Ghalib:Epistemologies of Elegance

Title: Ghalib:Epistemologies of Elegance

Author: Sara Suleri Goodyear, Azra Raza  

ISBN:  9780670081950 

Binding: Hardback

Date: 2009 

Publisher: Viking/Penguin 

Number of Pages: 183

Price: Rs 325/-

Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869) lived at a time of historic change in India—a period when the British conquest of India was in its ascendancy and the Mughal Empire was coming to an end. He was witness to the ravagement of Delhi and its courtly culture, culminating in the catastrophe of the uprising of 1857. This trauma, accompanied by his personal losses, informs his poetry, evidenced in Divan-e-Ghalib containing 235 ghazals in Urdu, ghazals redolent with a sense of loss, grief and a plangent longing for a vanished way of life. Yet, what sets his poetry apart is an irrepressible sense of humour, energy and linguistic delight that drive his darkest lamentations.

In Ghalib: Epistemologies of Elegance, Sara Suleri Goodyear and Azra Raza select twenty-one ghazals that illustrate the astonishing range of Ghalib’s many voices and the ideas that populate his poetry. Every ghazal is accompanied by an introduction, a literal translation and a detailed commentary that elucidate the complexities of the individual sher and the ghazal as a whole. The result is an erudite introduction to the work of the greatest Urdu poet of all time, which will be invaluable not only to the Ghalib aficionado but also the lay reader spellbound by the intricate imagery and the dazzling scope of this extraordinary poet.