Constructing Pakistan - pg. 17

I have written herein an account of events from May of last year to July 1858. On August first I have laid down my pen. I long for orders from the auspicious sovereign concerning three petitions about which I have written in this book -- that is for title, for robe of honour, and for pension. My eyes and my heart look forward to this order from the Empress whose crown is the moon, whose throne is the sky; who is renowned as Jamshid, as splendid as Faridun, as majestic as Kaus, as noble as Sanjar, as exalted as Alexander ... If through the generosity of the Queen of the World, I obtain some benefit, I will not have left this life a failure.

-- Ghalib

Constructing Pakistan - pg. 3

A private archive, retrieved and inserted into the official rendering of history, has been the most potent critical weapon to unravel the departmental claims of colonial administration, but in Dastanbuuy, we must reverse the order, we must declare and prove beyond doubt, instead of suggesting not to read it literally, that it is instead a public document garbed within the language and nomenclature of the private. Thus, immediately after the rebellion, the main struggle for the Muslim elite was not to preserve the Muslim culture in the private, spiritual realm, but to forge a place within the new hegemonic order, and this movement, in my opinion, could on ly be facilitated through, the language of loyalty.

India Book List

• Hayat e Javed
• Aab e Hayat
• Ghalib: Dastanbuuy
• Ibn ul Waqt
• Shibli Nomani
  

India After Gandhi - Opening

Prologue

UNNATURAL NATION

BECAUSE THEY ARE SO MANY, and so various, the people of India are also divided. They appear to have always been so. In the spring of 1827, the poet of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib set out on a journey from Delhi to Calcutta. Six months later he reached the holy Hindu city of Banaras. Here he wrote a poem called "Chirag-i-Dair", with these timeless lines: