Updated:
March 07, 2021 08:04 IST
A biography of the Urdu poet and writer also signposts the literary culture of the age
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I had expected the new ‘critical biography’,
Ghalib: A Wilderness at my Doorstep (Allen Lane) to be a biography for the ordinary Ghalib fan. I should have known better. Its author, Mehr Afshan Farooqi, is the daughter of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, whose demise last year deprived India of one of its most brilliant writer-scholars. Not surprisingly, while
Ghalib contains much of interest to the serious Ghalib fan (a description that does not include all those who attribute every amorous couplet to ‘Chacha Ghalib’), it is, above all, an original work of serious scholarship.