Ghalib

by Raza Mir

  Chauk jis ko kaheN vo maqtal hai

  Ghar bana hai namoona zindaaN ka

  Is tarah ke visal se Ghalib

  Kya mite dil se daagh hijraaN ka

  The market is a battleground

  And the home is but a prison

  How can such meetings, Ghalib

  Erase the scars of separation?

  ~

  Departure

  The night is frigid, moonless and unforgiving. It is the third of Zeeqad, in the year 1269 Hijri. An English calendar gifted to Ghalib by his friend Master Ramachandra shows the date as 14 February 1869. Ghalib had been composing an ode to Imam Husain to read at a majlis, the mournful gathering in Muharram, which is two months away. But as his pen scratches the parchment, Ghalib feels the strength leave his arm and knows that his moment is arriving.

  In his own way, he is at peace. The great patriarch of Urdu poetry, whose honorifics included Dabeer-ul Mulk, the secretary, and Najm-ud Daula, the star; the lion of the neighbourhood of Ballimaran; the composer of odes to Imam Ali and verses that extolled wine, whose work would be sung in streets and plumbed for meaning by philosophers over the aeons, is dying. The next day, his bier will leave his house, ritually washed, shrouded in plain white, for a grave that will remain derelict for years before a newly sovereign nation wakes up to his greatness and turns it into a simple mausoleum. For the moment though, it is just him and Umrao at home.

  He looks at her with a glance of infinite tenderness. Fifty-nine years of marital togetherness, which began when he was but a lad of thirteen and she a little girl of eleven. They have been united in sunlight and shadow, their existence an ocean of indebted want interrupted by fleeting islands of plenitude, but also a flowing stream of companionable agreement despite the eddies of conflict and argument.

  Umrao has rarely been resentful of his poetic boastfulness, his ego that has cost him many a financial opportunity. But she also is the one person who has never found it necessary to defer to his wisdom. She has known him as a shy teenager, and they have learnt to communicate without words; the wistful glances they share in these final moments are devoid of empty solace and full of well-rehearsed grief. After all, seven of their children have passed away under their roof, and they have been done wailing since Arif succumbed to one of those fevers of Delhi that brooked no arguments from despairing mortals.

  Ghalib senses consciousness leaving him, shyly, surreptitiously. He has marked most of the moments of his life with his poems. In keeping with the moment, he recalls several of his verses extolling, mocking and cajoling death. As he settles to await the arrival of the malak-ul maut, the angel of merciful death, he hums his own verse as a catechism:

  Gham-e hasti ka ‘Asad’ kis se ho juz marg ilaaj?

  Shama har rang meiN jalti hai sahar hone tak

  What is the cure for life’s sorrows save death, Asad?

  The taper burns in many hues until it is dawn.

  PART I

  1

  The Paragon of Urdu Expression

  HaiN aur bhi duniya meiN sukhanwar bahut achhe

  Kahte haiN ke Ghalib ka hai andaaz-e bayaaN aur

  There are many others in the world, poets truly great

  Rumour has it though, Ghalib’s turn of phrase stands separate!

  Few writers have the privilege of being so completely associated with a language that they are simultaneously viewed not just as its most skilful exponent but also as one of its exemplars. Like Virgil with Latin or Dante with Italian, Mirza Asadullah Khan Baig ‘Ghalib’ (1797–1869) is rightfully seen as the paragon of Urdu expression. His verses were written in original prototypes of rhyme and metre that have been imitated by other poets for almost two centuries. His turns of phrase are the stuff of proverbs. His prose, as exemplified by his letters, provides a refreshing down-to-earth counterpoint to his ornate poetry, and his book on the 1857 rebellion puts him in the company of the historians of his time. Indeed, like Mir Taqi Mir before him, Ghalib is not just a brick in the wall of Urdu poetry but one of its foundations.

  What makes Ghalib so unique? By now, all his poetic output has been plumbed by scholars, other poets and fans for metaphorical hints and allegorical insights. His poetry was at times super accessible and at other times impenetrable. He could write the most playful verses about mangoes and the most opaque poems about the nature of existence.

