by Raza Mir
It threatens friendships now, makes misunderstandings worse
If I harbour motives ulterior, may my face go black!
A merchant’s plan, a madman’s scheme, a crazy plot, I lack
As god is my witness, Ghalib my word is always true
I prefer honesty in speech and hate lying, I do!
The poem was indeed supplicatory in its attitude but contained a few zingers below the surface. For example, Ghalib implies that the sehra was written under duress. The reference to a black face may have contained an attack at the dark-complexioned Zauq. The verse mentioning the king also notes that Ghalib had not been paid. But Ghalib was aware that people in power always responded favourably to flattery, and in this case too, he escaped without any major consequence.
Taunts and Counter-taunts
When he did take on a fellow poet, it appears he tended to stretch the boundaries of accepted propriety, provoking his opponents incessantly. Zauq in particular was subjected to repeated and pointed jabs. It must have tired the old poet laureate to see Ghalib needle him continuously, be it in a poem written to mark the wedding of the king’s son, an aside to friends, or a verbal snub as he walked past.
Not gifted with the art of invective, Zauq seethed privately, but many others gave as good as they got. A humorous anecdote that is often repeated involves a contemporary who slyly asked Ghalib in a public forum to explain one of his verses, which apparently went:
Pehle to raughan-e gul bhains ke ande se nikaal
Phir dawa jitni ho kul bhains ke ande se nikaal
First, extract rose essence from the egg of a buffalo
Then distil all medicine from the egg of a buffalo
When a bemused Ghalib declared that the sher was utter nonsense, his interlocutor claimed, ‘But I read that in your divaan,’ perhaps to many a snigger.
Ghalib, it could be argued, brought this upon himself. His cantankerous personality often begged such comeuppance. But many a time, he saved himself by sheer presence of mind. In another anecdote made famous by repetition, it is said that he once spotted Zauq shuffling past his house and taunted him thus: Hua hai shah ka musaahib phire haiN itraata (He is the king’s underling, watch him preen thus). Zauq promptly complained to the king about Ghalib’s impertinence. When summoned by Zafar and asked to explain his effrontery, Ghalib affected an innocent air and said, ‘Your majesty, I was simply quoting the maqta of my ghazal.’ A suspicious Zafar asked for the full couplet, and Ghalib declaimed it thus:
Hua hai shah ka musaahib phire haiN itraata
Vagarna shahr mein Ghalib ki aabroo kya hai
He is the king’s underling, watch him preen thus
For otherwise, in this town, what is Ghalib’s status?
A version of the story goes that spurred on by a suspicious Zauq, Zafar demanded that Ghalib produce the entire poem. Ghalib responded by reciting an entire ghazal, which he made up on the spot. Yet again, the errant poet had been saved by his quick-wittedness.
5
1750–1850: The Urdu Century
Rekhti ke tumhiN ustaad nahiN ho Ghalib
Kehte haiN agle zamaane me koi Mir bhi tha
Ghalib, you alone are not the master of Urdu here
They say in an earlier time, there used to be a Mir
Ghalib was notoriously egoistical and wrote several verses extolling himself. In his mind he was exceptional and peerless, so coming from him, this sher in praise of Mir Taqi Mir, one of a few he wrote in appreciation of his predecessor,1 counts as high honour indeed. Not only is Ghalib extolling Mir in the above two lines, but he is also establishing a temporal continuity between himself and a man he considers a master of his craft. That craft is the ability to write poetry in Rekhta, a term that Urdu was known by before it was formalized as a language. Ghalib uses the term ‘Rekhti’, which for our purposes can be described as the Rekhta that is utilized in poetry, especially in the ghazal. It has an interesting gendered connotation, for the beloved in the Urdu ghazal is often referred to in male terms, and male poets often affect a female persona in a remarkable act of gender fluidity.
Rekhta to Urdu
The word ‘Rekhta’ was initially pejorative, meaning ‘low’ or ‘fallen’. It was used to describe Farsi that had been ‘contaminated’ with the local dialect of Hindavi. It eventually stood in for ‘simple language’ and by degrees was accepted as ‘Urdu’, a name derived from the Turkish word ‘orda’ or military camp, where soldiers from different regions learnt to converse through a bridge language. Perhaps the transition from Rekhta, a dialect, to Urdu, a language, crystallized in the century between 1750 and 1850, a period of great flowering for the language. To place Ghalib’s work in the context of his age, it might be productive to elaborate upon the ways in which the literary tradition of Urdu accelerated during this period.
