The singular hand-crafted edition of verses that Ghalib brought himself to share with the world is a prized object of art, more majestic than any Koh-i-noor, for it is unpossessable-a selection he fastidiously edited and pruned and published four revisions of in his lifetime (1797–1869, almost all of it spent in Delhi), barely altering the core, with the final edition published in 1862 containing 234 ghazals, which the Urdu/Rekhta scholar Frances Pritchett has counted to tell us comprise 1,459 two-line verses, or shers. He then adopted ‘Ghalib’, which essentially means someone who overwhelms you, and, among other things, victorious, triumphant and predominant, someone who surpasses all or is unsurpassed. Let us bear in mind that Mirza Asadullah Khan ‘Ghalib’ dropped his early signature, ‘Asad’, when another contemporary poet was found using the same taḵẖalluṣ (signature). Even the grand effort to establish them for the fakes they are may be regarded as acknowledgments of their worth. Such exercises in fakery sometimes find modest success-they are often committed to public memory and have elicited commentaries despite the bluff being called.

Seems some of Mirza Ghalib’s admirers have, a few times, committed the sacrilege of inserting their own couplets into his ‘holy’ Dīvān, his collected poems, exactingly overseen by the master. What is the best two-liner that you know?Īnd now a hearty annotation for these two lines.

Saddest ghazals