What makes Ghalib a great poet? The answer depends, to a great extent, on the times and age you were born in. Critics from different eras have had their own reasons to appreciate Ghalib. Right from Altaf Hussain Haali’s ‘Yaadgaar-i-Ghalib’ (1897) — the first book published on Ghalib’s life, art and thought — to the most recent works trying to explain Ghalib and his works, the paradigms of poetics have been in a constant state of flux.

Ever since the times of Haali, we have had a string of Ghalib scholars who have been expounding on the poet and his works. But each of these scholars have done so with a marked inclination towards a literary theory that prevailing in his (or her, though there are few female Ghalib scholars, if at all) own times.

In the beginning it was the emphasis on utility, morality, and philosophical stance that shaped literary theory in Urdu. It was the era of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, his rationalism and reformism that reflected perfectly in Haali’s critical thought. As if reacting to Sir Syed’s massive overdose of rationalism and realism, Urdu literature was soon riding the crest of romanticism, obsessed with theories related to aesthetics with a tilt towards the impressionistic school of thought. Abdur Rahman Bijnori’s ‘Mahasin-i-Kalam-i-Ghalib’ (1921), a eulogy too emotional to be called a critical work, was precisely the response romanticism of that era could have produced.

Then in the 1930s and 1940s, progressive literary movement took the subcontinent by storm. A steady rise of modernism was what we saw in the aftermath of progressive movement and then arrived from the west all the modern and ultra-modern literary theories. They included postmodernism, structuralism, post structuralism, deconstructionism, reader-response theory, plurality of meanings, and what not.

But the interesting thing is that critics from various schools of literary thought and different times admitted to Ghalib’s greatness, with an exception, of course, of a few progressive critics. However, there were many level-headed critics even among the ranks of progressives, such as Prof Mumtaz Hussain, who were convinced of Ghalib’s poetic genius and paid tributes due to him.

Among the later-day scholars who have been writing on Ghalib with new insight, a prominent name is that of Gopi Chand Narang’s. Ranked among one of the most celebrated critics and research scholars of Urdu in present-day India, Narang Sahib has penned over 60 books in Urdu, English and Hindi, mostly on the topics we rarely come across in Urdu: stylistics, semiotics, post-modernism, structuralism and post-structuralism. What sets him apart from his contemporaries is his penchant for exploring uncharted territories and discovering new horizons in the realms of language and literature.

In his new book ‘Ghalib: maani aafrini, jadalyaati waza, shunyata aur shaeryaat’ (Ghalib: meanings, dialectical outlook, shunyata and poetics), he has discovered new and post-modernistic dimensions of Ghalib’s text with a special reference to Ghalib’s dialectical discourse, his radical open-mindedness and shunyata.

This last word, shunyata, needs a bit of explaining. Dr Narang has amply explained it with its background — Shunyata is a Buddhist philosophy and means emptiness or void. He says, ‘shunya’ means zero and shunyata means the zero principle.

No, it is not a nihilistic idea. According to philosophy, nothing has an innate existence and is thus devoid of a permanent self. Narang then connects shunyata with Bedil, the classical Persian poet who was Ghalib’s declared mentor. He then traces Ghalib’s subconscious mind and while connecting the dots he concludes that Ghalib was as much immersed in local Indian culture as the Mughal culture.

Commenting on Ghalib’s relevance in different eras, Narang says, “The meaning and understanding of Ghalib’s text has been changing with time. Bijnori’s Ghalib was not the one that Haali had read. Sheikh Muhammad Ikram, Nazm Tabatabai or Saha Mujaddidi read a Ghalib who was not Haali’s. So everybody has read his or her own Ghalib, just as the lovers of classicism and romanticism had found their own Ghalib and progressives and modernists had created their own meaning of Ghalib’s text.

Ghalib had declared himself ‘a nightingale whose garden has not yet been created but which sang and with every turn of the time a new garden of meaning, so to speak, is being born. In a way, Ghalib’s dialectical approach suits the post-modernist outlook just as it suited the ‘modernist mind’.

Dr Narang further says, “In the new epistemology and poetics, more emphasis is on plurality of meanings and searching for new contexts than anything else. Ghalib’s open-mindedness and his dialectical discourse has a close and special relationship with the modern mind.”

According to him, Ghalib’s philosophy also had similarities with ideas post-modernism. In other words, the garden of meaning which Ghalib craved for, had just been created.

The scope of the 678-page book is too vast and too diverse to be captured in these columns. In a nutshell, every age is Ghalib’s age and Ghalib is relevant and meaningful even today.

The book has been published by the Sahidya Academy, Delhi.