Mirza Ghalib : The great classical poet

Staff Reporter
Ghalib was the pen name of Mirza Asad Ullah Khan. He was court poet to the last Mughal Emperor in Delhi. Mirza Ghalib was born in Agra to a Turkish family that had originally relocated to Samarkand to avoid political upheaval in Turkey. His grandfather then moved to India in the late 1700s. His family became a military family, his grandfather, father and uncles all serving as officers in the Indian army. Ghalib's father was killed in battle when Ghalib was just a boy; he was subsequently raised by his uncle and other distant relatives. Ghalib was married at a young age, apparently not a happy marriage, and all seven of his children died in infancy. These terrible sorrows seem to have inspired his interior exploration, through doubts and grief, but also to moments of profound clarity and artistic beauty. Ghalib's life bridged several cultures, traditions, languages, and social strata. He is called the last of India's classical poets, and the first of the moderns. He was of Turkish descent, but an Indian poet. He was a court poet who often wrote in the courtly language of Persian, but he is best known for his couplets written in the popular local tongue of Urdu. He wrote at the end of the Mughal Empire and the beginning of British rule in India. His poetry spoke to Muslims and Hindus alike. His willingness to wrestle with modern doubts in his writing have caused some to call him an atheist, while his mystical love poetry makes him a favorite of Sufis. In invigorating bouquet of ghazals, witty and astonishing and deliciously difficult,from a poet who deserves to be better known in the West--and is bound to be, after this book. " -- Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress Of Spices. "How fine it is to see a new collection of Ghalib brought into English. His ghazals offer spiritual and emotional wisdom, scope, self-knowledge, beauty, and a way of leaping from statement to statement whose influence on American poetry is already apparent.This is a splendid and needed collection of work by a poet of major significance." -- Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. "What if we demolish the ego, dig under the ruins, as Rumi tells us to, andinstead of finding the divine Friend, we find just the ground we're standing on? Ghalib and Robert Bly face this stark possibility with their fine, blended gaze." -- Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi Product Description. Ghalib is an astonishing poet from India, perhaps the most important poet since Kabir. In The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib: Selected Poems of Ghalib, poet Robert Bly and Urdu scholar Sunil Dutta collaborate to bring the delicacy and intensity of Ghalib's poetry to readers of English. This collection of thirty ghazals by Ghalib also serves as an introduction to the ghazal, the elegant and amazing poetic form revered for centuries in the Muslim world. Ghalib had a difficult life, full of rejections and excesses; much of his life was spent in Delhi during the British conquest of India. Ghalib's poems often mingle humour and anguish. His form and detail are exquisite. Many emotions flood into one poem--he complains, he pokes fun at intellectuals, he grieves over desires--and it is up to the reader to find the thread that holds the couplets together. Ghalib ends "The Road with Thorns" with a charming boast: The lightning that fell on Moses should have fallen on Ghalib. You know we always adjust the amount of the wine to the quality of the drinker His work lies in the tradition of Hafiz and Rumi; and yet he manages to join that fervor with a contemporary style. Ghalib's ghazals remain indisputably modern, intense, and as fresh as ever.

19 June, 2013 Wednesday

Mirza Ghalib : The great classical poet