Persian
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Choked to death with a shoelace for his poetry, Mir Ja’far Zatalli did not believe in sophisticated language and mincing words. Long ignored, we look at how Zatalli was a pioneer in creating a small but effective oeuvre of Urdu poetry and prose during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (In…
in Article
Rightly called ‘Voice of the Times’, Akbar Allahabadi was one of Urdu language’s premiere political satirist in Hindustan. His words spared neither the British nor Indians who supported the Raj. He pre-empted the existence of Hinglish as a colloquial language, and injected his poetry with just the…
in Article
Living through the carnage of the 1857 Revolt, Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib’s was most pained at the ruin of his beloved city, Delhi. Interestingly, we find that while in his ‘official and published’ diary, ‘Dastanbuy’, he writes in support of the British (his then patrons), some personal letters…
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In Baburnama, the Mughal Emperor’s memoirs, Babur expresses his most intimate emotions, among which is the yearning for his homeland. Even in victory of the great land of Hindustan, Babur is lonely and desolate, as he expresses his pain through ghazals and rubais. Here, we present the vulnerable…
in Article
There is remarkable richness of imagery and while the scientific nature of the visualisations in books such as those in the copy of the Mir’at al Nujum (‘Mirror of Astronomy’) that Prof. B.N. Goswamy came across at a bookstore during one of his travels. He believes that the volume, and others of…
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During a trip to the Salarjung Museum in Hyderabad, Prof. B.N. Goswamy was shown a most sumptuous-looking edition of one of the great classics of English literature—even if it is essentially a translation—Edward FitzGerald’s rendering of the ‘Rubai’yat of Omar Khayyam’. Here he writes about how…
in Article
A Ramayana? For the Mughals? So closed are our minds, and so firm our prejudices, that the two words would be seen by most people as if they contained a natural contradiction. Prof. B.N. Goswamy writes about the Mughal version of Indian epics that were produced at and for the Mughal court in the…
in Article
Nizam al-Din Abu Muhammad Ilyas bin Yousuf, known popularly, and simply, as Nizami, was one of the greatest Persian poets. Prof. B.N. Goswamy talks about the author of ‘Laila wa Majnun’ and his contribution to literature through the five-part Khamsa (Photo courtesy: Library of Congress/Wikimedia…
in Article
Edward FitzGerald’s translation of Khayyam’s verses as the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam has been published in over 2000 editions and translated into more than 70 languages. However, in the process, FitzGerald not only transcreated Khayyam’s poetry but his identity as well, turning the Rubáiyát of Omar…
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He was born and grew up in Hyderabad, and as a young student in 1987, helped compile an exhaustive report on the city’s libraries which contained Urdu books and manuscripts. His interest in books both precedes and was fed by this extraordinary project.
Following is an edited transcript of the…
in Interview