Ghalib

by Raza Mir

  Trip Eastward

  As part of his fruitless quest to have his stipend increased, Ghalib decided to travel eastward. His attempts to secure a satisfactory audience with Baronet Charles Metcalf, the British Resident, while the latter was at Delhi had failed. In October 1826, Ghalib tried to meet the Resident in Kanpur and set off on a trip that would last three years. He stayed for a few months each at Kanpur, Lucknow and Benaras before reaching Calcutta in February 1828. He finally managed to secure an audience with the new governor-general of India, Lord William Bentinck, in February 1829. Not much appears to have come out of his trip but having met the top British bureaucrat in the land, he returned, if not satisfied, at least mollified. He reached Delhi in November 1829.

  While Ghalib felt his case was strong, his opponents had the ear of the British. Needless to say, he lost. His many trips to different seats of power and his eloquent epistles notwithstanding, he received word in early 1831 that his appeal had been rejected, and his claims to any inheritance from his uncle’s property had been declared null and void. It was a crushing blow, which he described in a letter as ‘a murder of a universe of hope’ that ‘turned my honour into dust’.

  Sorry though this episode was, it may have been a blessing in disguise for Ghalib. His constant petitioning turned him into one of the era’s biggest patrons of the nascent postal service; an association that he used throughout his life to develop what in hindsight became an important element of Urdu prose. His letters have acquired a high status in Urdu literature. These letters, which help flesh out Ghalib’s character, are extremely popular even today and contain a spectrum of reflections including opinions on mundane day-to-day affairs, musings on mangoes,2 literary criticism, exegesis on his own poetry and that of others, and comments on historical and political events.

  The long trip added many dimensions to his personality. During his three-year sojourn, he had the opportunity to interact with a variety of his peers. While in Lucknow, he became familiar with the works of Mir Anees and Mirza Dabeer who were taking the tradition of marsiya, the elegy, to stratospheric heights. Shia devotional poetry moved him monumentally and deepened his connection to Imam Ali, a progenitor of most Sufi orders. He developed a rudimentary understanding of Hindu philosophy during a visit to Benaras. He took in Hindu devotional practices, made sense of Bhakti traditions of worship and made important connections between Islamic and Hindu religious practices. In his poem Chiragh-e-Dair (Temple Lamp), he described the city thus:

  Ibaadat-khaana-e naaqusiyaan ast

  Hamaana Kaaba-e Hindostaan ast

  It is the prayer house of the conch blowers

  Verily, it is the Kaaba of India

  His trip to Calcutta gave Ghalib further insight into the interactions between Western modernity and Hindu metaphysics. He loved Calcutta not only for its orderliness, but for the rationalist temper that infused the city. The conversations between Hindus and Christians were much more on an equal footing there, unlike in Delhi, where a virulent strain of evangelism had taken hold, and the natives were treated as heathens. Out east, Raja Ram Mohan Roy was ascendant, and the first assembly of the Brahmo Sabha (the precursor of the Brahmo Samaj), which would be held in August 1828, was being planned. Old cultural practices were being publicly debated, and progressive Hindus were unsparing in their self-criticism.

  Ghalib eagerly took in all these influences. Already primed due to his exposure to the Bhakti poets of Benaras, he embraced the ideas of vahdat-ul vujood, a belief in a unifying divinity that could accommodate all faiths. In his words:

  Hum muvahhid haiN, hamaara kaish hai tark-e rusoom

  MillateN jab mit gayeeN, ajza-e eemaaN ho gayeeN

  We are unitarians, rejection of rituals is our brief

  Where sectarian differences end, there begins true belief

  After Calcutta

  By the time he returned to Delhi in 1829, Ghalib had become a full-blown Sufi, but one with all manner of ecumenical and modernist influences. He was scornful of Muslim orthodoxy, especially the Ahl-e Hadith (People of Prophetic Utterance) movement that had emerged in Delhi, which was beholden to Saudi Wahabism and counted Ghalib’s friend and fellow poet Momin amongst its sympathizers. Ghalib’s poetry began to take a defiant anti-religious overtone:

