Breaking Ghalib, Saving Urdu

Abstract

No critic of Ghalib has acquired greater notoriety than Yas Yaganah Changezi, known in Urdu speaking circles as Ġhālib shikan, the “Ghalib breaker”—a title earned through his scathing critiques of Ghalib and everything the dominant Urdu milieu held sacred. For Yaganah, this defiance was inseparable from a larger reformist vision that demanded the cultivation of temperament, the reshaping of literary practice, and the reordering of the ethical world in which poetry circulates. To challenge the regionalism, patronage, sectarianism, religious chauvinism, derivative criticism, and nationalism in his world, Yaganah tackled Ghalib not just as a poet but an idiom, a capacious metaphor through which he could interrogate the full terrain of Urdu’s intellectual life—its modes of literary criticism, spiritual vocabularies, narratives of progress and nationalism, and gendered assumptions. Yaganah’s critique—and the backlash it provoked—offers a lens onto the making of literary authority itself, and onto the cultural forces that discipline those who dare to unsettle its foundations.