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What the poem is
The Persian title Chirāg-e Dair is also spelled Chirāgh-e Dair or Cerāge dair in catalogues and records. It translates roughly as “the lamp of the temple” or “the lamp of the monastery-temple,” and the English edition uses Temple Lamp as its title, with the subtitle Verses on Banaras.
A masnavi is a narrative or descriptive poem built on rhyming couplets that run on continuously rather than in the stanza-and-refrain patterns most English readers know. Ghalib is widely remembered for his Urdu ghazals, so the poem can surprise readers who meet him first through those short, tightly structured lyrics. The publisher’s 2022 catalogue notes that he wrote more poetry in Persian than in Urdu, and that his output also included qasidas, qitas and masnavis. That detail matters for understanding why this work sits outside the familiar Ghalib canon for many English-language readers, without suggesting that Persian was a side interest for him.
Why the English edition matters
The 2022 Penguin Classics edition, Temple Lamp: Verses on Banaras
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