by Raza Mir
Diya hai khalq ko bhi ta usey nazar na lage
Bana hai aish Tajammul Husain KhaN ke liye
ZabaaN pe baar-e ilaahi ye kis ka naam aaya
Ke meri nutq ne bosey meri zabaaN ke liye
God has also given to others, lest they be jealous
Of Tajammul Khan for whom all wealth was created
Whose name, oh my great lord, has passed my lips today!
For my words kissed my tongue when it was stated!
But his praise rarely went beyond the odes; rather, Ghalib was notorious for lampooning his patrons on the side. For instance, he found mirth in the realization that some of the benefactors he had written odes for had died shortly thereafter, slyly taking credit for their passing: ‘Anyone feted by me does not survive, it appears. Naseeruddin Haider and Amjad Ali Shah passed away after one qaseeda each. Wajid Ali Shah survived three qaseedas but couldn’t take it any longer. If I compose ten or twenty qaseedas for someone, they will depart even from the afterlife!’
For all his efforts at obsequiousness, he was capable of turning on these benefactors with satire when he felt disrespected. The story goes that Zafar would pay his poets every six months, adding to Ghalib’s already strained economic circumstances. He penned an appeal for a monthly salary to the king in the form of a thirty-verse-long poem detailing his hardship but dripping with stinging satire. A glance at just four of the verses is enough to get a sense of his sly repartee:
Bas ke leta hooN har maheeney qarz
Aur rehti hai sood ki takraar
Meri tankhwaah meiN tihaai ka
Ho gaya hai shareek sahookar
Meri tankhwaah keejay maah-ba-maah
To na ho mujh ko zindagi dushwaar
Tum salaamat raho hazaar baras
Har baras ke hoN din pachaas hazaar
I take out loans every month
And am burdened with interest
Of my salary I keep but two-thirds
The moneylender claims the rest
Pay my salary monthly, please
Lest life become a tougher test
Live a thousand elongated years
May you with long life be blest!
Over time, the last two lines quoted above have attained the status of a popular benediction, having lost the contextual sense of the sarcasm embedded in the original.
Ghalib and Colonial Power
Ghalib’s relationship with the feudal nobility, while fraught, was nevertheless leavened by humour and banter. This was less the case where his interactions with the British were concerned, who had neither an understanding of cultural nuance nor any interest in it. A famous anecdote about Ghalib recorded by Muhammad Husain Azad in Aab-e Hayaat relates to his potential appointment as a professor of Persian at Delhi College. This was a position that came with a status and salary that Ghalib was in desperate need of. However, when he arrived for the job interview he refused to enter the premises until the secretary of the college, one Mr Thomason, came out to welcome him personally. The obdurate Thomason refused, invoking bureaucratic clauses. Rather than retract his demand for the sake of the desperately needed position and suffer a consequent loss of face, Ghalib preferred to leave. He gave poetic voice to his feelings thus:
Bandagi meiN bhi vo aazaada o khud-beeN haiN ke ham
Ulte phir aaye dar-e Kaaba agar va na hua
In submission I seek respect, despite my devotion
I’ll return even from god’s house if its doors don’t open
Thomason’s cool hauteur reflected the general British attitude towards Ghalib. The new masters lacked cultural literacy, and exhibited little interest in learning how relations of patronage worked in the local context, and Ghalib’s economic fortunes ended up falling through the cracks between feudal and colonial India.
After 1857
After the revolt of 1857, Delhi saw savage reprisals by the British, often directed not just against erstwhile rebels, but against anyone who they felt had aided the revolt in any way. There was terror in the streets of the capital for months, before it eventually limped back to normalcy.
The British attitude towards a Muslim poet who had been loyal to Zafar would understandably terrify someone like Ghalib, and it would not be hyperbolic to say that he began to fear for his life. Amongst those executed by the British in the wake of the ‘mutiny’ had been some of his close poet contemporaries; the same Sahbai with whom Ghalib used to trade jibes was shot dead during the massacre of Kucha Chelan in September 1857. Meanwhile, his list of dependants had grown—he was now the head of a large extended family, which included the children of his dead nephew, and consequently had to tread carefully given the shifting ground of politics.
