‘Ghalib, Shakespeare different strokes of brush on same canvas’

Lucknow: What similarities did the two greatest bards of their times—William Shakespeare and Mirza Ghalib—have in common? While one would be baffled and would find the comparison absurd in the first place, a gripping session at Urdu Akadami on Saturday tried to draw parallels between the literary giants who have continued to stir the creative consciousness of people for generations. The literary session brought the two diametrically opposite literary icons on common platform and tried to interpret their work to find inherent and inadvertent similarities and incongruities between the two stalwarts who are known for expressing complex human emotions and moorings in metaphorically crafted couplets and sonnets.Author and Urdu enthusiast Sudhanshu Mani said that beneath the apparent differences between the two bards, one finds a common thread binding them and that is literature, besides the same canvas of life and human experiences. “They both explored different facets of life and several emotions around it. In their writings, though distinctive, they both explored and expressed a range of emotions impacting the human psyche,” Mani said. “For example, the conversation of Rosalind in Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ and Ghalib’s couplet ‘Meherbaan ho ke bula lo mujhe chaho jis waqt, main gaya waqt nahi hoon ki phir aa na sakoon’ deal with similar emotions. Likewise, dialogue between Bassanio and Antonio in Merchant of Venice expresses emotions similar to those portrayed by Ghalib in a couplet on the subject of loan,” he added. Despite being inadvertently similar in curious ways, the two also had many dissimilarities. While Shakespeare is known as a master storyteller and conveys his mental moorings through the characters of his plays, Ghalib is a lot more abstract and opaque, said the author. “Ghalib has a touch of spirituality, which is missing in Shakespeare. Moreover, Ghalib comes to you as a warm companion in your loneliness. Shakespeare is food for thought and compels you to contemplate,” Mani added. Another dissimilarity between the two is their popularity. “Shakespeare became popular and loved during his lifetime but Ghalib didn’t see posterity and impact on people he went on to yield across borders. Perhaps, Ghalib was way ahead of his time and the Sufism that enchanted him took time for the people to understand,” pointed out historian Nadeem Hasnain.