by Raza Mir
Ghalib-e-naamawaram naam-o-nishaanam ma-purs
Hum Asadullaaham-o hum Asadullaahiyam
I am the famous Ghalib; of my provenance ask no more
But that I’m Asadullah, slave of the Asadullah2 of yore
Ghalib’s Urdu poems were often infused with praise for Ali, some even attributing divine powers to him. In his words, hum ibaadat ko tera naqsh-e qadam, mohrey namaaz, we can prostrate to god in the indentation of your footprints. He often refers to Ali by flowery appellations such as saaqi-e Kausar (the cupbearer of the spring of heaven). In one of his famous verses, he wrote:
Ghalib nadeem-e dost se aati hai bu-e dost
Mashghool-e haq hooN bandagi-e bu-turaab meiN
Ghalib, the friend of the lord his fragrance does emit
Steeped am I in virtue, I am Ali’s servant, I admit
The idea here is that Ali is god’s friend and thus exudes divine fragrance. The poem makes a reference to one of Ali’s appellations, ‘bu-turaab’ (father of the earth). This nickname extols Ali’s spirituality, and Ghalib makes use of it in other verses, sometimes through the complex associations that make him notoriously difficult to understand, but reward those who try. Consider these four lines from one of his ghazals that underscore both his great devotion to Imam Ali and the complexity of his poetry:
Jalva pardaaz ho naqsh-e qadam uska jis ja
Vo kaf-e khaak hai naamoos-e do aalam ki ameeN
Nisbat-e naam se uske hai ye rutba ke rahe
Abadan pusht-e falak kham shuda-e naaz-e zameeN
Behold the one, the dust under whose footprints
Is the benefactor of this world and the next,
And the dignity of association with whose name
Forever makes the sky bow down before the earth
The first two lines contend that ‘the dust under his footprints is the saviour of the honour of this world and the next’. Whose footprints is Ghalib referring to? That is revealed in the next two lines. Poets often attribute a far higher status to the lofty sky (falak) as compared to the lowly earth (zameen). But because of association with his name, the stature of the earth has gone up so much that the sky itself forever (abadan) bends over in obeisance (pusht-e falak kham) to the earth. Whose name are we referring to? Ali’s of course, the bu-turaab, or the father of the earth.
Mocking Religious Practice
Ghalib’s poetry exhibits deep spirituality on the one hand and utter contempt for religious orthodoxy on the other. Such ambivalence was not uncommon, especially amongst poets of that era. Mir, Dard, Zauq and others had also expressed similar sentiments. In fact, one could argue that Mir had rescued Urdu poetry from its religiosity and turned it into an instrument of impudent and insolent apostasy.
Like Mir before him, Ghalib was trenchant in his criticism of the clergy, who were depicted in his poetry as hypocrites who ceaselessly advocated for an empty, ritual-based worship. The waaiz (pure one) came in for a lot of ridicule; to be in his bad books was a badge of honour for Ghalib (Ghalib, bura na maan jo waaiz bura kahe, Ghalib, feel not bad should the pure one criticize you). Cutting asides about the nature of afterlife, especially heaven, abounded in his verse. When the shaikh extols the garden of paradise, Ghalib sees nothing but a wilted bunch of flowers on the forgotten shelf (taakh-e nisyaaN). Occasionally, the tyranny of the waaiz is expressed by juxtaposing him with an executioner, jallaad se darte haiN na waaiz se jhagadte, we neither fear the executioner nor argue with the pure one. One of Ghalib’s best-known couplets goes:
KahaaN maikhaane ka darwaaza Ghalib aur kahaaN waaiz
Par itna jaante hain, kal vo jaata tha ke hum nikle
Where the tavern door, and where the preacher, Ghalib?
But all I know is this; he was entering as I left
It is not just the holy man who is subjected to this sarcasm; god isn’t spared either. For instance, Muslims believe that two recording angels sit on their shoulders making a list of good and bad deeds that will be used on the Day of Judgment to determine whether they are to be heaven-bound or consigned to hell. Ghalib finds the arrangement to be unfair. What if the angels err in their calculation, or wilfully misrepresent the deeds of humans?
