4 ideas
Ghalib dropped the long Persian openings of titles, praise and invocations. He began letters mid-thought, as if the reader had just walked in, and said he was turning correspondence into speech. Taking out the formal framing changes the relationship: the letter stops performing status and starts sounding like the two people are sitting together.
After the 1857 uprising, Ghalib's letters record in detail what the British reprisals did to Delhi. Friends were executed or scattered, whole neighborhoods were demolished, and the city's literary circles were gone. Because he wrote in plain first-person prose instead of set elegiac forms, the letters read as a live eyewitness account of a civilization collapsing, not a mourning ritual performed afterward.
Ghalib wrote openly about debts, his lapsed pension, begging patrons for help, and his fondness for mangoes and wine. He treated his own appetites and humiliations with self-mocking wit instead of hiding them. The mundane and embarrassing details of a life become the evidence of the self, and candor about need becomes a form of dignity, not a loss of it.
Later writers copied their direct, conversational voice. A new literary standard can emerge from private, low-status writing that drops inherited conventions, not from formal works that try to set a standard.