Perhaps like most languages, Urdu emerged as a separate tongue in the public consciousness by degrees. It is very clear that the argot spoken in the streets of the Indo-Gangetic plain was distinct from the formal languages of courts. Amir Khusrau began to write poetry in what we now know as Urdu in the thirteenth century CE. A version of Urdu migrated to the Deccan shortly thereafter, where it was adopted by the sixteenth-century poet king Quli Qutub Shah, as well as the seventeenth-century poet Wali Ahmed Khan, who is now remembered as Wali Dakkani.
Much of the corpus of formal Urdu poetry from those days has not survived. Its poetic traditions, however, began to gather steam at the turn of the eighteenth century. The works of poets such as Mirza Sauda and Khwaja Dard have endured and continue to be read and sung today. The arrival of Mir on the stage perhaps rescued Urdu from its over-reliance on Farsi metaphors and poetic traditions and went a long way in imbuing Rekhta with a sense of legitimacy. Mir supplied the Urdu tradition with innovative bahrs (rhyme schemes) and newer subject matter, and ended up creating a roadmap that future practitioners of the craft could adopt. Likewise, Sheikh Wali Muhammad (1735–1830) of Agra, who adopted the name Nazeer Akbarabadi, explored the nazm tradition in the ghazal-dominated canon of eighteenth-century Urdu poetry, writing verses about day-to-day activity in the bazaar in accessible language, deepening the canon of Urdu poetry.
British Engagement with Urdu
As the British began to enhance their colonial footprint westward from Bengal, they realized they needed to engage with India’s languages. In 1800, Fort William College was founded in Calcutta as a potential centre of Oriental studies. It had faculty positions in various Indian languages including Urdu to help British administrators speak the local languages with a modicum of fluency. Speaking ‘Hindustani’ was important, for it was the ‘literary language of the Musalmans and of Hindus educated on Musalman lines’. Mir Amman, a scholar from Delhi, wrote a book for the college titled Baagh-o-Bahaar (Garden and Bloom), which became a textbook for all British officers seeking to graduate from the college. The curriculum of Fort William College was adopted by a number of educational institutes across the country during the nineteenth century. John B. Gilchrist, a Scottish surgeon-turned-linguist, was an early professor of Hindustani at the college and wrote several tracts such as An English–Hindustani Dictionary, A Grammar of the Hindoostanee Language and The Oriental Linguist, which have been credited with birthing modern Urdu/Hindi prose.
Master Ramachandra (1821–80), a professor of Delhi College and a friend of Ghalib’s, wrote several books on science in Urdu, his colleague Dharm Narayan translated books on economics from English into Urdu and his student Munshi Zakaullah (1832–1910) wrote mathematical texts in Urdu and translated books on mathematics, history, geography and various works of literature into Urdu. Zakaullah’s Tuhfatul Hisaab (The Gift of Mathematics) was published in 1852 and reportedly sold out in three days!
The Quran was first translated into Urdu in the early nineteenth century under the auspices of Fort William College. Interestingly, various ulema protested, on the grounds that Urdu was not an ‘Islamic’ language and should not be used to study the Quran.
Much later, others would claim that Urdu was the lingua franca of Muslims alone, an irony that has affected Urdu negatively over time. The Bhagwad Gita had been translated in the late seventeenth century into Urdu verse by a Dakkani poet named Syed Mubin. The original text of the translation, called Krishna Gita, Arjun Gita, has been lost to history.
Urdu in Nineteenth-Century Lucknow
The nineteenth century saw polemical battles between Lucknawi writers and their Delhi counterparts for supremacy, each faction claiming that their work represented Urdu traditions better. Lucknow was blessed by the presence of Mir Babar Ali Anees (1803–74) and Mirza Salaamat Ali Dabeer (1804–75), two poets with such incredible command over poetry that they are arguably the greatest exponents of Urdu poetry ever to have lived. Their work has tended to be undervalued somewhat because both of them wrote almost exclusively within the bounds of their religious tradition, principally composing marsiyas or elegies commemorating the events of Karbala and the travails of the family of the Prophet Mohammad. According to the literary critic Muhammad Husain Azad, Anees may have composed 10,000 elegies, while Dabeer wrote around 3000. Considering that each poem had an average of around 600 lines, this is a staggering output.