Pakde jaate haiN farishtoN ke likhe par na-haq
Aadmi koi hamaara dam-e tahreer bhi thha
We are needlessly entrapped by the angels’ transcription
Was there an agent of ours at the time of writing?
Ghalib’s defiance is often tempered by his faith, such as in the two contiguous ash’aar from a ghazal:
Kya vo Namrud ki khudaai thi?
Bandagi meiN mera bhala na hua
Jaan di, di hui usi ki thi
Haq to ye hai ke haq ada na hua
Was it the divinity of the pretender Nimrod?
Even my obeisance was not beneficent
I gave up my life, for it was His gift
The truth is that even this was insufficient
The first two lines apparently mock god, who in his inability to minister to the worshipper proves to be a pretender (Nimrod was the arrogant foil to Abraham’s piety and plays the role of the paradigmatic false god in Urdu poetry). But in the very next verse, Ghalib affects an abject supplication, implying that even the ultimate sacrifice is insufficient to recompense god for the act of creation. Of course, the subject of both verses remains ambiguous (and can stand in for the earthly beloved), but reading it as a reference to god shows us Ghalib’s relationship with god, one that was simultaneously devotional and combative.
Ghalib believed in spiritual gnosis but not in rituals. He reserved special disdain for the fast and was pointedly proud of the fact that he neither fasted nor prayed. His biographer Altaf Hussain Hali narrates several stories of how Ghalib not only ate during the day in the month of Ramadan but also quipped about why he was doing so. ‘I am fasting, of course. It is just that I occasionally pamper my fast, with a little food here and a little water there.’ The memory of recent famines was in his mind, and he had seen enough hunger to find the ritual mystifying and annoying. ‘Those people who have enough means to prepare for the evening meal must certainly fast. But those who have no food to eat, perhaps that person should eat the fast instead!’
Ghalib’s aversion to ritual didn’t stem from disbelief in god. On the contrary, he seemed to be seeking a divine connection beyond a mere ritualized adherence to faith. Ghalib imagined a more mystical form of worship for himself, where he would be but a mute spectator in the magical tableau of divine desire (tamaashaai-e nairang-e tamanna), where the meaning of faith required a disavowal of any desire to seek meaning. In his words:
Hai pare sarhad-e idraak se apna masjood
Qibla ko ahl-e nazar qibla-numa kehte haiN
The object of my prayer is beyond the boundary of perception
For the cognoscenti, the Kaaba is nothing more than a compass
Perhaps unfairly, Ghalib derided ritual-bound believers for following religion unthinkingly and for believing that the structure of the Kaaba (‘qibla’ in his words but standing in for anything that was within the boundaries of human perception) was the object of prayer. For him, true worship consisted of destroying the self in the service of the divine. He challenged the religious to consign their ego to annihilation, for ‘the brilliance of the piece of hay is seen when it burns in the furnace’ (farogh-e taali-e khashaak hai mauqud gulkhaaN par). It is strange to hear the challenge to ‘destroy the self’ from someone who spent much of his life seeking material comfort, but these charming contradictions were an essential element of Ghalib’s personality.
Ultimately, the religious churning of Ghalib’s time both transformed him and ended up reflected in his writings. The equanimous coexistence of religions, however, did not last the test of time and history. In the days after 1857, religious positions began to harden so much that even ancient history was reinterpreted as an era of great inter-religious strife. The British colonists must shoulder much of the blame for this. Since they viewed Muslim
s as the primary instigators of the 1857 rebellion, they treated them with special cruelty, relative to the Hindus of Delhi. The selective repression began to fracture the communities, and the British, learning from past experiences, decided to exploit these schisms to their advantage. The communal fracturing intensified over time. In hindsight, Ghalib appears prescient when he had declared: vafaadaari meiN shaikh-o barahman ki aazmaaish hai, in the matter of loyalty, the shaikh and the barahman must face the test. Indeed, the shaikh and the barahman were tested in the crucible of colonial rule, and neither came out looking all that great. Within a century of Ghalib’s death, the subcontinent was divided, orgies of violence ensued, and the fabric of amity that had been woven over a period defined by mutual admiration and friendly coexistence between religious communities became increasingly frayed.
