(These ideas visit the imagination from the beyond: in the scratchings of the reed pen (I hear) the angel’s song.) In this couplet, Ghalib expresses the age-old belief that the provenance of poetry is ...

Mirza Ghalib, who died on February 15, 1869, was a powerful, eloquent and erudite poet who investigated and captured life’s experiences and occurrences with capering humour in his enigmatic ghazals.

As much as an expression of emotions and ideas, poetry is also a manifestation of the culture, tradition and socio-political conditions of a society. Language, the cloak of poetry, is itself deeply ...

I first encountered Ghalib in the early 1970s. I was in graduate school, studying poetry. Then, as now, I had no Urdu. The medium of transmission—translation—was Aijaz Ahmad’s Ghazals of Ghalib, from ...

When you utter the word ‘ghazal’, what comes to mind are the timeless verses of Mirza Ghalib and the haunting voices of Mehdi Hasan, Farida Khanum, Ghulam Ali, and Jagjit Singh. Ghazal is a ...

The Ghazal is a form, with its emphasis on Radif, Makta and Matla (and a sensibility that’s innate to Persian, Turkic and Urdu poetry), which isn’t easy to pull off in English. Of the modern English ...

Poetry often bypasses the conventions of connotation, flexes the rigidity of common contextual structures and eventually reinvigorates language itself by nuancing the larger context and stretching ...

It was an evening of sher-o-shayari and ghazal when recently, an event titled Saaz Aur Alfaaz was organized at Sangeet Natak Akademi. The event started off with the lighting of the lamp by chief guest ...