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The Modern Ghalib
Organizer: Alexander Sean Pue, University of Chicago
Chair: Frances Pritchett, Columbia University
The premier poet of Urdu, Mirza Asadullah Khan 'Ghalib' (1797-1869), is known as the last dying gasp of Mughal literary culture. Yet no other Indo-Muslim poet—and, one might add, no other Indian or Pakistani poet—has been as frequent a subject of analysis, translation, and commemoration in the modern period. He is claimed by both Indian and Pakistani literary communities, as well as speakers of Hindi, Urdu, and increasingly English. This panel focuses on the legacy of Mirza Ghalib from the twentieth century to the present within three distinct disciplinary domains. S. Akbar Hyder focuses on Ghalib's refusal to assess the A’in-i Akbari, an important sixteenth century historical text, for the edification of his nineteenth-century audience—an action which subsequently led to an interpretation of Ghalib as Urdu's first “Progressive” voice. A. Sean Pue juxtaposes two twentieth-century critical writings by N. M. Rashed and Salim Ahmed which place Ghalib within discourses of modernist literary practice and Pakistani national culture in the 1960-70s. Frances Pritchett, who is currently writing an on-line commentary on Ghalib, discusses the transformation of the form of both Ghalib's poetry and its commentarial practices over the course of the twentieth century and into the digital age. These transformations are a product of the increasingly tenuous historical position of Urdu itself. With an increasingly geographically and politically divided readership, Ghalib has become a window through which to view the contemporary literary and cultural history of South Asia.
Turning Nets into Nests: Geography, History, and the Last Mughal Poet
Syed Akbar Hyder, University of Texas, Austin
Sayyid Ahmad Khan, in the early 1850s, asked Ghalib to assess the historical merits of A’in-i Akbari—an important account of Akbar’s rule written by Abu Fazl—by writing a short review of the text. Cognizant of the value of this text for its own time, the sixteenth century, Ghalib refused to sing the praises of Abu Fazl’s treatise in the nineteenth century and compared it to an old, useless calendar. This paper explores the socio-political implications of Ghalib’s refusal during his own time and the message that continues in subsequent decades, as Ghalib is deployed as Urdu’s first “Progressive” voice. It calls attention to the interface of religious devotion, poetic license, and political exigencies that constituted Ghalib’s Persian and Urdu oeuvre on one hand and his legacy on the other. The poetics of turning an aristocrat into a comrade of the downtrodden provide the larger framework for this study.
In the Mirror of Ghalib
Alexander Sean Pue, University of Chicago
To twentieth-century readers, the poetry of Mirza Ghalib has both represented the Indo-Muslim “classical” tradition and been seen as a product of its modern historical moment. Writing through the rebellion of 1857 and witnessing the end of the Mughal empire and the transfer of power to the British crown, Ghalib is often retrospectively read as the first poet of jadidiyat (modernism/modernity) in Urdu. This paper will compare two such readings of Ghalib from Pakistani Urdu criticism. The first is by the modernist Urdu poet N. M. Rashed, who reads Ghalib through psychoanalysis, inflected by the Marxist Freudianism of the mid-1960s (Herbert Marcuse, Norman Brown). He argues that Ghalib, prescient to the unconscious, took repression and the struggle between the reality and pleasure principles as the basic theme of his poetry. The second reading, by the poet-critic Salim Ahmed, argues that Ghalib is the first Urdu poet for whom understanding of the value of things is based on the measure of the self (zat), as opposed to metaphysical tenets. For Salim Ahmed, modernism, relying on individual experience, is simply an act of negation. As such, Ghalib's modernism mirrors the fragmentation of the Muslim subject occasioned by the disintegration of the totality of an “Indo-Muslim civilizational unity” after 1857. Through a juxtaposition of these two readings, this paper will work to expose the contemporary social, intellectual, and political role of Ghalib in the discourse of Pakistani modernism.
"Not All, Only Some":The Modern Ghalib and his Interpreters
Frances Pritchett, Columbia University
Since Ghalib's death in 1869, over a hundred Urdu commentaries have been devoted to his ghazals, and a handful of Hindi ones as well. Nowadays the pace of commentary-writing has somewhat fallen off, but the pace of translation—overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, into English—has been steadily picking up. In the last five years, two different translations of the complete Urdu divan have been published, by Sarfaraz Niazi and Sarvat Rahman. These are the first two complete divan translations ever to be made. This paper will consider the work of these and other modern translators of Ghalib, some of whom have been well-known English-language poets (W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, William Stafford, Robert Bly), while others have been well-known Urdu scholars (Ahmed Ali, Ralph Russell, David Matthews); and one has created a major video series about Ghalib (Gulzar). It will juxtapose their approaches to those of representative modern Urdu commentators who represent the commentarial mainstream (Muhammad Baqir, Yusuf Husain Chishti, Ghulam Rasul Mihr). For purposes of comparison, the discussion will focus on the famous first verse of one of the finest ghazals in Ghalib's divan: the well-known "sab kahan kuchh." A detailed handout will provide material for the discussion. What methodological and literary choices have these translators and interpreters made, and what have been their accomplishments and their failures? The larger grounding of the discussion will be in my own experience as a commentator on Ghalib through the online project "A Desertful of Roses" (http://www.columbia.edu/~fp7).