by Raza Mir
Within Islam, the austere Ahl-e Hadith movement that began in eighteenth-century Arabia had reached the subcontinental shores and was in contentious dialogue with the more spiritually inclined Sunni traditions. The Shias, devoted to Imam Ali and Imam Husain, were a growing influence within Islam, and the poetry of Mir Anees and Mirza Dabeer of Lucknow had turned the epic elegy (marsiya) into a powerful poetic form that underscored the values of humanism, heroism and sacrifice. Sikhism, drawing from strands of both Muslim and Hindu traditions, offered a new theology, and with the establishment of the Sikh empire, provided political support for the faith. Within Hinduism, Bhakti poets were ascendant in Benaras, while the Brahmo Samaj movement was beginning to articulate its ideas in Bengal.
Ghalib was a privileged spectator and sometimes spirited participant in many of these debates, and his own spiritual attitude was influenced by them. His three-year sojourn beyond the boundaries of Delhi exposed him to different spiritual traditions, and his engagement with them finds expression in his prose and poetry and provides us with incomparable insights, not only into his personality and literary oeuvre, but also into the spiritual temper of his time.
Ghalib’s Affinity with Hinduism
Zunnaar baandh subba-e sad-daana tod daal
Rahrau chale hai raah ko hamvaar dekh kar
Tie on the sacred thread and let your prayer beads scatter
To the wayfarer, a smoother terrain is what should matter
Ghalib’s affinity with Hindu spirituality was a result of his life experiences. As his letters show, many of his friends and acquaintances were Hindus, and he shared a deep and affectionate relationship with several of them. These included Mahesh Das (who sent him frequent gifts of wine), Munshi Bansidhar (a friend from Agra with whom he played chess), Master Ramachandra (an academic), Shiv Ji Ram (a student, ‘like a son to me’) and Hira Singh (‘a man with a good heart and a great name’). There was, of course, his beloved friend Har Gopal Tafta, to whom many of his letters were addressed. In one letter to Tafta dated 23 December 1859, Ghalib writes, ‘I hold all humanity to be my family, and consider all men, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, to be my brothers.’ Such sentiment, not uncommon in those times, found vivid expression in the verses of this master poet and played a role in cutting through the barriers that divided religions. In Ghalib’s ghazals, the stock character of the ‘barahman’ stood in for practising Hindus and was often referred to in respectful or affectionate terms. In a famous couplet, he says:
Vafaadaari ba shart-e- ustuvaari asl-e eemaaN hai
Marey but-khaane meiN to Kaabe meiN gaado barahman ko
Loyalty is the essence of faith as long as it is steadfast
If he dies in the temple, bury the barahman in the Kaaba
The loyalty of the barahman to his faith meets with Ghalib’s approval and grants him pride of place alongside the most pious of Muslims. In Ghalib’s poetry, the barahman and the shaikh, his counterpart in Islam, face the same tests of loyalty, love and constancy. His poems abound in verses where the terms ‘shaikh’ and ‘barahman’ are often used together, signalling a shared spirituality. The barahman occasionally functions as a soothsayer:
Dekhiye paate haiN ushshaaq butoN se kya faiz
Ek barahman ne kaha hai ke ye saal achcha hai
What victories may beleaguered lovers expect from their idols?
Let us see, a holy man has predicted a good year
In his Farsi poetry, Ghalib sometimes longed for the freedom of worship provided by the ‘temples of India and China’ (butkhaana-haaye Hind-o Cheen) as opposed to the constraints of his own faith (dilam dar Kaaba az tangi giraft, my heart feels trapped in the confines of Kaaba). Chiragh-e-Dair (Temple Lamp), written in 1827, is fulsome and gushing in its praise for the holy city of Benaras. Overall, the influence of Hindu mythos and logos is built into many a line of Ghalib’s prose and poetry in an unselfconscious manner that reflects his desire for a non-adversarial and equal dialogue between the faiths.