  Dekhiyo Ghalib se gar uljha kiyo

  Hai vali posheeda aur kaafir khula

  Watch out if you should ever with Ghalib meet

  Saint in disguise, else an infidel complete

  He had returned to Delhi wiser but poorer. His debts amounted to sixty times his annual income. He was hounded by creditors and even ordered jailed (a sentence later commuted to house arrest). Around 1833, he put together his definitive divaan, which lay unpublished for eight years. He was a regular in the mushairas of Delhi, of which there were many. The palace conducted two mushairas a month at the Red Fort, and the Delhi College held a monthly event, while several smaller, private mushairas were held in homes and havelis. Poets and connoisseurs quickly became acquainted with Ghalib’s poetic genius, though that did not lead to any immediate financial gains.

  Ghalib had a pyrrhic victory of sorts in 1835 when his legal opponents suffered a precipitous decline in their fortunes. Nawab Shamsuddin, the elder son of the late Ahmad Baksh Khan and Ghalib’s adversary in his pension case, was executed by the British for alleged complicity in the murder of the British Resident, William Fraser. However, Ghalib’s personal fortunes did not improve.

  Another minor setback to Ghalib related to the matter of Mughal succession. In 1837, after the death of Emperor Akbar the Second, Bahadur Shah Zafar ascended the throne with the usual internecine squabbles that characterized Mughal succession, albeit on a smaller and bloodless scale. In a miscalculation, Ghalib had supported the claims of Zafar’s opponent Mirza Salim, and he paid for it dearly as the new king appointed Ghalib’s rival Sheikh Muhammad Ibrahim Zauq as his poet laureate, depriving Ghalib of a potentially lucrative seat. Ghalib was persona non grata in the Red Fort for a long time, though he did worm his way back in through a series of strategic odes written in the king’s honour. The process took well over an impoverished decade. His relative lack of contacts amongst the powerful cost him dearly as well when he was arrested and jailed in 1847 on a gambling charge, a sentence so harsh for a minor crime that it seems to have been a form of petty vengeance.

  Perhaps out of sympathy for Ghalib, a benefactor, Miyan Nasiruddin (aka Kaley Shah), offered him a house to stay in. Kaley Shah also pulled some strings and had Ghalib appointed to the court in a minor capacity in 1847. Eventually Ghalib was granted honorifics that were appropriate to his stature, such as Najm-ud Daula (star of the kingdom) and Dabeer-ul Mulk (the secretary of the realm). However, Ghalib’s bitterness at his long exile from the court found expression in his poetry and got him into trouble with the king.

  In 1854, Ghalib was chosen to be the ustad (teacher) of the heir apparent, Mirza Fakhru. He was finally elevated to the status of the court’s poet laureate and by extension, the ustad of the king himself, following the death of Zauq that same year. The nawab of Oudh also offered a pension to Ghalib, whose financial situation started improving, leading to a three-year period of relative security and comfort. He ate meat every day, drank chilled almond syrup in the morning and expensive wine at night, paid a retinue of servants and pupils and even made the odd income tax payment to the administration. Happily, his appointment to the court meant he went back to writing mostly in Urdu.

  The era of severely curtailed Mughal power during the two decades of Zafar’s monarchy produced a flowering of sorts in the court at the Red Fort. Courtly customs were the touchstone of good manners, and painting, calligraphy, music and poetry were discussed at leisure in a court that served no real administrative role, and perhaps as a consequence of its powerlessness, was even more committed to refined comportment and style.

  The Ghadar

  The calm of Delhi, and indeed of Ghalib’s life, came crashing down on a scarlet summer night, w
hich Ghalib marked as the sixteenth of Ramadan, 1273 AH. On that day, 11 May 1857, soldiers from the Meerut cantonment marched into Delhi, killed every Englishman they could find and declared themselves as part of an independent nation, with the octogenarian Zafar as their emperor.

