Ghalib:Literature

In 1857, Ghalib was forced to reassess his great admiration for Western culture when the British rulers of India responded to the Sepoy Rebellion with violence, martial law, and the forced exile of Delhi's Muslim and Hindu populations.

Eighteen months after the start of the fighting, he published Dastanbu, his memoirs of the suffering brought on by the conflict, and sent copies to various British officials, including Queen Victoria, both to plead for moderation in the treatment of Indians and to establish his own innocence in the rebellion.

At this time, motivated by the realization that most of his unpublished manuscripts had been destroyed when the rebels and British alike looted the libraries of Delhi, Ghalib attempted to gather his remaining ghazals into expanded editions of his Divan.

Source: Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism

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