Mirza Ghalib: Temple Lamp (Verses on Banaras)

The poem Chiragh-e-Dair, translated from Persian into English in its entirety for the first time as Temple Lamp, with a critical introduction, is an eloquent and vibrant Persian masnavi by Mirza Ghalib. While we quote liberally from his Urdu poetry, we know little of his writings in Persian, and while we read of his love for the city of Delhi, we discover Temple Lamp his rapture over the spiritual and sensual city of Banaras. It is Mirza Ghalib's paen to Kashi, which he calls 'Kaaba-e-Hindostan' or the Mecca of India.

MIRZA GHALIB (1797-1869) is popular for his Urdu poetry and ghazals. That he was also among the best of the Indo-Persian poets is less widely known even though he wrote more poetry in Persian than in Urdu. Ghalib lived during the reign of the last Mughal king, whose court was the centre of the Golden Age of the Urdu poetry of Delhi. Ghalib was also witness to the revolt of 1857 against the British and the subsequent retributions in Delhi by the Empire. Ghalib's letters on poetry and the sociohistorical events of his time are treasured for both their archival value and stylistic merit. He wrote in other poetic forms such as the qasida, qata and the masnavi. Temple Lamp is the masnavi he wrote on the city of Banaras en route to Calcutta. Ghalib also holds the dual distinction of being the most quoted and misquoted poet in the Indian parliament.

MAAZ BIN BILAL (b. 1986) is a poet, a translator, and an academic. His first collection, Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu (2019), was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. The Sixth River (2019), his translation of Fikr Taunvis's Partition diary, was also critically noted. Maaz was the recipient of the Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship in writing and translation in Wales (2018-19), and he has also just received the Akademie Schloss Solitude fellowship in writing (2022). He holds a PhD from Queen's University Belfast on the politics of friendship in E. M. Forster's work and teaches literary studies at O. P. Jindal Global University.

The garden has a prominent place as a sensuous image of fruition and abundance in Persianate poetry. It also works as a symbol for the ideal home/destination, reminiscent of paradise, tracing itself not just to the garden of Eden but also to a pre-Islamic legacy going back to ancient Iran. The term 'paradise' originated in the Avestan or Old Persian pairidaeza' meaning 'enclosure, park", originally the royal park or orchard of the king' There is also the deeper allegory of the garden as the site for the Qur'anic injunction to read God's signs in nature. In the above Urdu sher or distich, Ghalib appears to demand a new haven to sing his verse-not only in the spirit of taza goi or 'fresh (poetry) telling' that had thrived in the Persianate poetry of the subcontinent since the sixteenth century but also for the sake of a more congenial political and cultural clime with appropriate recognition-a place of inner harmony, a home for his subtle sensibilities.

Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan, known more popularly by his takhallus or nom de plume 'Ghalib" (1797-1869). was a modern poet who spent much of his life in quest of an audience receptive to his talents. In his early years his poetry was thought to be overtly complex and convoluted and in his later years the very court he sought patronage from was disbanded. A true poetic, spiritual, material. linguistic, and national home was either denied to him or placed in jeopardy for much of his lifespan. He was a poetic genius who worked across early colonial India's two major languages-Persian and Urdu-to aspire for a Hindustan that was either dying or was yet to come to fruition. Ghalib was, thus, among 'the last of the classicists and the first of the modernists' Altaf Husain Hali, Ghalib's first biographer has also argued that Persian poetry and prose in India saw its final heyday with Ghalib.

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