  Arguably, the Ghalib era symbolized the peak of Urdu sukhan, its literary expression. Ghalib took Urdu poetry by the scruff of its neck and shook it into a new order with his incredible riffs on philosophy, love and politics. Despite his cantankerous nature and his obsession with writing in Farsi (which led him sometimes to devalue his own Urdu poetry), he was fortunate enough to be recognized as a genius in his own time. In the century and a half since his death, he has reached the status of a colossus on the poetic landscape of Urdu. More copies of the Divaan-e Ghalib have been printed than of any other book in the history of Urdu literature, and Ghalib’s verse may be the most translated of all Urdu writing, in the most number of languages.

  Not only was Ghalib a great poet, but he was also a marker of a new era that was a work-in-progress during his lifetime. His life mirrors the fault lines between the age of tradition and the era of modernity. He lived in a world that grappled with the ingress of technology and capitalism into Indian society and witnessed foundational changes, both progressive (the introduction of the printing press and the postal system) and cataclysmic (1857 and its aftermath). His engagement with these developments and events provides us with an interesting insight into how his society was responding to these transformations.

  Ghalib Ki Dilli

  The historian Giovanni Arrighi has referred to the period starting in the 1870s and continuing into the 2000s as the ‘long twentieth century’, referring to a particular phase of capital accumulation and state formation. In similar fashion, and moving beyond artificial temporal milestones, we could refer to the period from 1707 to 1857 as the ‘long eighteenth century’ of India. That era was bookended on one side by the death of Aurangzeb and on the other by the formal takeover of India by the British crown following the ghadar, the rebellion that we now read in hindsight as the first birth pangs of a free country. Ghalib lived through the second half of this long century and chronicled the shock of its sudden end in a language suffused with lyrical nostalgia and layered with his reflections about its significance in the broader context.

  The subcontinent that had been unified under Aurangzeb into a single kingdom began to break apart shortly after his death. Delhi remained the epicentre of the seismic shifts that buffeted the country. The Persian king Nader Shah attacked from the north-west in 1739, carving out the Afghan regions from Mughal control. The British established a beachhead in Bengal after the victory of Major General Robert Clive of the East India Company over Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The kingdom of Mysore became autonomous in the 1750s with Sultan Hyder Ali Khan and his son Tipu Sultan asserting their sovereignty. The nizam of Hyderabad, who was notionally a Mughal subject, stopped being beholden to the Mughal emperor roughly at the same time. Maharaja Ranjit Singh built up a Sikh empire in 1800, and the Balkanization of the subcontinent continued unabated, a phenomenon that the British exploited through a series of military campaigns, political co-optation and long-term strategies that produced spectacular dividends in their southward and eastward march towards the colonial domination of the subcontinent.

  In the century and a half between 1707 and 1857, the Mughal empire counted fourteen kings who came and went in a depressing cycle of ineffective rule and brutal overthrow. In the late 1700s, it was the locus of struggles between the Afghans led by Ahmed Shah Abdali, the Marathas led by Yashwantrao Holkar, and the British. Matters ended decisively for Delhi in 1803 with the defeat of the Marathas by General Gerard Lake in the second Anglo-Maratha war. The battles between the British and the Afghans would continue throughout the nineteenth century, as part of what became known as ‘the gre
at game’, where global powers treated Afghanistan as a staging ground for larger global struggles.

  Delhi, as the launching pad for British operations in the north-western part of the subcontinent, became extremely important for the British crown. Once the British defeated the Marathas, they quietly began entrenching themselves as the de facto rulers of the region, setting up Nawab Shah Alam II as a figurehead. Nobody was fooled, and the ironic jibe that floated in the streets of Delhi made fun of his name ‘Shah Alam’ (the ruler of the world) thus: Sultanat-e Shah Alam, az Dilli ta Palam (the reign of the king of the world extends from Delhi to Palam). Even granting him this twenty-kilometre stretch was a generous concession. The British appointed David Ochterlony, a senior manager with the East India Company, as the first British Resident of Delhi. He set up headquarters in Mehrauli, fixed a stipend for the king and called all the shots. The East India Company slowly shifted the centre of operations away from the Red Fort, and a series of Residents established administrative operations in the region till the practice was abandoned in 1857, when India was formally brought under the rule of the British crown.

