It was calligraphed in 1821 by Hafiz Mueenuddin when Ghalib was 24 years old.
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The first of such nuskhas to surface was the one discovered in the Bhopal library in 1918. Fortunately, a few copies of his bayaz were made periodically by the poet for his use and for gifting, and many of them survived, despite the great upheaval of 1857. But what happened to the verses that he did not deem worthy of publication? Ghalib was not careful in keeping all his verses together. It is obvious that Ghalib made a definitive selection or intikhab of his poetry. Subsequently, the divaan went through four more editions in Ghalib’s lifetime. So he disregarded some 700 verses and chose what he regarded worthy of publication. The 1833 selection had a total of 1,070 verses when it was published in 1841, the number of verses was 1,095, which meant an addition of only 25 new she’rs in eight years! This is partly because Ghalib was writing mostly in Persian in those years, but we must remember that he had already composed 1,800 verses by 1816. Nawab Ziauddin Ahmad Khan wrote the taqriz (critical introduction). Ghalib revised the dibachah, adding the famous paragraph stating that this was his authorised divaan and any stray ghazals found outside of this should not be attributed to him. Ghalib also wrote a dibachah, or a foreword in Persian for his Urdu divaan, but quite a number of years elapsed between the preparation of the manuscript and its eventual publication in 1841 (Delhi). During the course of preparing Gul-i Rana, Ghalib may have decided to produce an intikhab of his Urdu verse as well. He prepared the manuscript for Gul-i Rana, a collection primarily of his choicest Persian and some Urdu poetry in 1828.
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On an extended visit to Calcutta, the colonial metropolis with a different cultural-literary ambiance than Delhi in the late 1820s, Ghalib was persuaded by Maulvi Sirajuddin Ahmad to make selections of his poetry for publication. Ghalib may have been among the earliest of Urdu poets to navigate this unfamiliar path. With the popularity of the printing press at the turn of the 19th century, poets had to negotiate with the challenge of publishing their work for a wider, even unknown audience. In those days it was customary to get a katib or a calligrapher and have authored texts, particularly poetry, beautifully inscribed and bound into a book manuscript for presentation and circulation among the lettered elite of society.
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Later on he used Ghalib for both Urdu and Persian. At the time, he preferred the takhallus Asad for his Urdu and Ghalib for his Persian poetry. Ghalib composed almost double of the 1,800 or so verses that are presented in his authorised divaan.Īsadullah Khan Ghalib began composing Urdu verses at an early age and had a sizable collection of 1,800 verses ready by 1816, that is when he was only 19 years old. Ghalib’s output in Urdu was not as meagre as we generally assume looking at the slender Divaan-i-Ghalib. It is fascinating to examine Ghalib’s work from yet another perspective: the printed or what I will call ‘authorised’ versus the calligraphed or hand-written nuskhas of his poetry collection.