Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics

Ghalib said, “… the poem always slips, like the imaginary anqua bird, through the finest nets of awareness.” This statement aptly defines the myriad moods the ghazal aspires to capture”… various facets of the lover’s experience… lamenting the pain of separation … delighting in imaginary union … feeling alienated from the world,” yet remains mysterious. Frances W. Pritchett recalls her first experience o the ghazal as love at first sight, contrary to the disdainful approach of modern Urdu critics. In Nets of Awareness Pritchett joins literary criticism and history to explain how the ghazal, for centuries the pride and joy of Indo-Muslim culture, was abruptly dethroned within its own milieu and by its own theorists. A must-read if you want to understand the complexity and power of this undeservedly maligned genre.