The Oxford India Ghalib: Life, Letters and Ghazals

by Ralph Russell (Editor)

Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797-1869), noble, poet, and wit of Mughal Delhi in its twilight years before the Revolt of 1857, is the most famous of the Urdu poets that the Indian subcontinent has produced. This volume brings together his significant writings in poetry and prose, and provides
information on the life and times of Ghalib.

Genres: Poetry, Biography, Literature

580 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

My copy’s got only the Life and Letters, but that alone’s worth the fee at the gate. Generous extracts from Ghalib’s correspondence, gracefully interleafed with commentary from the editors, give a remarkably rounded picture of the poet and his world: tight friendships, fussy poetics, loneliness, self-pity, black humor, stoic resolve, complaints of old age, and money problems on a Baudelairian scale lend dimension to Ghalib’s knotty ghazals and the circumstances they both varnish and conceal. The long extracts from Dastambu, Ghalib’s account of Delhi during the Rebellion of 1857, and the frank letters he wrote afterward to friends from the wrecked Mughal capital, were the highlight for me, bringing that difficult, cataclysmic period to life with all the ‘fog of war’ that surrounds such events for the participants. The Ghalib that emerges from the letters is very human and ‘modern’, but the poetic culture he moved in—with its courtly patrons, stipends, petitions, mushairas, and panegyrics—isn’t, which makes this one of the more fascinating literary memoirs I’ve read.

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