Heaven on Earth

In this long poem, we see Banaras was many things for Mirza Ghalib-sanctum, paradise, trap

- Harish Trivedi

Mirza Ghalib, the greatest Urdu poet, apparently did not think much of Urdu and, in his mature years, wrote mostly in Persian. His Persian works, like those of other Indian poets, from Amir Khusrau to Mohammad Iqbal, remain largely unread and unsung, both here and in Persia. If a single masnavi by Ghalib running into 108 couplets is now and then rescued from oblivion—as it has been in an Urdu translation in 2015, a Hindi translation in 2018, and now in this English translation—this has as much to do with the felt needs of our troubled times as with the literary value of the poem.

Temple Lamp is a poem about Banaras where Ghalib stayed for a month in December 1826 on his way from Delhi to the new British capital, Calcutta. He knew no one in the city and seemed stranded there, waiting for friends in Delhi to send him money before he could resume his travels.