Anees and Dabeer were the stalwarts of the Lucknow scene, but they weren’t the only ones. Imad Bakhsh Nasih (1776–1838) is credited with founding what is now considered the Lucknow school of Urdu poetry. His contemporary and rival Khwaja Haider Ali Aatish (1764–1846) was a great poet in his own right, as was Daya Shankar Kaul Nasim (1811–43), who wrote the epic Gul Bakawali, among several others.
Urdu in Nineteenth-Century Delhi
The seat of the Mughal court ensured that Delhi remained the cynosure of Urdudaan eyes for the immediate future. Mohammed Ibrahim Zauq (1789–1854), the poet laureate, gave voice to his love for Delhi when he was being courted by the aesthetes of the Hyderabad poetry scene. Zauq’s memorable refusal of the invitation of his aficionados from the south took the form of a couplet, the second line of which Delhi-walas quote till today:
In dinoN gar-che Dakkan meiN hai badi qadr-e sukhan
Kaun jaaye Zauq par Dilli ki galiyaaN chhor kar
Although in the Deccan they value poetry these days
O Zauq, who can forsake Delhi’s delightful byways?
Zauq, Momin Khan Momin (1800–51) and Ghalib constituted a triumvirate that made Delhi the seat of Urdu poetry. Patrons from Rampur and Awadh, in order to maintain their relevance in the literary world, continued to patronize poets from the capital, and despite the straitened circumstances of the Mughal court, it still leveraged its minimal purse and maximal social capital to host the most popular of mushairas. The first half of the nineteenth century saw Delhi become the site of an amazing flowering of Urdu prose and poetry. The city that had risen like the phoenix from the ashes of multiple phases of destruction, such as the brutal attacks of Timur at the turn of the fifteenth century and the depredations of Nader Shah in the mid-eighteenth century, saw a brief period of peace after the conclusion of the Second Anglo-Maratha War in 1803. Bahadur Shah Zafar’s ascension to the throne in 1837 produced an interesting political situation. The British had assumed total administrative control over the region, leaving the ‘Emperor of the World’ with little to do. He in turn assumed the cultural leadership of the realm. The country was ruled by bureaucrats out of squat offices in Mehrauli and elsewhere, while the opulent Red Fort, with its marbled Diwaan-e Khaas and the sandstone Diwaan-e Aam, its elaborate gardens and gracefully geometric courtyards, its grandeur and its opulence, was really the site of empty but fastidious ritual.
Urdu in Zafar’s Court
Being a poet himself, Zafar began to patronize the arts with zeal. Musicians, painters and poets flocked to the Red Fort in droves. Courtly protocol was observed to the hilt. Mushairas were conducted with the seriousness and fervour of religious events, and the most successful gatherings were those where the sovereign himself sent his work to be recited. Zafar was known to write his poems in his own hand, deft as he was at calligraphy. In keeping with his royal station, he rarely recited his own work, leaving it to an appointed emissary, usually his son Prince Fakhruddin, who in time transcended his nickname of ‘Mirza Fakhru’ to become Fateh-ul Mulk Shah Bahadur.
These glorious appellations were of course to come to naught after the bloodletting of 1857, but that was still a ways away. Zafar was busy writing commentaries on Farsi poets such as Saadi, Ghalib and Zauq were having some of their famous contretemps, Momin was juggling a dual career as a doctor and a man of letters, and a variety of minor poets strove gamely to rise above their station through their mushaira performances. Each master poet had a retinue of pupils, known as shaagirds, whose work they shaped and tried to promote. Everything came to a head during the major mushairas, which were held sporadically but were grand affairs. In a fictional account of a mushaira held in 1845 titled Dilli ki Aakhri Shama (The Last Lamp of Delhi), Mirza Farhatullah Baig describes one in loving detail, including the manner in which entrepreneurs set up the event, the protracted negotiations between the organizers and poets (the bards were notoriously sensitive about who was invited first and who got to recite later, for it reflected stature), the layout of the hall, the actual poems recited by different poets, the audience reactions along with a series of delightful anecdotes about the personages and their relationships.
