[Reader-list] Talk by Mehr Afshan Farooqi on 'The Nightingale of Future's Garden: Reflections on the "Rejected" Corpus of Ghalib'

[Praveen Rai]

Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

invites you to a Talk



*The Nightingale of Future's Garden:*

*Reflections on the "Rejected" Corpus of Ghalib*

by *Mehr Afshan Farooqi*



*Geeta Patel* will Chair

Tuesday, 4 March 2014, 5:30 pm

CSDS Seminar Hall,

29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054





The great 19th century Urdu poet Asadullah Khan Ghalib's *muravvaj* or
current Divan contains roughly half of the verses he composed, as he was an
exacting editor of his own compositions. Ghalib was a zealous critic of his
own poetry; sometimes he took criticism of his peers to heart. Much of the
*mustarad* or discarded work belongs to his early period when his poetic
language was closer to Persian than Urdu, and his themes were quite
abstruse. Ghalib's early work was almost forgotten until a manuscript
surfaced in Bhopal in 1918.  This manuscript known as the nuskha-e Bhopal
is dated 1821.  It was first published as *Nuskha-e Hamidiyya* in 1921.
Much later, in 1969, a manuscript in Ghalib's own hand was discovered,
again, in Bhopal. It contained some of his earliest compositions (1816).
Despite the unearthing of the new material Ghalib scholars continue to
focus on the muravvaj Divan. The talk will present an overview of the so
called discarded ghazals and pose questions examining the exigencies of
"rejection" and how that impacts our view of Ghalib as a whole.



*Mehr Afshan Farooqi* is Associate 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 is presently working on a project that highlights the great
Urdu poet Ghalib's *mustarad* (rejected) verses.



She is the editor of the pioneering two-volume work, *The Oxford India
Anthology of Modern Urdu Literature *(2008).  More recently she has
published the acclaimed monograph*, The* *Postcolonial Mind, Urdu Culture,
Islam and Modernity in Muhammad Hasan Askari* (2013).



*Geeta Patel* is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian
Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. A Visiting Fellow at
the CSDS, she has translated widely from prose and poetry composed in
Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi, Braj and Awadhi and is currently writing a book on
Ismat Chughtai.



Her first book, *Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: Gender,
Colonialism and Desire in Miraji's Urdu Poetry *(2002) focuses on the
renegade Urdu writer, poet, critic and iconoclast Miraji, who writes at the
cusp of modernism and mysticism.




Praveen Rai
Academic Secretary
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29, Rajpur Road
Delhi - 110054
Phone: 91-11-23942199
Fax: 91-11-23943450
www.csds.in