  Ghalib’s Early Days

  In the midst of this turmoil, Ghalib was born in Agra in 1797 to a family of soldiers, a matter he was very proud of. His maternal grandfather, Khwaja Ghulam Hasan Khan, was perhaps the most famous of his ancestors and had been granted the title of Kamin Dan (commander). His maternal uncle, Nasrullah Baig, served briefly as a subedar (the equivalent of a British captain) in Agra. His paternal ancestors were of Turkish stock; his grandfather had arrived in India through Samarkand.

  Ghalib’s childhood was spent in Agra in the environment of the vernacular Urdu. Sometimes it went by its earlier name, Rekhta, and remained far removed from Delhi’s courtly Persianized fare. Agra was the land of Nazeer Akbarabadi, the troubadour of the masses, whose songs about bazaars and festivals rang with a homespun cadence and whose idiom helped unify a variety of minor dialects into an emerging language. Rumour has it that Ghalib was tutored by the great Nazeer himself in his early days.

  It was a matter of pride for Ghalib that his life overlapped with that of another giant of Urdu poetry, Mir Taqi Mir, the man who came to be known as the Khuda-e Sukhan (God of Poetry). Mir was the only poet whose work Ghalib deferred to and whose spiritual debt he acknowledged along with that of Sufi scholars such as Bedil Dehlavi (1642–1720), whose Farsi poetry was known to have inaugurated an ‘Indian style’ (sabk-e Hendi).

  Tragedy befell Ghalib’s family in 1801 when his father was killed in a botched militia action in Alwar. The four-year-old Ghalib was initially sheltered because his uncle Nasrullah Baig received a generous stipend of Rs 1700 a month from the British. Unfortunately, lightning struck the family twice. Nasrullah Baig died in a freak fall from a horse in 1805, and the stipend died with him. It was eventually restored but only partially, and Ghalib’s immediate family received a mere sixty-two rupees and eight annas each month.

  Ghalib’s Marriage and Youth

  Ghalib was married at the age of thirteen to eleven-year-old Umrao Begum, the daughter of Ilahi Baksh Maroof, a lower-level nobleman in Delhi, and eventually moved to the capital. His father-in-law was a poet and a man of relatively better means than Ghalib’s immediate family. Seeing few opportunities for his son-in-law in Agra, he invited him to move to Delhi. Ghalib and Umrao, however, did spend a few years in Agra before moving. Despite differences in temperament, Umrao being rather religious and Ghalib a bit of a libertine, they appeared to have been quite a well-adjusted couple. Their relationship was marked by levity. For example, Ghalib is reputed to have brought home a large cache of liquor. When Umrao asked him where he got the money for it, he said he had spent his stipend on it. ‘God has promised food for His subjects, so I am not worried. But he did not promise them wine, so I have made my own arrangements.’ She threw him out, liquor and all. He eventually returned, with his shoes in his hand. When she asked him why, he said, ‘Since this house has been turned into a mosque by you, I need to take appropriate precautions.’ She began to smile and all was well. This is pure unsubstantiated anecdote, but sometimes, anecdotes have a way of turning into myth, and fleshing out the contours of history. So let us suspend disbelief every now and then.

  While in Agra, the young Ghalib studied philosophy, astronomy and Arabic along with other subjects. He claimed to have benefited from instruction at the hand of one Maulana Abdus Samad Horzmud, an eminent Iranian émigré, but the odds are that this ‘tutor’ was a fake invented decades later by Ghalib to bolster his claim of special access to Persian, which, if true, would be entirely consistent with his personality. At any rate, Ghalib is reported to have written his first ghazal when he was eleven, using the pen name (takhallus) ‘Asad’. He would adopt the takhallus ‘Ghalib’ in 1816, but continued to use ‘Asad’ on occasion.

