ABSTRACT

Ihave none of the hallmarks of a Muslim; why is it that every humiliation that the Muslims suffer pains and grieves me so much?’, the great Persian and Urdu poet Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797-1869) once mused.1 For a non-conformist who spurned the orthodox view of Islam, though not the basic tenets of the faith, Ghalib’s pathos for the Muslims is as touching as it is revealing. It offers an insight into the self-identification of one of the leading literary figures of nineteenth-century northern India. Associated with the court of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, Ghalib was personally affected by the erosion of Muslim power which culminated in the dramatic loss of sovereignty in 1857. Yet his poetry and prose, imbued with idioms and motifs drawn from a cultural milieu that was both Muslim and Indian, tended to be more individualistic than communitarian in expression.2 This was in keeping with literary conventions prior to 1857 in

contrast to the dominant trend from the late-nineteenth-century when a more self-conscious attempt was made to project the collective identity of the Muslims.