Of Ghalib's poetry and the making of meaning

Anisur Rahman's Essential Ghalib features 200 verses by the poet in the Urdu original, accompanied by Hindi and English renderings, and detailed explanations

- Mahmood Farooqui

There have been more modern interpretations and studies of Mirza Ghalib than of any other poet in Urdu. A report a few years ago in The Indian Express mentioned that the poetry most frequently quoted in the Indian Parliament was Urdu poetry, and the poet most often mentioned was Mirza Ghalib. For the same reason, perhaps, he also remains the most misquoted poet.

As Shamsur Rahman Faruqi writes, Ghalib is unique not only because he is the last of the classical poets and the first of the moderns. He is unique also because the circumstances of his life, and his experiences, made him doubt everything about the ancient regime and the values he was handed. He became skeptical, and thereby became modern. But he was also modernist, in the sense of not being direct, not being representational, in being fragmentary, in being ironic, and in being multilingual.

In his introduction to this wonderful book, the Kabir scholar Vinay Dharwadker writes that Ghalib is essential because, "throughout his career, he is contemporaneous with colonial moderns in a different sphere—not only with Rammohun Roy from the 1810s to the early 1830s, but also, say, with Madhusudan Dutt in the 1840s and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan in the 1850s and 1860s."

Ghalib has, of course, been translated before. By the venerable CM Naim, by the late brilliant Aijaz Ahmed, and by the illustrious Frances Pritchett. In this crowded field, Anisur Rahman's new work, The Essential Ghalib, stands out. It is to his immense credit that he marks his own place with his novel approach and his presentation. He has selected 200 verses or