indian History Sourcebook, History
of India and Itihaas.
Useful books on Ghalib and Urdu poetry include A. Ali's An
Anthology of Urdu Poetry (1992), the Ghazal of Ghalib
entry in A. Ahad's Encyclopedia of Islam (1971), D.
Matthew and C. Shackle's An Anthology of Classical Urdu
Love Lyrics (1972) and M. Memon's Studies in the Urdu
Ghazal and Prose Fiction (1979).
