Mirza Ghalib in AmericaArticle
Urdu Literature
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7
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…
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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…
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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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Qurratulain Hyder exhibited a robust inclination for experimental and experiential writing. Locating her texts in history, Hyder explored philosophical perspectives, cultural mores, customs and traditions in language and form that were innovative advancements on the available and the accepted. We…
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Ismat Chughtai was a fierce writer who wrote extensively on themes of female sexuality, femininity and class conflict. She not only wrote short stories and novels but also numerous essays including ‘Pompom Darling’, in which she critiqued Qurratulain Hyder’s early writings, asking her to ‘come out…
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Saadat Hasan Manto was constantly at war with himself. Following the footsteps of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the iconic writer separated Saadat Hasan, the person, from Manto, the writer. We take a close look at the ‘one–two’ man, who was at times unheroic and self-contradictory, yet brutal and free-…
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Mirza Ghalib is a household name in the Indian subcontinent—a figure who is synonymous with Persian and Urdu poetry. The timeless nature of his verses and the universality of his themes have resulted in his works transcending borders and languages. Thanks to translations of Ghalib's ghazals to…
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