SOURCE: "The Personal and the Universal in Ghalib," in Indian Literature, Vol. XII, No. 2, 1969, pp. 5–14.

In the following excerpt, Mujeeb provides a brief appraisal of Ghalib's career as a poet.

Ghalib's biographer finds it difficult to identify any event that could be called significant in his life; it was so much a life of the mind. We cannot be sure even of the external circumstances that could have influenced him. He came of what was then considered a good family, and his own statement could be quoted to prove that he was proud of his family and his aristocratic connections. As against this we have the verse, hitherto overlooked, it seems, of his earlier period:

 I cannot tell you how perverse they are:
Disgrace itself now shuns the nobly born. 

This was written before an overzealous kotwal of Delhi had sent him to jail for gambling and before...