Like many others, Ghalib lost a lot and was greatly inconvenienced during the revolt. His brother Yousuf died for want of medical attention during those days, and he and Umrao were reduced to a state of near-starvation. Most distressing to him, a lot of his poetry was lost in the conflagration. In a letter to his friend he wrote: ‘I never kept my poems with me. Nawab Ziyauddin Khan and Nawab Husain Mirza had collected them. They wrote down all that I had composed. Now both their houses have been sacked. Libraries worth thousands of rupees have been razed. How I yearn to see my own poetry! A few days ago a faqir, who has a beautiful voice and is a fine singer, found a ghazal of mine and got it written down. When the beggar showed me that piece of paper, believe me, I felt like weeping!’
Ghalib had no option but to return to the public arena. His meagre earnings depended on his ability to be seen as a public figure, and perhaps gain a tutoring appointment here, a mushaira invitation there. He also needed to get the measure of the new administration to figure out how his pension could be restored and avoid future harassment should he be marked as a supporter of the rebels.
He initially tried his hand at what he knew best, writing a Persian ode in praise of Queen Victoria, a poem he had actually composed some time ago, but tried to re-send. As a poem, it was a magnificent effort and elevated the monarch to a status higher than Alexander and the mythical Persian king Fereydun, regarded a paragon of justice and generosity in Farsi literature. Unfortunately, not much came of it. The British had neither the inclination, nor perhaps the ability, to appropriately acknowledge or reward that offering. It went into the black hole of British bureaucracy.
Dastambu
His poetic efforts having failed, Ghalib tried the prose route and sought to record an account of the mutiny and its aftermath, composed first as a diary in Farsi and later published as a book titled Dastambu (A Fistful of Flowers). The book reflects how he adjusted to his changed circumstances once the city was stripped even of the pretence of Mughal rule.
The amount of self-restraint he must have exercised when writing that tract is evident in the prose and reflects Ghalib’s literal fear for his life. This was not paranoia—he had observed carnage at an unprecedented scale and knew how costly the use of the wrong words could prove to be. And yet he could not help but be critical, even if he tried to do so in muted and highly circumscribed ways.
Ghalib began Dastambu, following established convention, with an elaborate ode in praise of god. He moved on to recounting stories of earlier conquerors in other lands, who followed their conquests with violence against the populace. He then threw in a few words critical of the rebellious soldiers of Meerut (‘faithless to their salt’) who overran Delhi, and the guards of the Delhi cantonment who, far from fighting them, had instead welcomed them. He presented himself as one of many inconvenienced by this action, and in overwrought prose, expressed pity for those English folk, men, women and children, who had lost their lives as a consequence. He decried the loss of order, the cessation of tax payments, the freeing of all prisoners and the looting that ensued in the days during which the rebels controlled the city, and their disrespectful treatment of the emperor.
Ghalib then segued into stories of his own life, presenting himself as a victim of circumstances, subjected to untold suffering by the way in wh
ich normal life in his beloved city had ground to a complete halt. ‘Every door in the city has closed. There is neither shopkeeper nor customer, there is no seller of wheat from whom to buy flour, no washerman to wash dirty clothes, no barber to cut hair or sweeper to clean floors. Even getting water is impossible.’
He then proceeded to describe the manner in which the British took back the city after pitched battles. It is here that he ventured some cautious critique of British conduct: ‘There is a prison outside the city and one inside. In both places, so many people have been crowded together that it seems as if they must have fused together and crawled into each other’s skins. The angel of death alone knows how many people have been hanged by the neck in these two prisons.’
