Most scholars were of the opinion that the discarded poetry was too obscure, even meaningless, to merit deeper analysis besides, it had already been bypassed by the poet himself.
Although the edition created a ripple in the Urdu literary world, it produced only one commentary, Abdul Bari Asi’s Sharh-e-Kalam-e Ghalib (Commentary on Ghalib’s Poetry, Lucknow, 1931). An edition of this early poetry was first published in 1921 from Bhopal, India. This manuscript can be dated to 1821 and is known as the Bhopal nuskha. Most of the early work seemed to have disappeared, until a manuscript was discovered in 1918, nearly 50 years after the great poet’s death.
While five editions of Ghalib’s Urdu divaan were published in his lifetime, starting with the first edition in 1841 and the last in 1863, the editions offer a mere 1,800 of the 4,209 couplets composed by Ghalib. Ghalib’s introduction to his Urdu poetry divaan was in Persian. Besides writing poetry in Urdu and Persian, Ghalib was a remarkable prose stylist one of the earliest for Urdu, since literary prose made a late entry in Urdu’s development. He wrote first in Persianised Urdu and then for a long period only in Persian, and returned to Urdu later in life when he was appointed royal tutor to the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Ghalib began composing verses at the early age of 10 or 12, and had written many of his best known ghazals by the time he was 19. Much of the discarded work belongs to his early period, when his poetic language was closer to Persian (not his native language) than Urdu, and his themes were quite abstruse.
The great Urdu and Persian poet Asadullah Khan Ghalib’s (1797–1869) current divaan (poetry collection) contains less than half of the verses he composed, as he was an exacting and selective editor. I am the nightingale of a garden, that has yet to bloom
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