For all these qualities, his ability to memorialise the varied moods of a lover, the breadth of his vision, his deep humanity, the unforgettable music of his lines, his use of new imagery and new uses of old imagery, all the nuances of meaning captured in his dictions, his wit and playfulness, and the multiple layers of meaning in his ghazals – and notwithstanding the difficulty of his diction and syntax – Ghalib remains the poet of poets as well as the common man. Ghalib offers observations on life that anticipate the doubt, skepticism and angst that have come to define the modern age. Ghalib covers these subjects in the most exquisite manner, bringing a new and sharper irreverence to his dissent, but nearly always his barbs are softened by his inimitable wit and humour. In a society that was outwardly ruled by the shariah, poets used the ghazal to celebrate love and longing, and, under the cover of symbols and metaphors, questioned, criticized, and even made light of the religious and social conventions of society. Nevertheless, although his Urdu ghazals were written mostly in his early years, many before he was twenty, his claim to fame rests primarily on his slim Urdu divan and secondarily on his Urdu letters. He wrote much of his poetry in Farsi and believed this was superior to his work in Urdu. Ghalib is commonly regarded as the greatest of Urdu poets. Ghalib was the leading light of this Delhi florescence and in 1854 he became ustad or poet-mentor to the Mughal emperor who was an accomplished poet in his own right.
The reign of the last of these Mughal emperors, Bahadur Shah Zafar, produced a final but brilliant flowering of Urdu culture in India. He was born in Agra, moved to Delhi at an early age, and but for an absence of three years during which he visited Calcutta, he never left Delhi again, not even during the great rebellion of 1857.Īlthough the British became sovereigns of much of India by 1803, they found it useful to maintain a titular Mughal emperor in Delhi where he kept court, with some of its former trappings but powerless outside the walls of the city. Like all poets of the ghazal, Mirza Asadullah Khan (1797-1869) is best known by his takhallus, Ghalib, the pen-name with which he signed his ghazals.