In describing his own inconveniences, Ghalib sought to mirror the sad state of Delhi following the mutiny, where lawlessness was its own reason and terror its own logic. But a close reading of Dastambu and Ghalib’s equivocal prose not only reminds us of the precarious state of the city after the rebellion was quelled, but also provides insight into the psyche of a man who, when confronted with power, responded with ambivalence. A cursory reading of Dastambu might understand it as a critique of the rebellion, but if approached from the point of view of a beleaguered resident of Delhi in 1858, Dastambu reveals itself to be an accounting of oppression, an expression of anger masked by sadness and despair—in effect, an act of resistance. This ambiguity is also an integral part of the ‘Ghalib paradox’.
4
Ghalib and His Critics
Maala japne laga hai buddhhu ghar ghar
Kalma padhne laga hai mithhoo ghar ghar
Tota bhi hai haafiz-e kalaam-e Ghalib
Mirza ka bolta hai ullu ghar ghar
The idiot chants a repetitive spell in every home
And piously does the parrot yell in every home
Every copycat has now memorized Ghalib’s poems
The owl hoots Mirza’s verse as well in every home
Yagana Changezi (1884–1956), who wrote the above verse on the flyleaf of his contrarian tract Ghalib Shikan (Conqueror of Ghalib), gave voice to generations of poets who felt that Ghalib had been given undue importance by critics and the public and had been equated with all that was good in Urdu poetry in a manner unfair to his predecessors, contemporaries and successors. In Changezi’s ringing words, ‘the blind faith of Ghalibians has usurped the efforts of all past and current poets and granted all their skills to Ghalib, presenting him as the sole representative of Urdu.’ For Changezi, Ghalib was an unoriginal plagiarist, an inveterate daad-sukhan, one who shamelessly craved approbation, while his fans were sycophants unacquainted with the rich poetic history of Urdu.
Later Critics
Changezi’s analysis of Ghalib is especially sour, but the reality is that Ghalib always had his share of detractors, in his time and later. From Hali to Azad and beyond, critiques of Ghalib after his death abound, but most of them seem to have been levelled by those seeking to burnish their own reputation at his expense. For instance, the poet Jaun Elia (1931–2002) is reported to have declared that, ‘MiaN Ghalib to pachchees sheroN ka shaayar tha’ (Ghalib was a poet of twenty-five verses), implying that the rest of his work was derivative. Of course, Elia quickly segued from a critique of Ghalib to self-promotion, declaring that there were essentially two great poets in Urdu, Mir Taqi Mir and Elia himself!1
Other self-aggrandizing critiques of Ghalib have occurred across time and across languages. To discuss one example of early English writing on Ghalib from India, we can go back to 1928, when Professor Syed Abdul Latif wrote a sharply worded critique of Ghalib’s work titled Ghalib: A Critical Appreciation of His Life and Urdu Poetry. The word ‘appreciation’ in the title of that book truly strikes one as ironic, for it was a merciless takedown of the bard, ending its analysis with the following words: ‘This is the story of our poet. He lived a distracted life under the shadow of a distracted outlook, and left us poetry out of harmony with itself. He cannot be numbered among the great.’ Others, such as the critic Muhammad Sadiq, have damned him with faint praise.
Ghalib’s Contemporaries
However, the more interesting (and entertaining) critiques of Ghalib came from his contemporaries. Given his abrasive personality and his penchant for making merciless fun of his peers, it is quite understandable that Ghalib had his share of adversaries and detractors, many of whom got back at him by making mischievous jokes about his work. The general opinion was that Ghalib’s poems were deliberately obtuse and opaque, and Ghalib himself was needlessly pompous and could use a good takedown. One of his contemporaries, Agha Jaan Aish, tried his hand at one such. In a mushaira, just before Ghalib was set to take the stage, he is reported to have declaimed:
Agar apna kaha khud aap hi samjhe to kya samjhe
Maza kehne ka jab hai ik kahe aur doosra samjhe
Kalaam-e Meer samjhe aur zabaan-e-Meerza samjhe
Magar in ka kaha ya aap samjhe ya Khuda samjhe!
Of what use is speaking if only the speaker understands?