  Ghalib was known to be handsome and took great pride in his appearance. In his youth, he preferred long hair and a clean-shaven face. He dressed in manners appropriate to the fashion of his time, wearing spotless kurtas and a muslin cap in the summer and woollen attire in the winter. Financial insecurity did not rob him of sophisticated tastes. He was also a man of set opinions, which he expressed with a certitude bordering on pomposity. He was known to have a roving eye in his Agra years and implied that a woman had died because of unrequited love for him. In a letter written in his old age, he recounted the event: ‘In my time, I too was cruel, and made a beautiful songstress suffer. May god’s peace be with her . . . Forty years have passed and now I have abjured such actions, but the memory of that girl’s wondrous ways often haunts me. I shall never forget her death.’ In all likelihood, this story was an apocryphal boast, but it hints at Ghalib’s memories of a hedonistic life in Agra.

  Ghalib was around sixteen years old when he moved to Delhi. He had imagined it would be for a short period, while his pension issues were sorted out. Fate of course had other plans, and his move to the capital ended up being a permanent one. Umrao’s cousin Buniyadi Begum was generous enough to gift them a house in Gali Qasim Jan, so despite their poverty, they were at least not homeless.

  Dilli Ke Ghalib

  When Ghalib moved to Delhi, the capital was in a state of calm between eras of tumult. The memories of the famine of 1782 that had wiped out over a quarter of its population were fresh in people’s minds, and the mood in the capital was austere in the extreme. Employment opportunities were hard to come by, and the circles of patronage that had been common in the heyday of Mughal rule were steadily drying up.

  Ghalib set up residency in the walled city of Shahjahanabad and attempted to eke out a living as a poet and a man of leisure. Being a man of leisure, of course, was hard work. Egos had to be massaged, rivals quelled. One had to know the unwritten rules of behaviour amongst the poets of Delhi and the aristocrats of Shahjahanabad, the court customs at the Red Fort, and above all, the emerging bureaucratic traditions of British rule. There were Mughals and Rajputs, Rohillas and Jats, British and French, men and women, nobility and commoners, all manner of entities and a bewildering array of customs to contend with. Luckily, Ghalib had charm and social skills to spare, though his ego sometimes proved to be a major obstacle to his advancement.

  Ghalib’s early days in Delhi were consumed by an increasingly desperate effort to have his stipend raised. He felt he had been duped by his relative, the nawab of Loharu, Ahmad Baksh Khan. The latter’s estate had been asked to provide Ghalib’s extended family an annual stipend of 10,000 rupees, but had reduced it to 3000, of which Ghalib’s immediate family received 750 rupees.

  Ghalib’s penurious state in Delhi forced him to take up his case seriously. British records show that he wrote several eloquent letters to an array of authorities pleading with them to rectify the matter. He took his status as a beneficiary of inherited largess for granted and was possessed of a sense of entitlement that was increasingly at odds with the straitened circumstances of his feudal benefactors and the shifting priorities of the new ad
ministration.

  He began flourishing as a poet in Delhi, appearing regularly in local mushairas in the Delhi circuit, swiftly establishing a name for himself. He was treated with respect in the highest corridors of Mughal power. His opinion on matters of poetry was held in high regard, and people began to cajole him to bring out a divaan1 of his work. He was known to be generous with both his time and his money; anecdotes of his charitable nature abound. His philosophy was to give before being asked: be-talab deN to maza us meiN siva milta hai; vo gada jis ko na ho khoo-e savaal achcha hai (the joy of giving without being asked is unique; the beggar who does not have the need to beg is a welcome sight).

  The one problem with such behaviour was that Ghalib, in his hobnobbing with the social elite and being profligate with his charity, had to spend a lot of money to keep up appearances, well above his income. He began to spiral into debt, far more so when his father-in-law, a pillar of financial support, died in 1826.

  He doesn’t appear to have spent any time doing physical labour or seeking any manner of paid employment. It was only later in life that he served as a tutor to the rich, the famous and the gifted. He sought what he felt was his just due and spent his youth railing against his relatives, alternately cajoling and scolding a variety of administrators from Delhi to Calcutta, and pressing his case with the determined obduracy of someone unable to recognize a lost cause. Ghalib’s case offers a window into the fast-changing relations of feudal governance. To put it succinctly, British influence waxed as Mughal sovereignty waned. Ghalib, wise to these power shifts, pursued his rights in British courts.