Ghalib the Sufi
Sufi thought in India dates back to the early days of the Delhi sultanate, around 700 years before Ghalib’s time. Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti (d. 1236), who is interred in Ajmer, and Nizamuddin Auliya (d. 1325) of Delhi were idealized figures in Indo-Islamic mythography, and saints who followed them produced an array of Sufi orders or tariqas throughout the subcontinent. Sufi thought overlaid Islamic gnosis with other faith traditions, and reflecting its Iranian origins, contained a variety of metaphors from Zoroastrian thought. In the subcontinent, Sufism influenced and was influenced by the Bhakti tradition of Indian devotion. It relied on song to spread its message and therefore attracted poets to its fold. Since Sufis frequently ran afoul of the ruling class, they were often beleaguered and oppressed. Many among their pantheon of saints were martyred, such as Mansour Hallaj, who was executed by the Abbasid caliph Al-Muqtadir on the charge of apostasy in the tenth century, Nurullah Shustari, who was put to death by Mughal emperor Jahangir in 1611 CE, and Sarmad Kashani, who was killed on the order of Aurangzeb in 1661 CE.
The Sufis’ belief that the individual could only know god through personal experience of the divine without the intercession of the clergy was a direct threat to the religious establishment, which often tried to put down the Sufis with brute force. Many Sufi saints were executed on the charge of apostasy, but their popularity often soared after their deaths, resulting in shrines at their tombs and stories about their miracles.
Ghalib grew up on legends like that of Sarmad Kashani, who is buried in a shrine close to the Jama Masjid. It is reputed that when Sarmad was asked to recite the kalma, the statement of faith (the first line of which is la-ilaha illallah, there is no god but Allah), he started by saying la ilaha (there is no god) but refused to complete it. Sarmad explained himself thus: ‘currently I am drowned in negation and have not yet achieved the state of affirmation. In this state, to utter the entire kalma would be a lie.’ For this act of defiance, which was deemed heretical, Sarmad was beheaded.1 The legend goes that his body picked up its own head and walked seven steps up the stairway of Jama Masjid. The seven steps are believed to have marked the seven times Delhi was destined to be invaded and sacked.
Stories such as Sarmad’s produced a stirring passion within the adherents of Sufism, who cut across class boundaries. Religion took on a popular and accessible form and did not rely on the supervision of any clergy. Ghalib was moved by the tales of Sufis who faced their impending death with stoic dignity and sometimes with pleasurable anticipation (eid-e nazzara hai shamsheer ka uriyaaN hona, it is a festival for the eyes, the sight of the naked sword). Stories of Sufi martyrdom merged seamlessly in his mind with the iconic Islamic story of the sacrifice of Imam Husain, the Prophet’s grandson, at Karbala, and produced exuberant accounts of the martyrdom narrative. Sometimes he imagined himself as the joyous subject of sacrifice:
Tegh dar kaf kaf ba lab aata hai qaatil is taraf
Muzhdabaad ai aarzoo-e marg-e Ghalib muzhdabaad
Sword ready, with foaming lips, advances the killer
Bravo! Your desire for death, Ghalib, bravo!
Ghalib borrowed a number of metaphors from Sufism for his ghazals. Some of them are:
Aaina, or the mirror. This is used as a metaphor for the heart and also for the universe that is reflected therein. The pure heart is therefore a polished mirror in which the truth of the world is revealed. A mirror is also honest in that it reflects reality without prejudice.
Haq, literally ‘the truth’. This is also a synonym for god. Sufi spirituality often located god inside the believer. Mansour al Hallaj is reported to have declared ‘an-al haq’, which could mean ‘I am the truth’, or ‘I am god’, for which he was charged with apostasy and killed.
Hairat or astonishment. Hairat grows in the human consciousness as more and more of the divine, or the essence of beauty, is revealed.
Fana/baqa, representing the dual nature of destruction and preservation. Sufis believe that one must destroy the self t
o exalt the spirit.
Tariqa, which is the path that one must traverse and symbolizes one’s philosophy and beliefs. At a collective level, a tariqa becomes an order, a school of Sufism.
Jalwa, which exemplifies the revelation of god to humanity. The revelation of the divine to Moses on Mount Sinai is considered the most paradigmatic of jalwa, the plural of which is tajalliyat.
Kamaal or insaan-e kaamil, the state of human perfection or the perfect human. Prophet Mohammad or Imam Ali are often revered by the Sufis as being the idealized form of humanity.
Maarefat or gnosis, which is a form of spiritual understanding that is beyond conventional modes of ‘knowledge’. Maarefat is considered a superior form of eeman or belief, incorporating an organic understanding of the entity in whom faith is placed.