3
The Ghalib Paradox
One day, some white men entered Ghalib’s house by force. The king’s soldiers tried to stop them, but they would not be denied. Mirza narrates in his ‘Dastambu’ that the British soldiers took him and a few companions into custody and presented him before a British colonel. The colonel asked him, ‘Are you Muslim?’ Mirza replied, ‘Half.’ ‘What does that mean?’ asked the colonel. Mirza replied, ‘I drink wine but do not eat pork.’
This anecdote, reported by Altaf Husain Hali in his Yaadgaar-e Ghalib, reveals how Ghalib often got by on his wits and charm in an era where a wrong word could lead to terrible consequences. Here, he saved his skin by his levity, declaring himself to be ‘a half-Muslim’. In reality he was a half-everything, with a few implied romantic dalliances on one side and a strong puritanical bent on the other, sharply critical of many a peer but notoriously thin-skinned when criticized, affecting a couldn’t-care-less attitude to the way his work was received but keeping a sharp eye out for praise, mocking the foibles of the powerful while also displaying a predilection for sycophancy.
These may appear to be character flaws but were in fact born of the imperative to survive in a constantly shifting sociopolitical terrain. It must be remembered that Ghalib occupied a subaltern position in the socio-economic pecking order of his day, possessing neither wealth nor powerful backing. Much of his persona therefore was constructed to avoid being attacked or judged on the basis of his financial and structural vulnerabilities or his relative lack of contacts amongst the powerful. He often enacted his resistance to power slyly, using the ‘weapons of the weak’ and taking positions that he could withdraw from should they get him into trouble.
Ghalib’s Poor Choices
Ghalib’s self-presentation was of one who lived a life of affluence and leisure, where he was respected as a thinker and honoured by the powerful. In reality, his poetic prowess was relatively unacknowledged in his own time, and his existence was marked by deep and constant financial insecurity exacerbated by the fact that he all too often backed the wrong horse in the context of a constantly shifting field of power. Where the Mughals were concerned, Zauq outsmarted him by hitching his wagon to Bahadur Shah Zafar, while Ghalib was left backing the wrong prince. On the British end, his cousins outwitted him in the matter of his inheritance with a better set of contacts. It could be argued that even when it came to language, Ghalib made poor choices, electing to write in Farsi at the exact time that Urdu poetry was achieving legitimacy, and losing a lot of time writing Persian poetry in what was regarded as a derivative style. Seen against this backdrop, Ghalib’s frequent resort to his sharp wit as well as his many foibles and personality quirks (chronicled both by his peers and in the many letters he wrote) paint a picture of an extremely intelligent and complex man struggling to maintain his dignity in a world that was rapidly changing in ways that were not easy to grasp.
Ghalib’s often contradictory attitudes towards religion, which we encountered earlier, provide one lens into his complex personality. His attitude towards wine, and towards those in power, both feudal and colonial, provide others.
Ghalib and Wine
Prohibition against the consumption of alcohol is considered an important artefact of Islamic faith. However, Ghalib was not only an inveterate drinker but was also quite vocal about his consumption, to the point of ‘over-sharing’. He did so while keeping the company of Muslims, writing verses dripping in religious piety and participating in the socio-religious activities of his milieu. Perhaps the consumption of alcohol was not as big a social taboo amongst Muslims of nineteenth-century Delhi as one might imagine. Certainly, Ghalib, who was not averse to self-censorship when it came to politically sensitive issues, felt free to out himself time and again as a connoisseur and consumer of alcohol.
