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Ghalib's Agra forgets him on birthday

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Despite repeated demands to name a road or an auditorium after the famed poet, the municipal corporation has not responded and Agra University has turned down a demand to set up a Ghalib chair to promote research and work in Urdu literature

Mirza Ghalib

Agra: Mirza Ghalib, whose contribution to Urdu literature was perhaps as significant as that of Shakespeare to English, was born here on this day over 200 years ago. The Taj city Saturday not only forgot to celebrate his birthday but also does not have a decent memorial to the poet, activists said.

Despite repeated demands to name a road or an auditorium after the famed poet, the municipal corporation has not responded and Agra University has turned down a demand to set up a Ghalib chair to promote research and work in Urdu literature.

Syed Jaffrey, director of the Mirza Ghalib Academy, wants better facilities and support from the government to promote research in Urdu literature.

“Agra, which has given so much to the Urdu culture, should have a decent memorial for the poet. The municipal corporation has proposals pending to name a street after the poet but there has been no follow-up,” he said Saturday.

The haveli in Kala Mahal area where Mirza Asad Ullah Khan ‘Ghalib’ was born in 1796 is now a girls’ inter-college. The mansion has no memorial to the poet.

The Uttar Pradesh tourism department had at one time planned to take over the haveli and convert it into a memorial, but the plan was shelved for some reason.

Ghalib moved to Delhi where his poetic talent blossomed and found new expression at a time when Bahadur Shah Zafar was the Mughal emperor.

Sandeep Arora, a member of the city’s hotel and restaurant association, said when foreign tourists ask to be taken to Ghalib’s birthplace, Agra citizens feel “very embarrassed”.

“The central and state governments should jointly build a fitting memorial and a library in Agra for Urdu poetry lovers,” he said.

Surendra Sharma of the Braj Mandal Heritage Conservation Society said Ghalib’s house “should be converted into a national memorial” for the poet “whose contribution to Urdu literature has been as significant as that of Shakespeare to English literature”.

(IANS)

Book describes the Urdu literary culture of North Indian cities

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the-sun-the-rose-from-earth

Dilli ke na the kuche/ Auraq-e-mussavir the. Jo shakl nazar aayi/ Tasveer nazar aayi.

(It wasn’t the lanes and streets of Delhi: It was the pages of an album. Each and every face that one saw Was a painting.) – Mir Taqi Mir

The thriving Urdu literary culture of 18th and 19th century in North Indian cities of Delhi and Lucknow that remained vigorous and resilient even at the face of glaring defeat in 1857 at the hands of ‘Company Bahadur’ is the subject of the book ‘The Sun That Rose from the Earth’ by noted Urdu poet and critic Shamsur Rahman Faruqi.

Only last month, his earlier book The Mirror of Beauty, also describing the high Urdu literary culture of 19th century, was long-listed for the prestigious USD 50,000 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

First published in the Urdu as ‘Savaar aur Doosre Afsaane’ in 2001 and translated in English by Faruqi himself, the book is a collection of five stories written between 1999-2012, all having a similar quest, “to rehabilitate in people’s mind ,” as Faruqi himself puts it, “the vigour and resilience of Urdu poetry amidst decaying imperial Mughal rule.”

Although fictional, the stories are replete with historical figures of Urdu literature like Mirza Ghalib, Mir Taqi Mir, Shaikh Mushafi, Budh Singh Qalandar, Kanji Mal Saba, and are set in the historical background of 18-19th century, some in the immediate aftermath of the calamity of 1857, thus placing the book in the category of historical fiction.

The stories are woven around the historical personage of these towering Urdu poets, and represent a quest for mastering the nuances and subtleties of their poetry. Faruqi, the noted Urdu literary critic is never missed in these stories, and often the protagonists of his stories not only chase, idealise and romanticise these great poets, but also discuss and critique them.

These Urdu poets, whose verses and shadows loom large in his stories, are drawn from a diverse Hindu-Muslim background to deconstruct the popular notion that equates Urdu with the language of Muslims. Budh Singh Qalandar, Kanji Mal Saba, Ikhlas were all Hindus.

“Urdu was not the property of Muslims alone,” says Faruqi, as he laments its association in the 20th century with the language of the Muslim Lashkar (army), or the language that caused partition.

(PTI)

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