WELL VERSED

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

- Rakhshanda Jalil

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.