Wanderers, Kings, Merchants by Peggy Mohan

Author:Peggy Mohan [Mohan, Peggy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789390914845
Published: 2021-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

Ghalib was born Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan in Agra in 1797. His father’s family had originally come from Samarkand, in what is now Uzbekistan, where they were Aibak Turks. His mother was Kashmiri, making him a Turkic-local hybrid just as Amir Khusro had been. After he married he settled in Delhi and became attached to the royal court, and the Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, himself a poet, happily appointed him as his tutor in the twilight days of the Mughal Empire. He took on the takhallus Ghalib, ‘conqueror’, a formidable tag he felt he needed after a lesser poet once tried to appropriate the first takhallus he used: Asad, ‘lion’, derived from his own name. Ghalib wrote 11,340 couplets in Persian, but only 1792 in Urdu.

Still, despite the pride he took in his Persian writing, it is his Urdu verse for which he is most remembered. Here are the first two lines from the well-known first ghazal of his Diwān-e Ghalib, where every couplet ends with the letter alif, or ā:

Naqsh faryādī hai kis kī shokhī-e tahrīr kā

Kaghzī hai pairhān har paikār-e tasvīr kā

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