The 2024-25 Aziz Ahmad Lecture: Creating and Recreating in Language

Much has been written about the young Ghalib’s tatabbuʻ (following in the footsteps) of Bedil, for whom he expressed his admiration in numerous verses. Later in his career, presumably after his disagreement with Persian poets of Indian descent who criticized his Persian usage, Ghalib distanced himself from Indian-Persian. Thus, when he prepared the intikhāb (selection) of his Urdu poetry in 1833 (published in 1841), Ghalib did not include his panegyrics to Bedil.  Some Urdu critics even go so far as to say that Ghalib changed his poetic style after 1840; most overlook the fact that Ghalib wrote much more in Persian than in Urdu: his Urdu divan of 1841 is composed of 1,090 verses, while his Persian divan of 1845 contains 6,000. The complexity of Ghalib’s admiration for Bedil has not been explored fully, much of the scholarship focused on tracking and matching verses with similar, if not identical themes. Indeed, some verses are so close that they are virtual translations from Bedil’s Persian to Ghalib’s Urdu. Whatever the case, Ghalib’s “poetic temperament” (pratibhā), his being in the presence of words and meanings conducive to the composition of poetry, was in tune with Bedil’s. I will show how Ghalib’s quest for Bedil’s tarz-i tāzah (new style) gives us an opportunity to think through the Ghalib-Bedil relationship, the metapoetics, as well as fresh perceptions and visionary moments that drive the creative process itself.

Mehr Afshan Farooqi is Professor of Urdu and South Asian Literature at the University of Virginia. Her research publications address complex issues of Urdu literary culture particularly in the context of modernity. Farooqi is also a well-known translator, anthologist, and columnist. She has recently published Ghalib: Flowers in a Mirror, A Critical Commentary (Penguin, 2024). Currently, she is at work on a memoir, “A Book of Hearts,” and writes a featured column on Urdu literature past and present for Dawn.