WELL VERSED WITH GHALIB

Mehr Afshan Farooqi’s academic rigour and bilingual ease make her the ideal Ghalib biographer

This Ghalib biography in English will stand up to rigorous academic scrutiny

There have been commentaries and translations aplenty—ranging from good, bad to indifferent—of Ghalib’s spectacular poetry but no substantial biography in English. A reader curious about Ghalib and his times, the contradictions of his age and his literary career, the complexities of his craft and tradition, would have to go digging in larger narratives on the development of Urdu prose and poetics and literary histories. What has been singularly missing, given the burgeoning crop of writings in English on Urdu literature, is an exhaustive critical biography of Ghalib in English, one that meets the requirements of rigorous academic scrutiny and easy, accessible insights into the work of one of Urdu’s greatest poets.

This need has been filled by Mehr Afshan Farooqi’s Ghalib: A Wilderness at My Doorstep. Given her long years of studying Ghalib as well as her bilingual ease, she is singularly well-placed to ‘locate’ Ghalib for the modern reader in his time and circumstance and also in the continuum of Urdu poetry that is like a ceaselessly flowing river.

Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797-1869), the pre-eminent Delhi poet, was born in Agra to a family of soldiers of central Asian descent. Conscious from an early age of his own undeniable talents as also his striking good looks, he moved to Delhi some years after his marriage at the age of 13. Delhi was to become his home for the next five decades where he lived and wrote except for a hiatus of three years when he travelled to Calcutta (October 1826-November 1829) to seek the restoration of his inherited pension from the Governor General. Always a tenant, never a house owner, he shifted homes but remained in the neighbourhood of Gali Qasim Jan for all his years in Delhi. A prolific letter-writer, we know a great deal about his life, and his city, from the letters initially written in Persian, till he switched to Urdu.

The last of the classical poets and the first of the moderns, Ghalib brought Urdu poetry to the point where it was ready to take wing and soar in new directions. As Farooqi notes: “Ghalib is the only Urdu poet to have inspired an entire commentarial tradition…. Despite having the reputation of being a ‘difficult’ poet, Ghalib became a household name because his work was published regularly. One can also reverse the argument and say he was published because he was a household name. Nonetheless we cannot deny that authorial-editorial choices and print publication played an important role in making Ghalib the most recognised name in the Urdu canon.”

It is to be hoped that what Altaf Husain Hali’s seminal work, Yaadgar-e Ghalib, was to an earlier generation of Urdu readers, Wilderness at My Doorstep will prove to be for newer readers who access Ghalib in English. What is more, it comes with far more rigorous research and analytical tools than were available to the most diligent of Urdu writers a century ago. ■