Mirza Ghalib

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Mirza Ghalib.

Mirza Ghalib was the most celebrated Urdu poet at the time of the first war of Independence. The soldiers of the British East India Company ransacked and burnt all the books in Urdu as retaliation.

Ghalib’s poems didn’t suffer much since they were actually memorised by his friends, rivals, students and beggars. Beggars used to chant his poetry on the streets whilst asking for alms. The Mutiny and its aftermath killed many of his students, friends and rivals who memorised his poetry.

William Dalrymple in his book, The Last Mughal, describes how Ghalib managed to note down one of his own poem from a beggar:

“By 1859, Ghalib was complaining that he could not even find a single bookseller, binder or calligrapher in this once most bookish of cities. Still less were there any poet: ‘Where is Mamnun? Where is Zauq? And where is Momin Khan? Two poet survive. One, Azurda- and he is silent: the other Ghalib, and he is lost in himself, in a stupor. None to write poetry, and none to judge its worth.’
To make matters worse for Ghalib, much of his own verse – of his ghazals and the two private libraries in which his friends had stored his poetry had both been sacked and destroyed by the British. ‘A few days ago a faqir who has a good voice and sings well discovered a ghazal of mine somewhere and got it written down,’ he wrote in one letter. ‘When he showed it to me, I tell you truly, tears came to my eyes.”
( adapted)

Image of Ghalib from the Book: Mirza Ghalib and the Mirs of Gujarat by Mir Jaffar Imam.

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