Ghalib

It has taken nearly 250 years for the first full length translation of Mir’s putative autobiography, Zikr-e Mir to appear in Urdu. The section that has been consistently elided is the one relating to “jokes and witty anecdotes”, which Mir, arguably the greatest Urdu poet ever, appended at the end of his autobiography for the “entertainment and edification of friends”. Consider here, two of them: A portrait of Mir (Wikimedia Commons) An atheist called Abdur Rahman used to sit in the courtyard of the building…

Have you ever fallen so deeply in love with a place that you’ve wanted to protect it with all your might? Poet Mirza Ghalib felt this way about Banaras, the city also known as Varanasi and Kashi. In his Persian masnavi Chiragh-e-Dair, he wrote: “ta’ālallah banāras chashm-e-bad dūr/bahisht-e-khurram-o-firdaus-e-ma’mūr”. Maaz bin Bilal’s Temple Lamp: Verses on Banaras, a recent English translation, presents this as: “May God keep Banaras/ from the evil eye, / it is heavenly bliss, paradise established”. Hindustani…

In 2019, I published my collection of poems Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu. I was very clear that just as Delhi and Belfast were cities I had lived in, perhaps even more significantly I lived in multiple languages and cultures. English and Urdu being two primary ones for me. Wherever we go, we carry our cultures with us, and inhabit them. And so I wrote poems such as Biryani in Belfast on my culinary experiments with food and comparative politics in that troubled city. And this hybridity is what makes…

Tell us a bit about your journey with Persian. Why, how and when did you start learning? I learnt Persian formally during my MA days from the Iran Culture House in Delhi but I had been interested in Mirza Ghalib from childhood and Urdu is my mother tongue. Urdu traces the etymology for many of its words to Persian and Arabic. Ghalib’s Urdu poetry employs a more Persianized register than most poets. With Ghalib as my favourite Urdu poet, I felt pushed towards Persian to read even his Urdu poetry and eventually started…

Mirza Ghalib’s andaaz-e-bayaan, we know, is aur (ie his style is extraordinary). But many of us, who relish his poems in Urdu or translated into English, might not know yet the extent of this aur. While Ghalib’s Urdu poetry remains popular, we can’t access another part of his work. “The bulk of his work was written in Persian... very little of his Persian poetry has been translated into English,” says the introduction to the English translation of Ghalib’s long poem in Persian, Chirag-e-dair. Temple Lamp is said to be…

Urdu literary theorist Gopi Chand Narang (born in 1931), who was honoured by both India and Pakistan, died on June 15. His scholarship pegs down two hostile nations, each of which conferred its highest honour on him – he was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2004 and the Sitar e-Imtiaz in 2012. Professor Narang wrote more than 70 books in Urdu, English and Hindi. Academic rigour and a profound interest in new criticism, stylistics, semiotics and sociolinguistics run through his work. In a literary journey spread over more…

‘Chaltaa hun thodi duur har ik tez-rau ke saath/pehchaantaa nahin hun abhi raahbar ko main’ or ‘I go along some distance with every swift walker/I do not yet recognize the guide’ — Mirza Ghalib. Anjum Altaf and Amir Basole’s Thinking with Ghalib uses this verse from Ghalib to assess the political leaders of the subcontinent and their ephemeral but passionate followings among the populace. The verse also gives us an insight into the ambition of this genre-defying book. It is at once a self-help manual, a volume of…

One of India’s earliest tech entrepreneurs talks about the contribution of NASSCOM, the impact of the IT Revolution, and the influence of Jain teaching What made you write this book?India’s economy has ballooned in the last few decades, and the seminal role played by the IT industry, which contributes almost 10% of the country’s GDP, has not been properly acknowledged. Noted professionals, industrialists and even bureaucrats have written books but none mentioned its contribution, or the contribution made by NASSCOM in…