  The mutiny had been years in the making. The British had begun to extract greater and greater tribute from the Indian hinterland, leading to untold misery. The Doctrine of Lapse promulgated by the Governor-General Lord Dalhousie in 1848 had sought to annex princely states whose rulers died heirless. The nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, had been deposed in 1856 and his princely state annexed. The agents of the East India Company had exacted tax with unprecedented brutality during times of famine, and Indian soldiers in British barracks were being treated poorly. There were rumours that the recently introduced Enfield 1853 rifle had beef and pork tallow in its cartridges, a concern that the British refused to recognize or allay. In March 1857, a mutinous soldier named Mangal Pandey was hanged in Barrackpore, lighting a torch of rebellion that spread westward. On 10 May, the final domino fell when the soldiers at the Meerut barracks revolted and rode to Delhi, seeking a figurehead leader to cement disparate revolts into a war of independence.

  For a little over four months, Delhi was taken over by the rebels. The residents of the walled city were mute spectators as their lives were upended by events beyond their control but quickly adapted and accommodated their new visitors from the east. Ghalib continued to attend court and even wrote a qaseeda, a poetic paean, in praise of the king’s victory, but it is clear that he felt overwhelmed by the turn of events. He took to recording the various incidents that marked the rebellion and its aftermath, which were eventually published in a book titled Dastambu (A Fistful of Flowers). That account appeared in 1858, after the British had reconquered Delhi, and reflects his careful attempts not to run afoul of the returning rulers, and its ambivalences must be understood in that context.

  It is safe to say that Ghalib, like most of his counterparts, was distressed by the events that followed the recapture of Delhi by the British. Their savage cruelties purged any residual loyalties he may have felt towards them, and he learnt to be circumspect in his future engagements with them. The entries in his diary from September 1857 describe the events with unsparing detail: ‘when the wrathful lion-hearts entered the city, they felt free to slaughter the defenceless and burn their houses . . .’ He wrote of how his neighbours lived without water for days, and of his bereavement at the loss of his beloved brother, Yousuf Mirza, who was deprived of treatment and consigned to a slow death in Ghalib’s house: ‘My eyes have seen nothing but tears, may they forever be caked shut with dust . . .’ He also wrote of the trouble he had while trying to give his brother a decent burial: ‘How can a Muslim join with two or three friends and shoulder to shoulder carry a corpse to burial? My neighbours took pity on my loneliness . . . they washed the body, wrapped it in a few white sheets and in a mosque near his house, dug a hole in the ground.’

  Not everyone was so fortunate, for ‘about the princes, not much can be said, some fell to bullets, some were sent to the jaws of the monster of death, the souls of others were snuffed out by the hangman’s noose, some languish in prison, while others run aimlessly on the face of the earth, His Highness is under trial, and the noblemen of Jhajjar and Ballabgadh, as well as the rulers of Farrukhabad have been hung on separate days on the gallows tree . . .’

  The British treated the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid with utter contempt, destroying many buildings and repurposing others into barracks and quarters. Zafar was tried, found guilty and exiled to Rangoon. Many of his sons and relatives were summarily executed and there were reports of large-scale rape. The nightmare of Delhi had begun.

  British Rule

  With the advent of the ghadar, Ghalib’s short-lived period of financial stability ended abruptly. While the city limped back to order, his stipends from the court ceased. Between 1857 and 1860, he had few sources of income, presumably making do on the kindness of relatives and distant benefactors such as the nawab of Rampur. In 1860, the British finally restored some of his pension, but things were difficult in the era of post-mutiny inflation. All Ghalib had each month was the sixty-two rupees and eight annas he received from the British, supplemented by a hundred rupees that the nawab of Rampur sent intermittently.