Speaking is fun when one speaks and another understands
The poetry of Meer and the language of Meerza2 we understand
But of what he says, only he or the Almighty understand
Ghalib’s response to these critiques alternated between exasperation and good humour. Some of his simpler ghazals may well have been written in response to such critique. But as a poet, he always regarded himself as a purveyor of the ‘meaningless verses’, or perhaps ‘verses beyond meaning’, the abyaat-e be-ma’ani. Under his skilful hand, language danced to the most subliminal of rhythms, layering meaning upon meaning, changing its connotation depending on which word was emphasized and at which point one paused during its recitation. Indeed, he was the nightingale of a garden of rekhti that was still under construction.
The Sehra Controversy
Ghalib’s temperament got him into a lot of trouble many a time. One such occasion stands out. In 1851, the wedding of Mirza Jawan Bakht, the youngest son of Bahadur Shah Zafar, was solemnized. The king’s wife, Nawab Zinat Mahal, harboured a desire that her son would ascend to the Mughal throne and prevailed upon the relatively straitened monarch to conduct one of the most lavish weddings in history. Obligatory to the occasion, of course, was a sehra, a traditional paean to the groom. Zauq was indisposed and Ghalib was asked to compose it. He did his bit but could not resist incorporating digs at Zauq and the king, hidden like Easter eggs throughout the poem, and ended with a florid maqta3 that was essentially in praise of . . . Ghalib! He wrote thus:
Hum suqan-fahm hai Ghalib ke tarafdaar nahiN
DekheN likh de koi is sehre se behtar sehra
We are the cognoscenti, Ghalib-partisans we are not
We challenge anyone to better this poetic thought
Word did get around to the monarch, perhaps amplified by Zauq, that Ghalib had belittled the occasion with this act of thoughtless grandstanding. In an earlier era, a head could have rolled, and even in this age of attenuated monarchy, the king’s ire could have led to major financial consequences. Sensing potential opportunities slip away, Ghalib saved himself by—what else—writing a poem of explanatory apology. In his poem, he kowtowed to the king, appeased Zauq and engaged in self-abnegation. Or did he? Be the judge, for the poem deserves to be read in its entirety:
MAAFINAAMA
Manzoor hai guzaarish-e ahwaal-e waaqai
Apna bayaan husn-e-tabiyat nahiN mujhe
Sau pusht se hai pesha-e-aaba sipah-giri
Kuch shaayari zariyya-e-izzat nahiN mujhe
Azad rau hooN aur mera maslak hai sulh-e kul
Hargiz kabhi kisi se adaawat nahiN mujhe
Kya kam hai ye sharaf ke Zafar ka ghulaam hooN
Maana ke jaah-o mansab-o sarwat nahiN mujhe
Ustaad-e-shah se ho mujhe pur-khaash ka khayaal
Yeh taab yeh majaal yeh taaqat nahiN mujhe
Jaam-e-jahaaN numa hai shahanshaah ka zameer
Saugandh aur
gawaah ki haajat nahiN mujhe
Sehra likha gaya zarah-e imtesaal-e amr
Dekha ke chaar-e ghair-ita’at nahiN mujhe
Maqte mein aa padi hai sukhan gustaraana baat
Maqsood is se qat-e muhabbat nahiN mujhe
Ru-e-sukhan kisi ki taraf ho to ru siyaah
Sauda nahiN junooN nahiN vehshat nahiN mujhe
Saadiq hooN apne qaul meiN Ghalib, khuda gawaah
Kehta hooN sach ke jhoot ki aadat nahiN mujhe
APOLOGY
It is my desire that we report just the facts
I am not given to self-praise, I am a man of tact
My forefathers have been soldiers for many a generation
Poetry has never been for me a source of acclamation
I am a free spirit and conciliatory is my mien
My verses are not malicious, and they do not demean
It is enough privilege for me that I serve Zafar
Though unrecognized, unpaid and unrewarded, I suffer
I dare not take potshots at the teacher of his Highness4
I lack such temerity, such arrogance, such slyness
To look beyond my liege’s saintly conscience I am loath
For my exoneration I need not swear another oath
The sehra was written in compliance with royal order
Obedience demanded I become the wedding’s recorder
Needlessly controversial became my poem’s final verse