About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the complete Urdu text, with an English translation, of the section on Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869) in *Aab-e-Hayat* ("The Water of Life") by Muhammad Husain Azad (1830–1910). *Aab-e-Hayat*, first published in Lahore in 1880, is a history of Urdu poetry told through the lives of its poets, arranged in five "periods" (*daur*). Ghalib's section comes in the fifth period, among the poets of Delhi in the last years of the Mughal court.

Source of the Urdu text: *Ab-i hayat*, Lucknow, Ihsan Book Depot, 1900. The scan, made from the copy in the University of Toronto (Robarts Library), is freely available on the Internet Archive (archive.org/details/abihayat00azaduoft). The Ghalib section runs from page 625 to page 670 of this edition. The text was transcribed page by page from the scan for this edition.

What is included and what is left out: the whole of Azad's section on Ghalib is given, from the heading with Ghalib's titles to the last couplet of the selection of his *ghazals*, with Azad's own footnotes. Nothing in it is later editorial matter, so nothing has been left out. Four footnote markers in the print have no note at the foot of the page in this scan; they are kept and marked [illegible]. One note (on Ghalib's case at Calcutta) breaks off in the print, and a translator's note says so. The very long footnote on the poet Auj is kept in full, although its small print is hard to read and several words in it are marked [illegible]. Where the scan is blurred or cut, the gap is marked [illegible]. Readings that are possible but uncertain are kept as printed; where the printed text of a verse differs from the usual text of Ghalib's *diwan*, a translator's note says so. Nothing has been supplied to fill a gap.

Arrangement: Azad divides the section with a few headings of his own: the life, "Mirza Sahib's life and natural habits", "Persian works" and "Ghazals". These are kept as chapters. Two of them are long and have been divided in two; the second part of each carries the word "(continued)", which is added by this edition. Azad's footnotes are collected at the end of each chapter. Page numbers and running heads are left out.

Translation: the translation is faithful and complete, in plain modern English, with nothing summarised or skipped. Every couplet (*sher*) is translated as two lines and every quatrain as four, with accuracy put before rhyme; Ghalib's pen names, Ghalib and Asad, are kept as names. Persian verses and phrases, which Azad quotes without translating, are translated, with the originals in the facing Urdu column. Ghalib's letters, which Azad quotes at length, are translated in the plain conversational tone that made them famous. Key terms are kept in italics with a short gloss and explained in the glossary at the end. Translator's notes are marked [TN: ...].

Copyright: Azad died in 1910, and *Aab-e-Hayat* was first published in 1880, so the text is in the public domain in Pakistan, India and the United States. The English translation is new.

Introduction

Muhammad Husain Azad was born in Delhi in 1830. His father, Maulvi Muhammad Baqir, ran the first Urdu newspaper in Delhi and was executed by the British after the Revolt of 1857. As a young man Azad was a pupil of the poet Zauq, the Mughal emperor's own teacher, and he grew up among the poets and gatherings he later described. After 1857 he made a new life in Lahore, where he worked in education, helped to found new kinds of Urdu poetry with Altaf Husain Hali, and became professor of Arabic at Government College. He wrote textbooks, essays (*Nairang-e Khayal*) and a history of Akbar's court (*Darbar-e Akbari*). In his last twenty years his mind gave way, and he died in Lahore in 1910.

*Aab-e-Hayat* (1880) is his masterpiece. It is the first real history of Urdu poetry, and one of the founding books of modern Urdu prose. Azad tells the story of the language and its verse from its beginnings to his own day through the lives of the poets, with anecdotes, sayings, letters and verses, many of them taken from his own memory and from what he had heard from Zauq and his circle. Its stories of the poets of Delhi and Lucknow have shaped how readers have seen them ever since, though modern scholars have shown that some of them are coloured by Azad's loyalty to Zauq.

The Ghalib section is one of the most famous parts of the book. It tells of Ghalib's descent and childhood, his lost family pension and his journey to Calcutta, his life in Delhi, his poverty, his pride, his marriage, his religion and his friends, and the ruin of 1857. It quotes many of Ghalib's Urdu letters, gives a list of his Persian and Urdu works, tells the story of the *sehra* (wedding poem) that offended the emperor and of the apology he wrote, and collects a string of his witty sayings. It ends with Ghalib's own chronogram of his death and a selection of ten of his *ghazals*. Azad, who knew Ghalib in person, writes of him with admiration but also with the sly reserve of Zauq's pupil, and a long footnote on the poet Auj shows how Delhi poets of the time laughed at verse that was too obscure.

Why it is studied: the Ghalib section of *Aab-e-Hayat* is read in courses on Urdu literature, on Ghalib, on the literary culture of Mughal Delhi before and after 1857, and on the beginnings of literary history in South Asia. It is one of the earliest biographical accounts of Ghalib, and one of the main sources for the anecdotes that are still told about him.

Names in this translation: Ghalib (Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib; earlier pen name Asad), Azad (Muhammad Husain Azad), Zauq (Shaikh Ibrahim Zauq), Momin (Momin Khan Momin), Tafta (Munshi Hargopal Tafta), Mir Mahdi, Bahadur Shah Zafar, Delhi, Agra (Akbarabad), Lucknow, Rampur, Calcutta. Key terms are kept in italics with a short gloss on first use, and explained in the glossary at the end.

How to cite: Muhammad Husain Azad, *Aab-e-Hayat*, the section on Ghalib (Lucknow, 1900; archive.org/details/abihayat00azaduoft), with English translation, urduintranslation.com, 2026, https://www.urduintranslation.com/works/aab-e-hayat-ghalib.