  Ghalib made the most of his situation and even found ways to make light of it. In a letter to his young friend Mirza Alauddin Ahmed dated 28 July 1862, he writes with a veritable twinkle in his eye: ‘Give my salaams to my brother [the recipient’s father] and tell him, those days are gone when one could take a loan here from Mathura Das, attack Darbari Mal for another there, and loot Khubchand Chainsukh’s house for a third. Everyone accepted my sealed note of request, which was of course useless, for I repaid neither principal nor interest. My aunt paid for some expenses, I got a bit from Khan, a little from Alwar and occasionally something from mother in Agra. Now it is me, and sixty-two rupees and eight annas, along with a hundred from Rampur. The only one who will give me credit now demands interest month on month. From that, I have to pay income tax, the guard, the interest, the principal, the upkeep of wife and children, my pupils, all in one hundred and sixty-two rupees. I am frustrated. It is nigh impossible to live like this. What can I do? I cut out the morning drink, halved meat rations and stopped drinking wine at night. That saved twenty or twenty-two rupees, and there was some room in the budget. Friends asked, “How long can you continue like this?” I said, “Till god demands it.” They asked, “If you do not drink wine, how will you live?” I said, “The way god wills me to.” But suddenly, Rampur sent some money greater than my expectations. Some debt was repaid. Morning drinks and wine began anew, and meat was added back to the grocery list . . .’ This dark humour masked the reality that from 1857 onwards, Ghalib’s life was a struggle for survival, leading him to vacillate between cautious optimism and dark pessimism.

  Squabbles and Fame

  Despite his financial troubles, Ghalib continued to court controversy, principally on account of his lack of tact and his tendency to overreach himself in areas that were not his expertise. One particular incident is illustrative of Ghalib’s personality. A noted scholar from the Deccan named Maulvi Mohammed Hussain Tabrizi had written an influential Farsi dictionary in the seventeenth century titled Burhaan-e Qati (Conclusive Proof), which had been used as a definitive reference volume by most Farsi scholars in the subcontinent. Fancying himself an authority on Farsi, Ghalib published a work titled Qati-e Burhaan (Proof Conclusive) in 1862, a highly intemperate critique of the venerable author, and as if to add insult to injury, one that was relatively carelessly written and riddled with errors.

  This proved to be a mistake. For one, Tabrizi had several admirers, who were riled by Ghalib’s critique, especially its tone. Also, Ghalib had already alienated several people in the Urdu/Persian literary circles with his cantankerous nature and his attitude of superiority. Sensing an opening, his opponents piled calumny upon him with glee that bordered on schadenfreude, and Ghalib found himself bitterly defensive for years. It did not help that he constantly invoked his status as a high-born person and disparaged his rivals for being commoners, thus provoking further attacks. Eventually, he was stung enough to appeal to higher authorities, suing his rivals for defamation in a British court. It was a sorry spectacle.

  However, his stature continued to grow, as did his popularity among the masses. His Urdu divaan was released in a fifth edition, and the newly inaugurated Nawal Kishore Press of Lucknow published his Farsi divaan in 1863. In 1868, a collection of his letters was published under the title Ud-e Hindi (Indian Perfume). The bard of India was being firmly recognized as a genius in his lifetime.

  Twilight of the Giant

  Ghalib’s health began to fail him in the late 1860s. His last few years were spent worrying about his relatives. The children of his late adopted son, Arif, were now married, and he was being pulled into their marital disputes. Ma
ny of his contemporaries had died, and his younger friends, such as Master Ramachandra of Delhi College, were not poets, even if they were intellectuals in their own right. He wrote little poetry during this period, but his published work—both prose and poetry—circulated more than ever as a result of the increase in supply and demand of printed work. Eventually, on 15 January 1869, the great bard of Delhi breathed his last, fittingly in the same year that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in distant Porbandar. One great Indian stalwart was born just as another passed into history.

  2

  The Half-Believer Sufi

  Ye masaail-e tasawwuf ye tera bayaan, Ghalib

  Tujhe hum wali samajhte jo na baada-khwaar hota

  These Sufi-like discussions, and your speech, Ghalib, you thinker

  We’d have considered you a saint, had you not been a drinker

  Ghalib was a self-proclaimed Sufi, but one who bucked religious custom and dictum with a mischievous insouciance. This wasn’t particularly rare given the spiritual landscape of nineteenth-century India. Ghalib came of age at a time when religious thought in northern India was experiencing a tumultuous churning. On the one hand, Christian proselytizers were making inroads into the Indian socio-cultural landscape. A number of prominent thinkers such as Ghalib’s young friend Master Ramachandra, Abdul Masih of Delhi, Begum Samru from Meerut and Michael Madhusudan Dutt from Calcutta had converted to Christianity, leading to a variety of debates amongst people of his time on the nature of monotheism, the politics of evangelism and the implications of inter-religious interaction.