He measured his economic situation by the quality of wine he drank and reserved his highest affection for those of his friends that brought him wine as a gift. While he preferred wine, he also made do with rum or even country spirits when his budget contracted. At the same time, he declared that he was a muvahhid (that is, he evinced faith in the oneness of god—one of the main tenets of Islam) and had an abiding love for the Prophet and his family. He often needled the clerics about their pronouncements against the consumption of alcohol through verses calculated to shock them and other ‘pious’ Muslims. For example, the matla of one of his ghazals goes:
Masjid ke zer-e saaya kharaabaat chaahiye
BhauN-paas aankh qibla-e haajaat chaahiye
There should exist a tavern under a mosque’s shade
Just as below the eyebrow, the praying eye’s arrayed
Here, the curve of an eyebrow is seen as a mehraab, the dome under which prayer is performed. Just as the eyebrow shelters the eye, so too should the mosque shelter the tavern. Ghalib is equating the tavern to the eye; to him it is the fount of creativity and the object of supplication (qibla-e haajaat).
On other occasions, he mocked his own attempts at temperance. For example, he claimed that he had given up wine and only occasionally indulged in it, ‘when there is a cloud in the sky at day, or a moon at night’ (peeta hooN roz-e abr-o shab-e maahtaab meiN). At other times, he imagined himself prohibited from drinking, presumably by ill-health or impending death, but declared he would like to lie with a wine flask and glass in his sight, for ‘my hands do not have strength, but my eyes still work’. Go haath ko jumbish nahiN aankhoN meiN to dum hai; Rahne do abhi saaghar-o meena mere aage.
Wine was a source of unmitigated pleasure for Ghalib. He felt that it opened the doors of perception, and more importantly, made life worth living. In his words:
JaaN-fiza hai baada jis ke haath meiN jaam aa gaya
Sab lakeereN haath ki goya rag-e jaaN ho gaeeN
Wine is life-giving, and the hand that a cup contains
As if every line of their hand turned to jugular veins
Ghalib of course knew his way around Islamic lore and used his religious knowledge to defend his drinking, or at least complicate its proscription. He repeatedly reminded anyone who would listen that the Quran stated that the highest quality wine would be offered to the faithful on the Day of Judgment, and that Imam Ali was known as the Saaqi-e Kausar (the cup-bearer of the pool of paradise). In fact, he specifically invoked Ali as and when he enjoined his contemporaries to drink:
Kal ke liye kar aaj na khissat sharaab meiN
Ye soo-e zan hai Saaqi-e Kausar ke baab meiN
Do not save for the morrow, be not niggardly with wine
Lest the cupbearer of Kausar deem you out of line
Wine featured prominently in his letters to his friends. He credited his poetic prowess to inebriation (alongside other bad habits). Once, the story goes, when he heard people extolling the poetry of the pious Imam Bakhsh Sahbai (1803–57), his contemporary, Ghalib retorted, ‘How can Sahbai be called a poet? He has not tasted wine, nor gambled, nor been beaten with slippers by a lover, nor has he been imprisoned.’ Needless to say, Ghalib had experienced all of the above. In 1837, a British wine merchant sued him for a series of unpaid chits. Legend has it that the presiding judge, Mufti Sadruddin Azurda, who was a fan,
ruled against Ghalib but paid the merchant with his own money, sending Ghalib on his way. Another time, he was found guilty on a charge of gambling and landed in jail. History is thankfully silent when it comes to the matter of his being beaten with slippers by a lover!
Ghalib and Feudal Power
Chaltaa hoon thodi door har ek tez-rau ke saath
Pehchaanta nahin hoon abhi raahbar ko maiN
I do not mind walking awhile with every swift traveller
But I do not yet recognize in any of them my leader
Ghalib spent most of his life in abject poverty, dependent on a variety of benefactors for his economic survival, from Bahadur Shah Zafar to the nawabs of Rampur or Awadh, and any number of British bureaucrats. Often, he was required to write panegyrics in their honour as part of the payback—a service that he performed perfunctorily, making fun of them behind their backs when he deemed it safe to do so. This may appear to be hypocritical, but his dependence on the largesse of the powerful was the source of much bitterness for him, and so his self-respect and perhaps even his sanity required being able to engage in such everyday acts of resistance. He can hardly be faulted for writing verses of praise that were less than enthusiastic, such as these lines composed in honour of the nawab of Farrukhabad: