Books
Temple Lamp (2022)
Verses on Banaras; by Mirza Ghalib
The poem Chiragh-e-Dair or Temple Lamp is an eloquent and vibrant Persian masnavi by Mirza Ghalib. While we quote liberally from his Urdu poetry, we know little of his writings in Persian, and while we read of his love for the city of Delhi, we discover in Temple Lamp his rapture over the spiritual and sensual city of Banaras.
Chiragh-e-Dair is being translated directly from Persian into English in its entirety for the first time, with a critical introduction. It is Mirza Ghalib’s paen to Kashi, which he calls ‘Kaaba-e-Hindostan’, or the Mecca of India.
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The Sixth River (2019)
A Journal from the Partition of India; by Fikr Taunsvi
The Partition of India in 1947 left millions displaced amidst indiscriminate murders, rapes and looting. The Sixth River, originally published as Chhata Darya, is an extraordinary first-person account of that violent time. It is the journal Fikr wrote from August to November 1947 as Lahore disintegrated around him. Fikr is angry at the shortsightedness and ineptness of Radcliffe, Nehru, Gandhi and Jinnah. In the company of likeminded friends such as Sahir Ludhianvi, he mourns the loss of the art and culture of Lahore in the bloodlust and deluded euphoria of freedom; and derides the newly converted, who adopted stereotypical religious symbols. He is bewildered when old friends suddenly turn staunch nationalists and advise him to either convert or leave the country. And the deep, unspeakable trauma millions faced during Partition reaches Fikr’s doorstep when his neighbour murders his daughter, and when he is eventually forced to migrate to Amritsar in India.
Powerful, ironic and deeply harrowing, The Sixth River is an invaluable account of the Partition. This brilliant translation by Maaz Bin Bilal makes the classic available in English for the first time.
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Ghazalnama (2019)
Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu
“Maaz thought he would live happily in Europe,
Did he know he had Delhi’s map in his heart?”
Ghazalnāma is the verse collection of my experiences in the worlds he has inhabited, cultural and spatial. It is as much a safarnāma or travelogue of his mind as it is a collection of ghazals and other poems, in translations across different cultural and linguistic spheres.
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