Ishq, which is an all-encompassing form of love, far more intense than mere mohabbat. Ishq is pure, unlike hawas, a base form of attraction.
Noor, which is the divine light, which makes up the pure soul. God is seen as light, as are truth, beauty and revelation.
Tamanna, or desire, which can turn into the more intense junoon (madness).
Shaahed (witness), one who bears witness to the divine. A related word, shaheed, means martyr, and shahaadat means both the act of bearing witness and martyrdom in the service of truth and faith.
Many of these ideas, in various permutations and combinations, suffuse Ghalib’s poetry. Take for instance the following couplet:
Kis ka junoon-e deed tamanna shikaar tha
Aaina-khaana vadi-e gauhar ghubaar tha
Whose mad gaze slew my passion?
The house of mirrors was but a valley of dust
This can be, and has been, read in different ways. To take but one interpretation, let us look at the couplet from the point of view of god, the possible subject of the first words, ‘kis ka’ (whose). We could read Ghalib as saying that god’s desire (tamanna) to be known and admired reached a level of madness (junoon) and led to the creation of the universe, the house of mirrors (aaina-khaana). But that house of mirrors, though it shimmers like a valley of jewels (vadi-e gauhar), eventually turns out to be nothing but a desert full of sand and dust (ghubaar). God’s desire to produce a perfect world is thwarted, perhaps by human imperfection and folly. An entirely different meaning can perhaps emerge if we take a human as the subject and play with the imagery in the poem. In this version, human desire to know the creator produced false visions of the divine in worldly (and therefore ephemeral) images. Still others have seen the verse as a plank balanced on the word ‘shikaar’ (hunt) and sought to draw a portrait of a hunter stalking prey with passion and seeking water at an oasis (vadi) and finding nothing but dust, thereby symbolizing the futility of existence.
The ambiguity of the sher provides us with multiple meanings, conveyed through multiple metaphors, all in two Sufi-like lines. The aaina/ghubaar binary evokes the image of a mirage that shimmers from a distance, only to let down the expectant wayfarer up close, and recalls the Sufi contention that the world of materiality is but a deception and that those who lust after it are doomed to eventual disappointment. Thus, by the deployment of Sufi images, Ghalib was able to layer his verses with a multiplicity of meanings.
Ghalib’s devotion to Sufism separated him from his Delhi contemporaries such as Zauq and Momin, who began to take on a more austere and literalist approach to Islamic dogma in their later years. After the death of the great Mughal king Akbar, clergymen who promoted a literalist version of Islam became prominent in the Mughal court. The more extremist amongst them were associated with the deaths of Sufi saints such as Nurullah Shustari in Jahangir’s reign and Sarmad Kashani in Aurangzeb’s. Ghalib’s multireligious and multicultural experiences kept him away from the astringent Ahl-e Hadith positions and increasingly brought him into the Sufi fold. Moreover, he fancied himself a disciple of the seventeenth-century scholar Abdul Qadir Bedil, who was not only an exponent of an indigenous Persian style of poetry (which Ghalib admired) but was also a Sufi saint and espoused Sufi metaphysics in his writings. The intersection of language, poetry and spiritual belief pushed Ghalib further towards Sufism.
The ‘love poetry’ of Ghalib that is constantly quoted in secular contexts also abounds in the same Sufi metaphors. For Ghalib, and indeed for all Sufis, the protocols of love extend in a seamless continuum from inter-human attraction to the gnostic love of the divine. There is wonderment (hairat), desire (shauq, tamanna), the occasional madness (junoon), the tearing of the shirt collar (chaak garebaani), and eventually, self-destruction (fana). Consider the following lines:
Wai deewaanagi-e shauq ke har dum mujh ko
Aap jaana udhar aur aap hi hairaaN hona
Alas, my intense desire has left me crazed
Time and again I go there, and leave amazed
In contrast to the disappointment experienced by the poet in the previous verse, Ghalib here is attracted to and eventually amazed by the new manifestations (tajalliyaat) of the loved object. The true form of the beloved/divine only reveals itself up close, increasing both delight and surprises and emphasizing the importance of ‘feeling/love’ at the expense of ‘understanding/reason’.
