The Urdu Ghazal A Gift of India's Composite Culture

The book presents unique flowering of Urdu ghazal as a by-product of India's composite culture that evolved from intermixing of Indian and alien value systems. This never before narrated story of the evolution of Urdu ghazal is documented in eight chapters divided into three parts. It explores a variety of influences, including Sufism, Bhakti movement, and infusion of Rekhta and Persian languages and culture. The book explains classical ghazal forms that blossomed from the seeds sown by Amir Khusrau in the fourteenth century to great heights of literary excellence achieved during the next three hundred years, notably in the works of great poets like Mir and Ghalib. Different socio-political and cultural demands of changing times are expounded towards the end, primarily showing how ghazal provided new creative models to deal with literary movements like progressivism, modernism, and postmodernism. It is a work of painstaking research conducted by eminent Urdu scholar and author Professor Gopi Chand Narang over a very long period. The book includes sample works of thematically related poets. The reader will especially appreciate extended coverage of pioneering innovators of the twentieth-century like Firaq Gorakhpuri and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and postmodern poets like Gulzar and Javed Akhtar.

GOPI CHAND NARANG is Professor Emeritus, University of Delhi and Jamia Mila Islamia. He was Indira Gandhi Memorial Fellow of the IGNCA (2002-2004), and Rockefeller Foundation Fellow for Residency at Bellagio Study Centre, Italy (1997). He received Mazzini Gold Medal (Italy, 2005). He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, London, UK and his invaluable contribution to literature is acknowledged in the DICTIONARY OF INTERNATIONAL BIOGRAPHY, Cambridge, UK. He is the only Urdu writer honored by the Presidents of India and Pakistan. In 1971, he got the President's National Gold Medal from Pakistan for his illuminating work on Allama Iqbal. He has authored more than 65 books; 12 in English, 8 in Hindi and more than 40 in Urdu. He was awarded Padma Bhushan in 2004 and Padma Shri in 1990. SURINDER DEOL served as a program manager and a senior specialist at the World Bank in Washington, DC. His interest in Ghalib's poetry, a passion from his early years, led him to translate Divan-e Ghalib in free verse, which was published as THE TREASURE: A MODERN RENDITION OF GHALIB'S LYRICAL LOVE POETRY in 2014. A new revised and expanded edition of the book appeared in 2018. He has also authored a novel titled ENDLESS LIFE (2012) and a collection of poems A MOMENT IN THE UNIVERSE (2006). More recently, he translated Professor Gopi Chand Narang's classic study of Ghalib's poetics into English and it has been published as GHALIB: INNOVATIVE MEANINGS AND THE INGENIOUS MIND by Oxford University Press. He lives in Potomac, Maryland, with his wife Daler Aashna Deol.