SOURCE: "The Age of Ghalib," in A History of Urdu Literature, Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 228-88.

In the following excerpt, Sadiq stresses the less attractive side of Ghalib's character to bring to light those subconscious traits that largely determined his inner life and therefore his poetry.

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Mirza Asadullah Khān, sumamed Ghālib, was born on 27 December 1797, in Āgra. His father, Mirza 'Abdullah, an officer in the Alvar army, dying during a punitive expedition, Ghālib, who was then hardly five, became the ward, first, of his uncle Nasrullah Khān, a cavalry officer in the British army, and on his death, four years later, that of his brother-in-law, Nawab Āhmad Bakhsh, recognized by the British government as the guardian of the former's family. Though nominally a ward of the Nawab, Ghālib passed his childhood and youth under the roof of his maternal grand-uncle in Āgra, in...