Now the pen has on its tongue some witty tales, and lays them out for its friends’ sake…
Thus begin the merry wisecracks, or lata’if, of Meer Taqi Meer. Restored at last, they constitute the long-censored final section of Meer’s autobiography, Zikr-i Meer (1793-98)—fifty-five sharp and playful anecdotes that colonial-era editors once deemed unfit for Urdu readers. Gathered here in four parallel versions—English, the original Persian, Urdu as well as Hindi— this volume offers the first truly complete edition of a text that reveals a lesser-known side of the poet celebrated as the Khuda-i Sukhan, the ‘God of Poetry’.
Ranging from sly jabs at scholars, poets and courtiers to earthy jokes drawn from everyday life, sometimes startlingly risqué, these wisecracks illuminate the social world and unbuttoned literary culture of eighteenth-century north India. Together with a rich introductory essay tracing the history of suppression and recovery of this material, the book offers readers a rare, panoramic view of Meer as both a master of verse and a man fully alive to the absurdities of the age.
Translated with a keen awareness of the idiom, this lively, unbowdlerized trib¬ute to literary freedom lets Meer’s voice be heard again in all its wit and charm.
