Anjum Altaf and Amit Basole’s recently published an anthology Thinking with Ghalib: Poetry for a New Generation (Lahore, Folio Books and is forthcoming from Roli Books, India), which tries to recast the genre of exemplary books for the 21st century.
But the ones for children are written by adults seeking to instruct them through exemplary lives and works of the great writer. Whichever Ghalib we subscribe to, the poet’s name alone conveys the figure of a venerable, imitable, exemplary teacher and guide for readers and connoisseurs of Urdu poetry worldwide.Īs the genre of biographies for children suggests, there can be many Ghalibs or Halis or Iqbals. Today, the poet’s name represents the last gasp of classical Urdu and Persian poetry in the subcontinent, or somewhat contradictorily, the birth of a modern consciousness in Urdu literature. One of the subjects of Hali’s biographies was Mirza Ghalib.
Urdu poem collection series#
Although a “minor” genre of writing, the genre of instructive biographies “for children” follows the trend of 19th century colonial education that believed in instructing the youth by example rather than application.Īltaf Husain Hali, another favourite subject for the “for children” series of books, and one of the earliest writers of modern critical prose in Urdu, associated with the Aligarh movement for the education of the elite among the Muslims of India, invented the genre of the biography of exemplary individuals, albeit written for mature readers and not for children. In Urdu, among books of this ilk, we have Bachchon ke Ghalib (Ghalib for children) or Bachchon ke Iqbal (Iqbal for children) or any of the other renowned modern personalities whose lives and works are rendered in simple anecdotal prose and paraphrased for young readers.
There exists a trend of writing books introducing famous literary personages for children.
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