Sunday, May 20, 2007
Ghalib's ambivalence toward the British possibly represents a charactersitic dilemma of the Indian—indeed, the Asian—peoples. Whereas they are fascinated by the liberalism of the Western mind and virtually seduced by the possibility that Western science and technology might be the answer to poverty and other problems of their material existence, they feel a very deep repugnance for forms and intensities of violence which are also peculiarly Western. Ghalib was probably not as fully aware of his dilemma as the intellectuals of today might be; to assign such awareness to a mid-nineteenth-century Indian mind would be to violate it by denying the very terms—which means limitations, as well—of its existence. His bewilderment at the extent of the destruction caused by the very people of whose humanity he had been convinced can, however, be understood in terms of this basic ambivalence.
—Aijaz Ahmad, Introduction to Ghazals of Ghalib, 1970