Perhaps the term ‘aakhri shama’ could only have been coined in hindsight. 1857 closed the doors of the Red Fort to literary activities for a long time. Delhi’s destruction after the mutiny meant that a lot else was destroyed with it, including the network of poetry and patronage. What rose from its ashes later was a very different scene, in which the romantic traditions of the nineteenth century began to be critiqued as relics of a decadent past. Newer poets looked westward for their inspiration, but elaboration on that must be left for another book.
Urdu after Ghalib
Two post-1857 developments of note must be mentioned. First was the southward migration of the locus of Urdu literary activity. Dagh Dehlvi (1831–1905), for example, moved to Hyderabad, and a host of poets followed. Aligarh and Hyderabad became the seats of universities that nurtured Urdu in the post-1857 era. These institutions sought to develop an Urdu-based curriculum for an emerging modern era, and more importantly, provided a critical mass for Urdu speakers and literary figures, who nurtured the poetry tradition in a harmonious cycle of writers and readers, performers and listeners.
The second was the emergence of institutions of mass publication in Urdu. The inauguration in 1858 of the Nawal Kishore Press and Book Depot in Lucknow by the twenty-two-year-old Munshi Nawal Kishore, who has been called ‘the Caxton of India’ after the fifteenth-century British merchant William Caxton, who had introduced the first retail press in England in 1476. Over a three-decade period, the Nawal Kishore Press printed around 5000 books in a variety of languages. Many of Ghalib’s works were published by this institution, which became a pillar of modern Urdu. Newspapers in Urdu had already started publishing, most notably the Dilli Urdu Akhbaar in 1837 and the Sayyid ul Akhbaar in 1841. The marriage of a living language and a modern technology eventually led to its popularization and democratization well beyond the period we now contingently recognize as its cultural zenith.
Once a language is adopted by the populace, it is hard to scrub out. Urdu survived and continues to thrive to this day. It would be a gross exaggeration to credit a small group of people with is popularity. But it behooves us to appreciate the period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century as a special time, if not as a flowering, then perhaps as a seeding, when a dialect argot emerged as a fully formed language with its own enviable literary tradition. In a fashion, a linguistic and poetic door was opened for a stalwart such as Ghalib to walk in.
6
Ghalib in the Here and Now
Hui muddat ke Ghalib mar gaya par yaad aata hai
Vo har ek baat par kehna ke yooN hota to kya hota
We re
member, though it’s been ages since Ghalib’s dead
‘Had it been so, how would it be?’ constantly he’d said
In May 2016, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, visited India. The audience at New Delhi welcomed a favourite son who had done well. Addressing the Microsoft India programme titled ‘Tech for Good, Ideas for India’, Nadella began by saying, ‘I have only two passions that have driven my dreams—poetry and computer science.’ Nadella then quoted Ghalib, hazaaron khwaahisheN aisi, ke har khwaahish pe dum nikle, bahut nikle mere armaan, lekin phir bhi kam nikle (thousands of desires, and each one worth dying for; many of my desires were fulfilled, but yet, they appear few).
Likewise, when Justice Markandey Katju delivered a landmark judgment in a euthanasia case in March 2011, he prefaced his consequential verdict by quoting Ghalib again, marte haiN aarzoo meiN marne ki, maut aati hai par nahiN aati (I die in my desire for death, but death, while ever present, eludes me).
In Pakistan, when the minister for finance, Miftah Ismail, unveiled a controversial national budget in April 2018, he responded to boos in the audience by quoting Ghalib, likhte rahe junooN ke hikayaat-e khooN-chakaaN, har-chand is meiN haath hamaare qalam hue (we kept writing the blood-splattered stories of passion, even though our hands were cut off in punishment).
I quote these incidents as examples of how Ghalib’s verse swirls around us in the twenty-first century, never leaving us, like a signpost of times that were and times that are yet to come. Ghalib may be dead and gone, but he remains with us, like a blessing, like a teacher whose words inspire us well after the lesson is done.