About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

These are letters written in Urdu by Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869) between about 1850 and his death, to friends, pupils and patrons. Ghalib died in 1869, and the letters, first printed in his lifetime and soon after in Ud-e-Hindi (1868) and Urdu-e-Mualla (1869), are in the public domain everywhere.

The Urdu text was transcribed for this library, page by page, from Khutoot-e-Ghalib, volume 1, edited by Mahesh Prasad (Hindustani Academy, Allahabad, 1941; Digital Library of India copy on archive.org), which arranges the letters by recipient and dates them. This is a selection: the letters to Munshi Hargopal Tafta (letters 1–42), all the letters to Hakim Ghulam Najaf Khan, Mir Mehdi Majrooh, Mirza Shahab-ud-din Ahmad Khan Saqib, Mirza Hatim Ali Mehr and Sahibzada Zain-ul-Abidin Khan, and all the letters to Ala-ud-din Ahmad Khan Alai. The scan lacks two pages of the Majrooh section, so letter 25 (incomplete) and letter 26 are not included. The editor's numbering of the letters within each section is kept; his footnotes and cross-references are not. Dates in square brackets were supplied by the editor.

The English is a new, complete translation of the selected letters, made for this library, paragraph by paragraph.

Introduction

Before Ghalib, a letter in Urdu or Persian was a formal composition, opened with long ceremonial titles. Ghalib, writing in Urdu in his last twenty years, made the letter a conversation: "I have invented a way of writing letters that turns a letter into talk," he wrote; "talk with the pen from a thousand miles away, and enjoy meeting in separation." The letters tease, scold, comfort and gossip; they correct a pupil's verses, haggle over a pension, describe a meal or a winter, and, after 1857, record with great feeling the destruction of Delhi and the deaths of friends.

They are as important to Urdu prose as his ghazals are to Urdu poetry, and selections from them are taught at every level, including the Urdu syllabus of Pakistan's Higher Education Commission and university courses in India. Read with the Diwan, they give the closest picture we have of the poet himself.