Sufi motifs of sacrifice run through Ghalib’s work. One of his more famous couplets goes:
Aashiqui sabr-talab aur tamanna betaab
Dil ka kya rang karooN khoon-e jigar hone tak
Love counsels patience while passion betrays its anxiety
How should I colour my heart, while these dual passions rage?
The duality between aashiqui (true love) and tamanna (perhaps a more superficial desire) here evokes opposite emotions that produce tumult and confusion in the heart, only resolvable by its transformation into blood. The theme of blood (and the colour of blood) runs through Ghalib’s poetry. Sometimes he feels it necessary to provide an accounting to the object of his devotion for the tears of blood he shed, for after all, the tears were from his heart, which belonged to the beloved. Sometimes the flowing blood shows the strength of the heart, for had it been stone, sparks would have flown. Sometimes, he asks that true blood does not wish merely to course through veins, but flow from the eyes. Jab aankh hi se na tapka to phir lahu kya hai? What is that blood that does not flow from the eyes?
In a similar vein, Ghalib wrote several verses extolling the sacrifice of Imam Husain, the grandson of Prophet Mohammed, whose brave act of martyrdom symbolized to him the finest of human actions. Describing Husain, he wrote, salaam usey ke agar baadshaah kaheN us ko; to phir kaheN ke kuch us se siwa kaheN us ko. Praise be to him, that if one called him an emperor, then one would desire to call him something greater than that.
The themes of sacrifice and blood and tears run through Ghalib’s verse with a Sufi rhythm. Self-abnegation, self-abasement and self-sacrifice all work in the service of the beloved, sometimes unattainable, occasionally heartless, but always a reason to live or die.
Devotion to Ali
Ghalib was a fierce devotee of Imam Ali, the cousin of Prophet Mohammad, the spiritual leader of the Shias and the fountainhead of most Sufi orders. In declaring this devotion stridently, Ghalib was staking out a partisan position in a religious divide that was deepening across the subcontinent. On the one hand, Sunni society in India, which had assumed a Sufi character over time, was being courted by the desiccated literalism of the Wahabis. On the other, the Shias were asserting themselves as a righteous religious sect that had been dispossessed and persecuted by intolerant rulers, and were reimagining their faith as a popular form of Islam, undergirded by poetry and performance that resonated across class divides. The obduracy of the Wahabis and the assertiveness of the Shias would lead to violent riots and bloodletting in the early twentieth century, but during Ghalib’s time, the Sufi position kept the peace between religions and denominations, providing a safe space where Sunnis and Shias, Hindus and Muslims, could enact shared traditions. And Ali, the patron saint of most Sufi orders, lay at the heart of Sufi metaphysics.
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nbsp; In his letters, Ghalib constantly wrote of his devotion to Ali. For example, in one to his friend Yousuf Mirza dated 28 November 1859, he said: ‘For whatever sorrow or joy, whatever calumny or whatever honour is fated for me, I will wait, and then, repeating Ali’s name, I shall depart for the land of oblivion—my body to the realm of Rampur, and my soul to the realm of light. Ya Ali, Ya Ali, Ya Ali.’ In another letter, he swore: ‘Ali ka banda hooN, us ki qasam jhoot nahiN khaata’ (I am the retainer of my Lord Ali and do not swear by his name in vain). For Ghalib, it was a sign of his steadfastness that he would never make a promise in the name of Imam Ali and then break it. According to him, the greatest journey that a person could make was a trip to Najaf to see Imam Ali’s mausoleum. In his words, khaak-e sehra-e Najaf jauhar-e sair-e urafa, the sands of the desert of Najaf are the jewelled destinations for the journeys of the wise.
Ghalib was influenced enormously by Shia spiritualism, but had to be careful about this. The Mughal court had come under the influence of Salafis over time, and had exhibited anti-Shia and anti-Sufi attitudes since the time of Jahangir. Reflecting this need to be mindful of royal sentiment, Ghalib never overtly came out as a Shia or a Sunni and stayed within the ambiguities of pan-Islamic identity. But his need to engage in dissimulation was a lot less than it might have been in another era; the days when the emperor could order executions were gone, and Ghalib had the indirect support of Shia kings and nobles from adjoining areas (Rampur and Awadh in particular), which allowed him to express his deep devotion to Ali in his poetry. In a Farsi poem, he wrote: